Chapter 6
The flowers came to the clinic on a Tuesday, which meant someone, presumably an assistant of an assistant, had looked up my work address rather than ask Grant for it directly, which told me something before I’d even signed for the box.
Marisol buzzed me up from the front desk. “Della, you’ve got a delivery. It’s, um.” A pause I could hear her deciding how to fill. “It’s a lot.”
“How much is a lot?”
“Just come see for yourself.”
It was a lot. Two dozen white roses, the expensive kind that don’t smell like anything because they’ve been bred for shelf life instead of scent, arranged in a low glass bowl by someone who’d clearly been given a budget and no other instructions.
A card, printed, not handwritten, from a florist’s standard card stock: I am so sorry. I love you. Let me make this right. G.
Four sentences. Not one of them specific to me, or to what had happened, or to anything that would tell you this apology belonged to this marriage and not to any of the several hundred other marriages that particular florist’s arrangement had probably apologized its way through that month.
I set the bowl on the corner of the exam room counter, where it sat all morning looking expensive and slightly accusatory, while I worked through a full slate of lameness exams and one dental float, and every single client who came through noticed it and every single one of them said some version of ooh, someone’s in trouble, delighted, the way people get delighted by evidence of somebody else’s marriage having a normal, survivable hiccup.
I let them think that. It was easier than the alternative.
One of my regular clients, Denise Okafor, who boards three hunters with me and has opinions about everything from farrier schedules to my choice of fly spray, leaned into the exam room around eleven and let out a low whistle at the roses.
“Somebody’s husband is in the doghouse,” she said, delighted, exactly the way I’d expected someone to be delighted. “What’d he do?”
“Long story.”
“Good flowers, though. Real effort there.” She peered closer, reading the card without any particular shame about it, the way people who’ve known you fifteen years feel entitled to. “‘I love you, let me make this right.’ That’s a decent start. My ex never sent me so much as a coupon.”
“He didn’t bring them himself, though.” I hadn’t meant to say it out loud.
“Well, no, they’re roses, not a pizza.” She laughed, missing the point entirely, the way anyone would who hadn’t spent the last four days learning to hear that particular difference. “Nobody delivers their own roses, Della.”
“No,” I said. “I guess they don’t.” That was as much as I was willing to give her, and she seemed to sense the door closing on the subject, patting my arm once on her way out, casually sympathetic in the way of a woman who assumed, reasonably, that this was an ordinary marital squall and not the thing it actually was.
I thought, watching her go, how easy it must be, from outside a marriage, to read four sentences on a florist’s card as evidence of real effort, when I already knew, standing three feet from them, exactly how little of Grant had actually touched any part of their assembly.
The second package came that afternoon: a folder, actual paper, couriered rather than emailed — already, before I’d opened it, the specific gesture of a man who thinks physical weight equals seriousness.
“Package for Marchetti?” the courier asked, already holding out a tablet for my signature.
“That’s me.”
“Sign here, and here.” He tapped two boxes on the screen without looking up. “Have a good one.”
That was the whole of it, the entire human exchange required to move an itinerary and several thousand dollars of resort booking from Grant’s desk to mine: a stranger with a tablet, and my name, signed twice.
Inside was an itinerary. Four nights at a resort in the Bahamas I recognized from a magazine spread Sloane had once mentioned, all-inclusive, a private cabana, a reservation at a restaurant with a name in a font that assumed you already knew it was good.
Dates two weeks out. A sticky note on the front page, in Grant’s actual handwriting this time, the only handwritten thing in either delivery: Whatever it takes. I’m not giving up on us.
I looked the resort up myself that evening, out of the same compulsive research habit that had built the calendar spreadsheet, and found, four photos into the gallery, the exact overwater cabana pictured in the folder, one I now remembered clearly: Sloane had shown it to me once, years back, at a company holiday party, scrolling through her phone, saying she was saving up for it “someday, if I ever stop being married to this job.” I’d forgotten the conversation completely until the folder on my desk jogged it loose, and sitting with it now, I couldn’t decide which was worse, that Grant had genuinely forgotten where the idea originated, or that some part of him, reaching for a gesture big enough to fix things, had unconsciously reached for the one thing he already knew, from watching someone else want it, actually worked as an aspirational image.
