9. Brooke
— ? —
Brooke
It turns out you can pack a whole life into one bag if you only take the parts that were ever really yours.
I’m almost done by the time I hear the elevator. I’ve been at it since I got upstairs, moving through the penthouse in my launch dress with my heels kicked off somewhere near the door, pulling my few real things out of a closet full of clothes I mostly let other people choose.
Two years of marriage and the pile that’s actually mine fits in a duffel with room to spare.
The last thing I add is my father’s drafting pencil, worn to a stub, the one thing in this whole glass box that has always, unquestionably, been mine. I try not to read anything into how small the rest of the pile is, and I fail.
The sketchbook, I almost take.
It’s in the nightstand drawer where it always lives, full of him, the drawings I made when I still thought he was worth drawing, the empty tables, the house I’ll never build now. I pick it up and hold it for a second, and then I put it back in the drawer and slide it shut.
I’m not taking it. It’s the truest thing I ever made in this apartment, and it belongs to the version of me who lived here and drew a man who wasn’t looking, and I am not going to be her anymore. She can stay in the drawer with the rest of what this place cost me.
I hear his key, and the door, and then his voice fills the apartment before he’s even all the way in, bright and fast and lit up in the way I used to live for.
“Brooke? Brooke, are you up?” Footsteps, quick, happy. “God, you should have seen it, it was insane, they ran out of books, do you understand what that means, they physically ran out, Priyanka nearly cried…”
Adrian comes around the corner into the bedroom still talking, still glowing, tie loose and hair a mess and his whole face open the way it only gets when the work has gone right, and he crosses the room toward me with his arms already lifting.
Because apparently, he wants to share it and in whatever version of tonight lives in his head, I am the person he comes home to and tells. He gets three steps in with his hands reaching for my waist before his eyes actually land on me.
On the dress I wore to his launch that he never saw.
On the bag.
He stops.
His arms come down slowly, and he doesn’t seem to know what to do with them anymore.
“You’re…” He looks at the duffel, at the closet standing open, at me. The glow doesn’t vanish all at once. It flickers out, the way a room dims when a cloud crosses the sun, light one second and gone the next. “What is this? What are you doing?”
“I’m packing, Adrian. It’s not a riddle.”
“I can see that, I mean…” He laughs, a small confused sound, still trying to fit this into a good night. “Where are you going? Is everything okay? Is it your mom?”
“My mom’s fine.”
“Then what?” He steps closer, reaching for the version of this where it’s a misunderstanding, some solvable thing, a scheduling problem, and my chest does an old traitorous thing at how badly he wants it to be small. “Talk to me. Whatever it is, we’ll figure it out. Come here.”
“Don’t.” I say it quietly, and I fold the sweater slower than it needs folding, because if I keep my hands busy I can keep my voice level. “Don’t come here.”
He stops again. And a look crosses his face that I’ve never quite seen on him before, the first real edge of fear, the expression of a man starting to understand that the ground he’s standing on might not be there.
“Brooke, you’re scaring me.”
“I was at the launch tonight.”
It lands. I watch it land, watch him replay the whole evening in half a second looking for me in it and not finding me, because I wasn’t in any of the places his attention went.
“You were… you were there? Tonight? At the venue?” His voice climbs. “Why didn’t you tell me you were coming, I would have…”
“You would have what.” Not a question. I set the sweater in the bag.
“Put me on the list? I wasn’t on the list, Adrian.
You want to know how I got in? I lied to a girl with a tablet and bluffed my way past security into my own husband’s launch, in a dress I bought myself, because it did not occur to a single person planning that event that the wife might want to be there. Including you.”
“That’s not…” He drags a hand through his hair. “The list wasn’t me, Wyatt handles the list, there were a thousand moving parts, I didn’t even see it…”
“I know you didn’t see it. That’s the whole thing. You didn’t see.”
“Brooke.” He’s off balance now, casting around, and he lands on the worst possible thing, the thing he thinks is generous.
“I thought, honestly, I thought you didn’t want to come.
These events, they’re a circus, you always say how much you hate the industry stuff, and I didn’t want to drag you into all the chaos and the cameras and put that on you. I was trying to protect you from…”
And that’s when I laugh.
