2. Brooke #2
“This is why I keep you.” He takes it, grinning, and then hears himself, and the grin softens into a look I like a lot better. “That came out wrong. I keep you for many reasons. The coat is a bonus reason.”
“Get out of my house.”
“It’s my house.”
“Get out of our house, then, and go sell your book.”
He goes and the door closes.
The penthouse gets very quiet very fast, the way it does, all that glass and all that view and nobody in it but me.
I’m fine with it. I want to be clear about that, because it would be easy to make this sound sadder than it is.
I have a whole day. I have sketches I’ve been meaning to get back to, a design competition I keep telling myself I’ll enter and keep not entering, a mother I should call.
I am a grown woman with an inner life and a to-do list, not a houseplant that needs him home to photosynthesize.
So I do my day. I sketch for a while. I call my mother and let her tell me about the neighbor’s roof for twenty minutes because it makes her happy and costs me nothing. I don’t think about the meeting. I think about the meeting maybe four times, which for me is basically not thinking about it.
Then it’s one o’clock, and there’s no word, and I tell myself that’s normal, meetings run long.
And then it’s two, and I tell myself the same thing with slightly less conviction.
At two-forty-three my phone finally lights up, and I hate that I know the exact minute, and I hate a little more that I grab the phone before the screen’s even done turning on.
Adrian: This is going to be HUGE. I’ll explain everything tonight. Adrian: Dinner? I’ll be home by seven, I promise. I mean it this time.
I read it twice. Then I put the phone face-down on the counter and I have a small honest conversation with myself, the kind you only get to have when nobody’s around.
I mean it this time.
Which means there were other times and that he knows there were other times.
Which means somewhere in him there’s a running tally he thinks I haven’t been keeping, and he’s wrong, I’ve been keeping it in beautiful detail, but the fact that he reached for that phrase means he at least remembers the tally exists.
I decide that’s almost sweet. I decide to let it be almost sweet, because the alternative is being the wife who reads a happy text from her thrilled husband and finds the one thread to pull, and I refuse to be her today.
So I make dinner.
I make the good dinner, the one that takes actual effort, because he had the best day of his career and he’s coming home to tell me about it and that deserves more than takeout eaten off my lap. I do the thing with the chicken he likes.
Then I open a bottle of the wine we save. I even light the stupid candles, and then I feel stupid about the candles and almost blow them out, and then I leave them, because a woman is allowed to light a candle in her own home without submitting a reason to a committee.
And here’s the part that undoes me a little, looking back.
He shows up at seven.
On the dot, key in the door while the chicken is still hot, and he comes in with his tie already loose and his whole face lit up from the inside, and when he sees the table, the candles, the wine, he stops and looks at it and then looks at me and says, “You didn’t have to do all this,” but he says it the good way, the pleased way.
“Sit down,” I tell him. “Eat. Talk. In that order, ideally, but I know you.”
He sits. He eats about four bites and then he can’t help himself, the words come pouring out, the campaign, the numbers, the publisher practically levitating, the reach, the timeline, the way Wyatt kept saying this could be the biggest launch the house has done in a decade.
His eyes are doing the thing I fell in love with, that bright hungry lit-up thing he gets when the work is going well, and God help me, I could watch him talk about his book all night. I’m not even being sarcastic.
That’s the trap of it. When he’s like this he’s the most alive person in any room, and for years I got to be the room.
“And Layla’s completely on board,” he says, reaching for the wine. “More than on board. She’s got ideas, she’s already thinking about the shoot, she’s genuinely excited about it. She kept saying how happy she is for us.”
For us.
There it is again, that small drop, that little missed-stair lurch, and I catch it faster this time because I’ve had practice, and I ask the reasonable question in a reasonable voice.
“Why her, though?” I say it lightly, spearing a piece of chicken. “I mean, she’s perfect, obviously. But out of everyone in this whole town full of famous people who’d kill to be attached to your launch, how’d it land on Layla?”
Adrian shrugs, easy, already halfway back to his numbers.
“Audience overlap, mostly. Wyatt ran the analytics. Her demographic and my readership are almost a perfect match, apparently, which is rare. And it doesn’t hurt that she’s your best friend, so there’s a built-in story there.
Wife’s best friend, husband’s book, everybody’s already comfortable. The publisher loved that angle.”
“The angle,” I repeat.
“You know what I mean.” He reaches across the table and squeezes my hand. “It’s a good thing, Brooke. It means you’re in it too. It’s not me going off and doing this on my own, it’s, I don’t know, it’s family.”
And that’s the thing. That’s exactly the thing.