Chapter 1
THANK YOU SO MUCH FOR YOUR SUPPORT
“Okay, but the moose.” Rachel grabs Mark’s arm across the table. “Tell them about the moose.”
“We’re pulling into this cove up at Payette,” Mark says, leaning into it, “dead quiet, not another boat around—and there’s a moose. Just standing in the shallows. Massive. Like, the size of our truck. And it turns and stares at us.”
“It didn’t blink,” Lisa says. “Not once.”
“So Lisa decides she needs a photo. Stands up in the boat, holds her phone out—and this moose just lowers its head and takes one step toward us. One step. Lisa drops the phone in the lake.”
“It was a threat display, Mark. That animal was going to charge.”
“It was standing in two feet of water eating lake grass. But sure—mortal danger.”
“Like it knew,” Lisa says. “Like it looked at me and decided, not this bitch.”
The whole table breaks. Tom throws his head back. Clarence is laughing so hard his shoulders are shaking, and he reaches across to refill Mark’s glass without being asked.
“That’s incredible.” Clarence shakes his head, still grinning. “How long have you had the boat now?”
“Since March. You guys should come out—seriously. The water’s finally warm enough that you don’t want to die when you fall in.”
“Name the day.” Clarence points at Mark with his glass. “Ginny burns like a lobster, but I’ll get her out there.”
I roll my eyes. “I’ll survive with sunscreen.”
The candles I set along the table are burning low, the wax pooling into the iron holders I found at an estate sale last fall.
The dining room looks the way I wanted it to—warm light, the reclaimed wood table I refinished myself, fresh hydrangeas from the yard in a copper pitcher.
I spent the afternoon getting it right. The linen napkins.
The good plates. The lamb marinating since last night.
It matters to me, this. Making a home that feels like something. Clarence used to notice.
“Rachel,” Clarence says, turning to her. “Tom told me about the promotion. VP of operations—the whole Southeast division?”
Rachel tucks her hair behind her ear. “It’s been a learning curve.”
“Don’t do that. Own it. That’s a massive portfolio, and you earned it.” He holds her gaze long enough for it to land, and Rachel sits up a little straighter.
“Thank you, Clarence. That actually means a lot.”
He lifts his glass to her. Warm. Sincere. The version of him that makes people say you’re so lucky, Ginny.
Mark leans forward. “Speaking of killing it—Ginny, your business is on fire right now. What are you at, triple the clients from last year?”
“Close to it.” The warmth spreads through my chest fast. Mark doesn’t hand out compliments like candy. “I just signed a restaurant group. Four locations.”
“That’s amazing.” Lisa squeezes my hand across the table. “I told you when you started—you were going to blow up.”
“Most of her clients are friends or friends of friends.” Clarence sets his glass down. “It’s not exactly cold-calling strangers. The restaurant thing is cool, but let’s see if it sticks.”
My face goes hot. The warmth in my chest curdles into something tight and sour, and I press my tongue against the roof of my mouth because if I don’t, I’ll say something I can’t walk back. He just called Rachel’s career a big deal. Lifted his glass to her. And mine gets let’s see if it sticks.
“Referrals are the backbone of design work,” I say. My voice comes out bright. Controlled. “If your clients love you enough to send their friends, that’s the whole game.”
“Sure.” He lifts his glass. “I’m just saying, let’s not get ahead of ourselves.”
Mark pivots to the Broncos’ season opener and the table exhales. I pick up my wine and the first sip tastes like nothing.
Lisa compliments the lamb a while later. “Ginny, this is incredible. The glaze—what is this?”
“Harissa and honey. I marinated it overnight, and the glaze itself has about twelve—”
“She had all day.” Clarence doesn’t look up from his plate.
My knife slips against the plate. The scrape cuts through the table noise and Lisa flinches.
The back of my neck is on fire. Every nerve from my jaw to my collarbones is pulled tight, and something behind my sternum is vibrating at a frequency that feels dangerous.
He just did it again. Sat at a table I set, eating food I made, in a room I designed, and dismissed all of it with four words.
Tom asks about a show he’s been watching and the conversation moves on. It always moves on. People fill the silence around Clarence’s comments like water filling a crack—fast, instinctive, eager to smooth things over.
I reach for his forearm. The kind of touch that shouldn’t require thought.
His shoulder rolls forward. He picks up his wine glass with the arm I just reached for, and my fingers land on tablecloth.
Lisa’s eyes drop to my hand. Then up to my face.
I pull my hand into my lap.
Dessert is a lemon tart I spent an hour on. Clarence tells everyone he picked up the lemons at the farmers’ market. He bought six lemons. I did everything else.
Tom and Rachel leave first. Lisa and Mark linger at the door, Mark shaking Clarence’s hand while Clarence claps him on the shoulder and says something about getting a tee time.
Lisa pulls me aside. Her hand lands on my elbow and she turns us just enough that our backs are to the men.
“Hey.” Her voice drops. “Is everything okay with you two?”
“What do you mean?”
“The comments. The thing with your arm.” She squeezes my elbow. “That’s not nothing, Gin.”
I force the smile. “He’s been stressed with work. You know how he gets.”