It comes out wrong, thin and disbelieving, because the sheer nerve of it, the way he’s reached into a real failure and pulled out a story where he’s the thoughtful one, is almost a marvel.
“You were protecting me. From my own husband’s book launch.”
“I didn’t mean it like…”
“When did you ask me?” I turn and face him full on for the first time, and he actually takes a half step back from whatever’s on my face.
“When, Adrian? Point to the conversation. When did you sit me down and say, hey, do you want to come to the launch, is this too much for you, would you rather sit it out? When did that happen? Because I’ve been living in this apartment the whole time and I don’t remember it. ”
His mouth opens. Nothing comes out.
“You didn’t ask,” I say. “You decided. You decided you knew what I wanted, all on your own, without checking, because checking would have meant thinking about me for two consecutive minutes, and you have not had two consecutive minutes for me in a long time. So don’t dress it up as protecting me.
You forgot me. There’s a difference, and we both know it. ”
He flinches at that, actually flinches, and for a second he can’t find anything to say, and into that silence I make the mistake of telling the truth.
“You want to know the worst part of standing in the back of that room?” I go back to the bag, because I can’t look at him and say this. “It wasn’t even you not seeing me. I could almost forgive that. It was that Layla did.”
He goes still. “What?”
“She saw me. Right away, across the whole floor. And then she came over and she made sure you were turned the other way, handed you off to a crowd so your back was to me, and then she told me to go home before I embarrassed myself.” I zip the side pocket.
“So. At least someone at your launch knew your wife was there. Just not you.”
“Layla knew you were there?” And there it is, the thing catching in him, his brow pulling together. “She saw you and she didn’t say anything to me? Brooke, if I had known you were there, I swear to God, I would have stopped everything, I would have…”
“Stop.”
I turn around.
“Do you hear yourself? Layla should have told you. Wyatt should have put me on the list. Somebody should have mentioned it.” My voice is very quiet now, which is worse than loud, I can see it hitting him.
“No one should have to tell you I exist, Adrian. No one should have to remind you your wife might want to be at the biggest night of your life. You should just know. That is the whole entire job of being married to me. To know.”
He opens his mouth and I keep going, because I’ve started now and it’s all coming loose.
“And this isn’t about tonight. I need you to understand that, because I can see you doing it, I can see you filing this under one bad night, one thing Layla should have flagged, one fixable mistake.
It isn’t one night. We have been distant for a while now, a long while, and you didn’t even notice it was happening.
That’s what tonight was. Tonight was just the first time it happened somewhere with cameras. ”
“That’s not fair.” He steps toward me and I watch the panic come up in him now, real and climbing. “Brooke, the campaign has been insane, you know that, you’ve been so patient about it, you understood, you always understand…”
“There it is.”
“What?”
“You always understand.” I laugh, but it’s got nothing good in it. “God, Adrian. Do you know how many times you’ve said that to me? On the phone, at the door, to Wyatt. She’s so supportive, she just gets it, she always understands. Like it’s a personality trait. Like it’s free.”
“I didn’t mean…”
“I did understand.” My voice cracks on it, just slightly, and I hate that, but I push through.
“That’s the thing you never once stopped to think about.
I understood all of it. Two years, Adrian.
Two years of understanding. I understood when you disappeared into the book.
I understood the late nights and the missed dinners and the calls you took in the middle of sentences.
I made myself smaller and quieter and more understanding every single month we were married, and I told myself that was love, that being easy to be married to was the same thing as being loved. ”
He’s not moving now. He’s just watching me, and the color has gone out of him.
“What I could never understand,” I say, “is why I was the only one who had to do it. Why understanding was my job and never yours. Not once. You never once made yourself smaller for me. You never sat in a cold apartment wondering where I was. You never taught yourself to need less so I could have more room. You just took it, all of it, all my understanding, for two years, and you never even noticed it was costing me anything, because it never cost you a thing.”
The apartment is dead quiet.
Down below, the city keeps doing its indifferent glittering thing through the glass.
“The missed dinners,” I say, softer, counting them off not as a list but as the receipts of it.