Chapter 4 #2
He doesn’t pull away. The shoulder roll doesn’t come. His arm stays flat and his face does something that knocks the air out of me—jaw unclenching, shoulders dropping, something warm and unguarded moving through his expression.
He softens. For her. Through a plate glass window, I watch my husband become a person I’ve never met.
“Ginny? You good?”
Wanda’s hand is on the door. One second from walking inside.
“Change of plans.” My voice comes out clean and professional and I have no idea where it’s coming from. “This place changed management last month—kitchen’s been inconsistent. I don’t want to risk it on a client lunch. There’s a spot on Walnut that’s better.”
She glances at the window. My heart hammers. “You sure? Looks packed.”
“Trust me.” I’m already turning, already moving. “Handmade pasta, gorgeous lighting. Worth the extra block.”
“Sold. Lead the way.”
We walk. Every step away from that window is a fight because what I want—what my body is screaming at me to do—is push through that door and cross the room and stand over that table until Clarence’s face cracks open.
I want Annabelle to look at the woman she calls boring and see a woman walking a four-location client through her own neighborhood.
I want to slam my portfolio on the table between their hands and say this is what stable looks like when it stops holding you up.
Instead I say, “Tell me where you landed on the Phoenix permitting timeline.”
The Walnut place exists. Small mercy. The hostess seats us by the window, and Wanda opens her sketchbook, and I order sparkling water because if I order wine I will drink the bottle.
“So I’ve been going back and forth on the bar top,” Wanda says. “The walnut is gorgeous, but I’m worried about durability.”
“It’ll hold up. We seal it with a marine-grade poly—three coats minimum, sanded between each one.” His face when she touched him. ”The key is the finish schedule. You rush it, you get clouding. You give it time, the grain comes through and the surface is practically bulletproof.”
“How long per coat?”
“Twenty-four hours dry time, then a light sand.” Four months of lying in bed wondering what’s wrong with my hands. “I’ve got a finisher I trust. He did the bar at Coperta—you’ve seen the photos.”
“That bar is stunning.” Wanda writes something down. “What about the stools?”
“I pulled three options.” I open my portfolio and spread the tear sheets between our plates.
My hands are steady. My hands are so steady I could perform surgery and nobody in this restaurant would know that six blocks east my husband is letting another woman touch the arm he pulls away from me.
“The Emeco is my top pick. The silhouette is clean enough for your aesthetic, and the aluminum won’t scratch the floor. ”
“These are perfect.” She taps the Emeco photo. “This is why I hired you, Ginny. You think about things nobody else thinks about.”
The sentence hits a bruise so deep the ache reaches my jaw.
Maybe if you had something real to brag about.
Clarence sitting across from me at our own dinner table, reducing this—all of this, the expertise, the client who flew from Phoenix, the four-location contract—to something cute.
Something to manage expectations around.
And right now, this moment, I am proving him wrong so completely that it should feel like victory, and instead it tastes like metal because he’s not here to see it.
He’s six blocks away, softening at another woman’s touch, and he will never know what I did today. How good I was. How much it cost me.
“Thank you,” I say. “That means a lot.”
Wanda’s Uber arrives at one-fifteen. She hugs me at the curb—one arm, quick.
“Monday for the tile walkthrough?”
“I’ll have samples ready.”
“You’re the best. I mean that.”
Her car pulls away. The compliment sits in the warm air with nobody here to knock it down, and I hold still on the sidewalk until the car turns the corner because I can feel what’s coming and I need to be inside my car when it hits.
I make it. Door shut. Street noise gone.
The shaking starts in my hands and rolls up through my arms and into my shoulders and my jaw and I grip the steering wheel with both hands and my forehead drops against it and the sound that comes out of me isn’t crying.
It’s low and raw and furious—the sound of an animal that’s been holding still for too long.
He softened. For her. The same man who treats my touch like a thing he needs to escape sat in a restaurant on my street and let another woman’s hand rest on his skin and his whole body said yes.
Four months I’ve been lying awake thinking something is wrong with me.
Replaying every reach, every dodge, every flinch.
Wondering if I forgot how to be someone worth touching.
I sit up. Wipe my face with the heel of my hand. Stare through the windshield at the Walnut Street traffic.
It’s not my hands. It was never my hands.
The tears dry up fast because something harder is moving in underneath them.
Not grief—that’s still there, but it’s getting pushed to the edges by something cold and clean and steady.
Something that sat through a ninety-minute client lunch with its chest full of glass and didn’t break a single piece.
I pull out my phone and text Deborah: Saw Clarence and Annabelle at a restaurant on Platte today. While I was with a client. Couldn’t do anything.
Three dots. Then: Are you fucking kidding me.
His neighborhood now, apparently.
Oh HELL no. Are you ok?
No. But I nailed the lunch.
That’s my girl. Come over tonight. I have wine and rage.
I set the phone down. Start the car.
The petition is being drafted. The evidence is filed. The attorney is terrifying, and the client is happy, and my husband doesn’t know any of it. He’s sitting on my street thinking I’m at home, boring, stable, holding up the floor he stands on while he reaches for somebody else.
He has no idea the floor is gone.