7. Brooke
— ? —
Brooke
I stopped talking to my husband a few days ago, and he didn’t notice, which is honestly the most on-brand thing that’s happened all month.
It wasn’t dramatic. I didn’t announce it.
I just stood in his office doorway at midnight three nights ago with the whole speech loaded, the I think we’re breaking and I don’t know how to stop it speech, the one I’d been carrying around for weeks looking for the right night to set it down, and I got about six words in before he asked if it could wait until tomorrow.
Because he was close on a scene and I looked at the back of his head, angled at that screen as if it was magnetic north, and I understood that there was no version of this where I said the thing and he actually heard it so I just said “Sure,” and I closed the door.
After that, I stopped and it’s not even out of spite.
I stopped because I finally believed him.
All those months I kept talking because some part of me thought the words just weren’t landing, that if I found the right ones at the right volume he’d turn around.
That night I finally got it.
The words were landing fine. He just had somewhere better to put his attention, and it wasn’t me, and no sentence I owned was going to change that.
So I went quiet.
Here’s the part that should have broken me and didn’t.
I think he liked it better.
He’s been lighter these last three days, easier.
A man whose wife has stopped asking him for anything is a man with more room in his day, and he’s been moving through that room like a guy on vacation, kissing my forehead on his way out, calling me his rock, telling Wyatt on the phone that I’m “so supportive, honestly, she just gets it.”
I get it. That’s the word he keeps using. I get it.
He has no idea that getting it and giving up make the exact same face.
But I have one thing left in me.
One.
The launch is this Thursday.
***
It is the biggest night of his career, the night the whole machine has been building toward, and I have decided it is going to be my last offering.
That’s how I’ve started thinking of it, in those words.
An offering. A thing you place on an altar not knowing if anyone’s going to accept it.
I am going to put on a dress and walk into that room and stand somewhere he can see me, and I am going to give my husband exactly one chance to look up from all of it, the cameras and the crowd and Layla, and find his wife, and want her there.
One chance. If he takes it, if some piece of the man who used to lose his page because I moved is still alive in there, then maybe we’re not over.
Maybe this is a bad chapter and not the end of the book.
And if he doesn’t, if I stand in that room in the dress I picked and he walks right past me without ever knowing I came, then I’ll have my answer, and it’ll be clean, and I won’t have to wonder anymore. There’s a mercy in that.
After months of not knowing where I stand, I would honestly take a clean no over one more day of maybe.
So on Thursday I make it a whole thing, on purpose, because if this is an offering then it deserves the effort.
My phone rings while I’m still in my robe, and it’s Nadia, an old friend from my program who does interiors now, who Gemma clearly called, because Gemma can’t fix a thing but she can always find someone who might.
“I’m not going to ask if you’re okay, because Gemma already told me you’re not,” Nadia says. “So instead I’m calling to bully you about a completely unrelated matter. Are you sitting?”
“Nadia, I have a whole day.”
“That renovation I mentioned, the boutique hotel in the arts district? They lost their design associate. I gave them your name. Don’t make that noise, I heard the noise.
You’re the most talented person I went to school with and you’ve spent two years being a rich man’s houseplant, and it’s a crime, and I said so, in an email, to actual professionals. ”
“I’m not looking for work right now.”
“You should be.” Her voice softens off the pitch.
“Brooke. You used to talk about buildings like they were people. You’d sketch a stairwell and make me cry about a stairwell.
That doesn’t just leave a person. It’s sitting in there getting dusty while you host dinner parties.
Just meet with them. That’s all. One coffee. ”
And I stand in my kitchen holding the phone, and a part of me old and buried shifts a little, some version of me I packed away in a box when I moved into all this glass, and for a second I actually let myself want it before I remember what today is.
“I can’t think about this today,” I say. “Today I have to go do a thing first.”
“The launch?”
“Yes, the launch.”
A pause. “Is he taking you? Or are you doing the thing where you show up and hope.”
I don’t answer, which is its own answer, and Nadia sighs the particular sigh of a woman who has watched this before.
“Okay. Go. But you call me next week, and we get the coffee, and you let me remind you that you’re a person with a name that isn’t just Mrs. Ashbourne. Deal?”