Either way, it wasn’t mine. It had never been mine.
I’d never once mentioned wanting an overwater cabana in my life, and the fact that he’d needed Sloane’s old daydream as a template for what my forgiveness might cost told me something about how little he actually knew, after eighteen years, about what I wanted my own life to look like.
I sat with the folder open on my desk for a long time, long enough that Marisol eventually leaned into the doorway.
“You’ve been staring at that same page for twenty minutes,” she said. “You need anything?”
“Do you know what’s wrong with this?” I asked her, which wasn’t fair, exactly, dragging my technician into the forensics of my marriage, but she’d been with me eleven years and had earned, I thought, the right to an honest question even if she didn’t want to answer it.
She looked at the itinerary. “It’s a nice resort.”
“It is.”
“But he’s not in it,” she said, slower, working it out as she said it, which is exactly how I’d worked it out myself an hour earlier. “There’s nothing in here that’s actually him doing anything. It’s just a place. You could send anybody to that resort.”
A four-night trip to a place I’d never expressed the slightest interest in, booked by an assistant, paid for by a card, delivered by a courier, accompanied by four hundred dollars of roses that didn’t smell like anything — and at no point in either package had Grant Marchetti actually shown up anywhere in person to say a single word to me himself.
I thought, packing up the folder to take upstairs, about Sloane’s text from two weeks back, the one I still hadn’t answered.
I feel sick about this. Please let me know if there’s anything at all I can do.
Four sentences, typed herself, at whatever hour she’d found out, sent before she’d had time to talk herself into something more composed, which had told me more about how fast and how genuinely she’d written it than a polished one ever could have.
Standing there with several thousand dollars of florist’s roses and resort brochures under my arm, it was a more convincing apology than anything currently sitting on my exam room counter — and it had come from the woman who wasn’t even supposed to be the one apologizing.
I called him that evening, which surprised us both, I think, given how the last call had gone.
I’d rehearsed nothing, deliberately, some old professional instinct telling me that a rehearsed conversation about an unrehearsed problem was simply a different flavor of dishonesty.
I sat on the apartment’s one good chair with my phone in my lap for a full five minutes before I actually dialed, running through every version of the conversation I didn’t want to have: the one where I forgave him too easily because forgiving was simpler than sitting in the discomfort of not forgiving yet, the one where I said something so sharp it closed a door I wasn’t sure yet whether I wanted closed.
I didn’t find a script that satisfied either fear.
I called anyway, deciding, somewhere in that fifth minute, that an honest unscripted conversation beat a well-managed dishonest one every time, whatever it cost either of us in the moment.
It cost both of us something, though not in the way I’d braced for.
Neither of us said anything unforgivable.
We simply said true things to each other, more of them than either of us had managed in longer than we wanted to admit — and true things cost something just by virtue of being true, whether or not they’re also cruel.
“Did you get the flowers?” He sounded hopeful in a way that made the whole thing worse, not better, because it meant he genuinely believed this had a chance of working, which meant he still, after everything, didn’t understand what the actual problem was.
“I got the flowers. And the trip.”
“Four nights, we can extend it if you want, I can move some things around—”
“Grant.” I let that stop him. “Who booked the flowers?”
A pause. “My assistant handled the order, but I picked the—”
“Who booked the trip?”
Longer pause. “Regina handled the logistics, but the cabana was my idea, I remembered you saying once that you wanted somewhere with actual privacy, not one of those resorts where you can hear the pool from your—”
“When’s the last time you were physically present for something that mattered to me, without an assistant handling the logistics of it?”
The silence this time went on long enough that I thought he might actually try to answer honestly, and for one strange, suspended second I wanted him to, wanted it badly enough that I held very still, the way you hold still for an animal that might finally let you close the last three feet.