She holds my eyes, and the words she’s choosing not to say press against her expression like hands against glass.
“Okay,” she says. She hugs me—one hand flat between my shoulder blades, holding on a beat too long. “Call me if you need anything.”
I close the door behind her. My hands are trembling against the knob, and I stand in the foyer listening to Clarence’s footsteps move toward the kitchen, and the shaking isn’t sadness. It’s everything I didn’t say vibrating under my skin with nowhere to go.
The kitchen is trashed. Plates crusted with harissa glaze, wine glasses with dark red tidelines, cloth napkins balled up on the counter. I turn the faucet on and shove my hands under the water before it’s hot enough.
Clarence walks in carrying the last of the wine glasses by their stems. Sets them on the counter. Pulls out his phone.
“That went well.” Already scrolling. “Tom and Rachel are fun. We should take Mark up on the boat thing.”
“Clarence.”
“Mm.”
“Every time someone said something nice about me tonight, you cut it down.”
He looks up from his phone. The same face he’d make if I told him the dishwasher was leaking—mild interest, already calculating how fast he can make this not his problem.
“What are you talking about?”
“Mark brought up my business and you made it sound like I was playing pretend. Lisa complimented the food and you said I had all day.” The water is scalding now.
I keep my hands in it. “You toasted Tom’s deal.
You called Rachel’s promotion a big deal.
And then you looked at my work and told the table to manage their expectations. ”
“I didn’t say manage their expectations.”
“You said let’s not get ahead of ourselves. Same thing.”
Something shifts behind his eyes. That careful rearranging he does—sorting through responses, picking the one designed to make me feel like I’m standing on uneven ground.
“I wasn’t undercutting you. I was being realistic. Mark was being nice—that’s what Mark does. You can’t take every compliment at face value.”
“You took Rachel’s at face value. You told her to own it.”
“That’s different.”
“How?” The word comes out sharp enough to cut, and something splashes—my hand jerking in the water, sending it over the rim of a glass.
“How is that different, Clarence? She got a promotion. I tripled my client list. You held hers up and you knocked mine down, and you did it at the same table in the same hour.”
He sets his phone face-down on the counter. Takes a breath. The patient face. The one that says I’m being reasonable and you’re being emotional, and we both know which one of those wins.
“I support your work. I’ve always supported your work.”
Six months ago, I would have believed that.
Maybe three months ago. But I’ve been watching this version of him take shape—this man who says the right words and means none of them—and the distance between what he says and what I feel when he says it keeps getting wider, and I don’t know when it started.
I don’t know what changed. I’ve asked. He says work is stressful.
He says everything’s fine. He says I’m overthinking it.
“You support it the way people support a kid’s lemonade stand,” I say. “You think it’s cute.”
The patience drops. Just for a second—a flash of something real, something with teeth, the thing that lives under the charm he performs for everyone else.
“Maybe if you had something real to brag about, I wouldn’t have to manage expectations for you.”
The sentence hits me in the sternum. Not like a slap—like a door locking. The click of something shutting that I didn’t know was still open.
“Manage expectations,” I say. “That’s what you think you’re doing.”
“I’m not doing this tonight.” He’s already moving toward the doorway. “I’m taking a shower. Leave the rest—I’ll get it in the morning.”
He won’t. I’ll clean this kitchen before he wakes up, and he’ll walk through it tomorrow without seeing it, the same way he walks through every room I’ve made beautiful for him.
His footsteps on the stairs. The bathroom door. Water running through the pipes overhead.
I’m alone in the kitchen with the faucet still running and my ribs aching like I’ve been holding my breath for hours.
My eyes burn. Not from crying—from the pressure behind them, the weight of every conversation that ends exactly like this one.
I say it hurt. He says I’m wrong about my own pain.
I stop talking. He leaves. I stand in the wreckage.
We used to be good. I keep turning that over, worrying at it like a loose tooth—we used to be good.
Didn’t we? Saturday mornings in this kitchen, his arms around me while I cooked, his chin on my shoulder.
The way he used to walk clients through our house and say Ginny did all of this.
Proud. Actually proud. I’m not making that up. I couldn’t be making that up.
So when did he stop? And why won’t he tell me?
My phone buzzes on the counter.
Lisa.
Hey. Just wanted to check in. Is everything really ok? I’m here if you need me.
I stare at it until the screen dims. She knows. She’s known longer than tonight, probably—Lisa watches people the way I watch rooms, reading the architecture of what’s really going on behind the surface. She saw the cracks I’ve been spackling over for months.
I pick the phone up. My thumb hovers.
I could tell her the truth. I could type I don’t know what’s happening to my marriage and he won’t talk to me and I’m scared. I could tell her that my husband treats me like furniture when the guests go home. That I reached for him tonight and he moved away from me, and it wasn’t the first time.
I type: I’m fine. Just tired. ??
Send.
The water went cold a while ago. I finish the last of the dishes and dry my hands on one of the linen napkins I ironed this morning, back when I still thought tonight might go differently.
Upstairs, the shower turns off.
I fold the napkin. Set it on the counter. Stand in the kitchen I designed, in the home I made, and try to remember the last time my husband looked at me the way he looked at Rachel when he told her to own it.
I can’t.