“Deal,” I say, and I mean it more than I expect to, and I hang up with the strange feeling of a door I forgot existed cracking open somewhere down a hallway I’d stopped walking.
I stand up too fast to go start getting ready, and the kitchen tilts.
It’s quick, a gray swim at the edges, the floor going soft under me, and I catch the counter and hold on until it passes.
I’ve been getting these all week, these little dropouts, and a wave of nausea rolls through my stomach right behind it. Nerves, I tell myself. I’ve barely eaten, I’ve barely slept, I’m about to crash my own husband’s launch.
Of course my body’s in revolt. I get a glass of water and drink it slowly and wait for the room to sit back down, and it does, and I don’t think about it again, because I have a dress to get into and a marriage to go find out about, and a woman about to walk into a fire does not have time to wonder why she’s dizzy.
Then I go get my nails done, because if I’m doing this I’m doing all of it, and I sit in the chair and let a stranger hold my hands, and it’s the most anyone’s touched me with any care in weeks.
“Big night?” the woman asks, not looking up from my cuticles.
“My husband’s got a book launch.”
“Ooh.” She lights up. “A writer. That’s romantic. You must be so proud.”
“I am,” I say, and the awful thing is I mean it. “I really am.”
Because that’s the knot of the whole month, right there in a nail salon. I am proud of him. I have always been proud of him. It turns out being proud of someone and being erased by them fit in the same chest at the same time, no trouble at all, they barely touch.
She holds a bottle up against my skin, considering. “You can’t decide, so let me. You’re a red. Trust me.”
“I don’t really do red.”
“Tonight you do.” She gets to work, and when she’s done she lifts my hand up to the light and turns it, pleased with herself. “There. Now you can’t hide.”
She has no idea she just described the entire evening.
Home again, I take the dress down from where it’s been hanging alone on its hanger for two weeks, apart from everything else, waiting.
It’s not the one Layla picked. This one is not built for blending into anyone’s background. It’s the color of a decision, and when I zip it and turn in the mirror, the woman who’s been getting quietly smaller in that penthouse for months isn’t the one who looks back.
This one used to take up space. She just remembered how.
And then I do the thing I’ve been saving.
I open my jewelry drawer and I take out the earrings.
They’re small, not showy, the kind of thing you’d miss if you weren’t looking, which is fitting. He gave them to me on our first anniversary, back when moments still happened between us, and I can put myself right back in that one if I let the drawer stay open a second too long.
We were at a restaurant, the good one, and he’d been strange all night, checking his jacket pocket, losing the thread of his own sentences, which my composed, unshakeable husband never did.
I thought he’d gotten bad news he didn’t know how to tell me.
Then over dessert he slid a velvet box across the table like it might go off.
“I don’t actually know if these are right,” he said, which is not how men like Adrian give gifts. “I stood in the shop for an hour. The woman gave up on me. I couldn’t decide, and then I decided, and now I’ve been sitting here for two hours convinced I decided wrong.”
I opened the box. The earrings caught the candlelight.
“Adrian.”
“If you hate them we can exchange them, it’s completely fine, I kept the…”
“I love them.” My eyes were doing a thing I hadn’t given them permission to do. “You stood in a shop for an hour. For me.”
“I’d stand in it for a week,” he said, and then looked faintly alarmed at himself, the way he did back then whenever a true thing escaped him, and I watched my careful husband blush over a sentence, and I think that was the night I stopped pretending I hadn’t fallen for him.
I’ve worn them maybe four times since. And I would put real money on him not remembering they exist.
That’s the test, in a way.
The dress is for the room, the earrings are for him.
If he sees them, if some old wire in him lights up and he thinks I gave her those, then he’s still in there.
And if he looks straight at me and they’re just earrings, just jewelry on a woman in a nice dress, then I’ll know the man who stood in that shop for an hour is gone.
I put them in.
They catch the light when I turn my head, small and steady, the way they did across that table.
I look at myself for a long time.
The dress, the earrings, the nails, the whole careful architecture of a woman about to go ask a question she’s terrified of the answer to.
The strange thing, the thing I didn’t expect, is that under all the fear there’s a feeling almost close to pleasure.
Because I look good. Not good-for-the-circumstances.
Not good-considering. Good. I’d forgotten I could.