2. Rhodes
— ? —
Rhodes
The ballroom is exactly what it should be, warm lighting, elegant table settings, the kind of understated sophistication that makes the company’s events recognizable before anyone sees the logo.
I stand near the bar with a club soda I’m not drinking, watching my team work the room, and I should feel satisfied.
Instead, I keep looking at the empty space beside me where Maren should be.
“No Maren tonight?”
David Kessler from Harrington Hotels has materialized at my elbow, cocktail in hand, wearing the same knowing smile he always wears at these things. I’ve never liked David Kessler. He’s the kind of man who asks questions he already knows the answers to, just to watch people squirm.
“She has a wedding tomorrow.” The words come out smooth, practiced. “Big installation. Couldn’t get away.”
“Ah.” David nods sagely. “That’s a shame. These industry dinners are always better with spouses. Humanizes us, you know?”
I don’t respond, mostly because I don’t trust myself to say anything civil.
“Good thing Rachel makes such a convincing plus one,” David continues, gesturing with his drink toward where Rachel is standing across the room, talking to a group of donors. “Anyone who didn’t know better would think you two were the married couple.”
He laughs like it’s a joke. I laugh too, because that’s what you do at these things, you laugh at the jokes that aren’t funny and pretend the barbs don’t land.
But this one lands. It lands harder than I want to admit, burrowing under my skin and settling there like a splinter I can’t quite reach.
David moves on to his next target, and I’m left standing alone, watching Rachel work the room.
She’s good at this, the best, actually. She knows exactly which donors to approach first, which executives to flatter, which conversations to interrupt and which to let run long.
She’s been by my side at events like this for years, and over time we developed a shorthand that makes everything easier.
She catches my eye from across the room and raises an eyebrow slightly, a question. Do you need me? I shake my head slightly, no, and she turns back to her conversation without missing a beat.
It’s nothing, just professional - the kind of seamless communication that happens when two people work closely together for years.
But I’m suddenly very aware of the fact that my wife isn’t here, and Rachel is.
“Mr. Calloway?”
A photographer has appeared beside me, camera ready. “Can we get a photo for the event coverage? Maybe with your right hand, since she’s getting the award tonight?”
“Of course.” The words come automatically, the public relations part of my brain taking over. I gesture to Rachel, and she excuses herself from her conversation and joins me near the step-and-repeat backdrop.
We’ve done this a hundred times. Stand together, smile, let the cameras capture us looking professional and successful and like the kind of people who deserve to be running a hospitality empire. It’s never felt strange before.
Tonight, it feels strange.
“Closer together,” the photographer directs. “Mr. Calloway, if you could angle toward her a bit, perfect.”
The flash goes off. Then again. Rachel and I hold our smiles, the practiced expressions of people who are used to being photographed, and I try not to think about David Kessler’s comment. Good thing Rachel makes such a convincing plus one.
“One more,” the photographer says, and just as the flash goes off, Rachel reaches up toward my face.
I flinch back before I can stop myself.
“Hold still,” she says, her voice amused. “Your tie is crooked.”
“I’ve got it.” I reach up and adjust the tie myself, and Rachel’s hand drops, and there’s a moment of awkwardness that shouldn’t exist between two people who have worked together as long as we have.
The photographer thanks us and moves on. Rachel gives me a strange look.
“Everything okay?”
“Fine.” I take a sip of my club soda. “Just tired.”
“You’ve been tired a lot lately.” She’s studying me with the kind of attention she usually reserves for work. “Is everything okay at home?”
The question catches me off guard. Rachel and I don’t talk about home. We talk about work, deals and problem vendors and crisis management. Our relationship exists within very specific boundaries, and “is everything okay at home” falls well outside them.
“Everything’s fine,” I say, and I don’t know why it sounds like a lie.
The rest of the evening passes in a blur of handshakes and small talk and photographs I don’t want to be in. Rachel receives her award and gives a speech that’s exactly the right length, exactly the right tone, and I watch from the audience and try to figure out why I feel so unsettled.
She knows when I want to leave. She always knows, she reads the restlessness in my posture, the way I start checking my watch more frequently, the subtle shift in my energy that signals I’m done performing for the night. Usually I’m grateful for it. Tonight, it bothers me.
How well do we know each other? When did that happen? And why does it feel like a betrayal of something I can’t name?
I make my excuses earlier than usual, headache, early morning, the kind of lies that are socially acceptable at industry events, and I’m in my car by ten o’clock, which might be a record.
The drive home is quiet. I leave the radio off, letting the silence fill the space, and I think about Maren.
About the way she hesitated before letting me kiss her this morning.
About the flatness in her voice when she said “come if you can.” And about all the things she’s been trying to tell me for apparently a year that I haven’t been hearing.
When did we become like this?
The house is dark when I pull into the garage, but there’s a light on in the dining room.
I find Maren at the table, surrounded by buckets of flowers, building small arrangements for tomorrow’s wedding.
She’s wearing an old T-shirt and leggings, her hair piled on top of her head in a messy bun, and she looks up when I walk in with an expression I can’t quite read.
“You’re home early,” she says.
“Left at ten.”
“That’s early for you.”
There’s no accusation in her voice, but I hear one anyway. I hear all the nights I didn’t leave at ten, all the events I stayed at until midnight, all the times I chose the work over coming home.
“Can I help?”
Maren looks at me like I’ve grown a second head. “What?”
“Can I help.” I gesture at the flowers spread across the table. “I’m not doing anything else tonight. Might as well be useful.”
“You’re terrible with flowers.”
“I remember.” I’m already shrugging off my jacket, already rolling up my sleeves. “You told me I was murdering that rose. What was that, eleven years ago?”
“You still owe me for that rose.”
“Put it on my tab.”
I sit down across from her without waiting for permission, and after a moment of hesitation, Maren slides a bucket of greenery toward me. “Strip the leaves off the bottom three inches. Don’t mangle them this time.”
“I make no promises.”
We work in silence for a while. It’s companionable, easier than I expected, my hands busy with the repetitive task, the smell of eucalyptus and roses filling the air, Maren’s concentration on her arrangements creating a bubble of focus I don’t want to pop.
I sneak glances at her while she works, watching the way her hands move with practiced efficiency, the way she tilts her head when she’s considering a stem, the way her whole body relaxes when she’s doing what she loves.
This is the woman I married. This is the woman I fell in love with. And somehow, without ever deciding to, I stopped seeing her.
“Stop staring,” she says without looking up. “You’re supposed to be stripping eucalyptus.”
“I’m multitasking.”
“You’re terrible at multitasking.”
“I run a billion-dollar company.”
“And yet you can’t strip eucalyptus and make eye contact at the same time.” She plucks a mangled stem from my hand and examines it with exaggerated disappointment. “What did this eucalyptus ever do to you?”
I laugh, a real laugh, the kind I haven’t made in weeks, and something shifts in Maren’s expression. Softens. For a moment, she looks like she did when we were first married, before the company and the late nights and all the distance I didn’t notice creating.
“Tell me about the wedding tomorrow,” I say.
“You want to hear about the wedding?”
“I want to hear about your day.” I set down the eucalyptus and give her my full attention. “I want to know what you’re working on, what’s going well, what’s frustrating you, to have a conversation with my wife that isn’t about my schedule or my events or my company.”
Maren is quiet for a long moment, and I can see her deciding whether to let me in or keep the wall up. The fact that she has to decide at all tells me how badly I’ve screwed this up.
“The bride is a nightmare,” she says finally, and there’s a hint of a smile at the corner of her mouth. “She changed her color palette three times in two weeks and then got mad when I told her we couldn’t source blue orchids with four days’ notice. As if blue orchids just grow on trees.”
“Orchids don’t grow on trees.”
“Some of them do, actually.”
“Seriously?”
“They’re called epiphytes. They grow on other plants.” She’s grinning now, warming to her subject. “But the point is, this bride doesn’t care about botanical reality. She just wants her Instagram-perfect wedding, and she wants me to make it happen regardless of what’s actually possible.”
“So what did you do?”
“Convinced her that deep purple dahlias were actually better than blue orchids and would photograph just as well.” Maren shrugs. “She thinks she got what she wanted. I got to not lose my mind. Everyone wins.”
“You’re good at that.”
“At what?”
“Managing people. Making them think they got their way when really you got yours.” I pick up another eucalyptus stem. “I should hire you as a consultant.”
“You couldn’t afford me.”
“I’m extremely wealthy.”