4. Maren #2
“He’s building an empire.” I try for a smile that doesn’t quite land. “You said it yourself.”
She senses weakness. I can see it in the way she leans forward. “It must be hard, though. He travels so much. And with Rachel always there-”
“Rachel’s his right hand.”
“Right, of course. But they have such great chemistry. That dynamic, the history. It must be strange sometimes, knowing someone else has access to parts of his life that you don’t.”
The accuracy of it hits like a slap. She’s not wrong. That’s what makes it unbearable.
“We should get a photo,” she says, pivoting before I can respond. “You and Rhodes - the power couple angle. It’ll humanize the piece.”
“I don’t think-”
“Just a quick one. Where’s James?” She turns to call for the photographer.
And then Rhodes is there. He must have followed her, or maybe he was looking for me, or maybe the universe just enjoys orchestrating my humiliations with theatrical timing.
“Hey.” He touches my elbow, a light pressure. “You okay?”
“Fine.”
“You disappeared.”
“I’m working.”
The writer claps her hands together. “Perfect, this is perfect. James! Can we get them together?”
The photographer appears, a guy with three cameras hanging off his body and the glazed look of someone who’s been shooting for hours. “Where do you want them?”
“Right here, against the wall - something candid.”
Rhodes looks at me. I look at him. For a moment, we’re both trapped in the absurdity of being asked to perform intimacy for a magazine that’s been documenting how the woman he works with knows more about his life than I do.
“Sure,” I say. “Quick one.”
We stand together. His arm goes around my waist, automatic muscle memory. I lean into him just enough to look like a wife instead of a stranger.
Then his phone buzzes.
He glances at it. I feel the exact moment his attention divides.
“I’m sorry,” he says. “There’s something with the, I have to-”
“Go.” I step back. “Handle it.”
He hesitates. He looks at me, really looks, like he wants to say something that matters. But the phone is buzzing again, and the photographer is waiting, and someone across the building is calling his name.
“I’ll be right back,” he says.
He won’t be.
The photographer shifts his weight, impatient. The writer’s already moving on, checking her notes. And I’m standing in a concrete hallway, watching my husband walk away from a photo he doesn’t even know we missed.
Twenty minutes later, they photograph him with Rachel instead.
I’m packing up leftover flowers when it happens. Nora went ahead to pull the van around, so I’m alone when the photographer positions them in front of the main entrance, Rhodes and Rachel, empire and empire-builder, looking like the cover of a magazine that hasn’t even been printed yet.
Rachel says something that makes him laugh. A real laugh, not the measured interview version. The camera captures it.
Nobody notices me watching. Nobody notices the florist in the corner, wrapping stems in wet paper towels and trying not to feel like she’s witnessing the documentation of her own replacement.
It’s not romantic. I know it’s not romantic. Rhodes isn’t having an affair. Rachel isn’t a villain.
But she’s standing in the space beside him like she belongs there. And everybody in the room, the photographer, the writer, the crew, accepts it as normal.
That’s the part that breaks something in me.
“Maren.”
I jolt. Rhodes is standing three feet away, the photo apparently finished.
“Hey.” I go back to wrapping flowers. “Good shoot?”
“I was looking for you. For the photo.”
“Something came up.”
“I was gone ten minutes.”
“The photographer moved on.”
“So I saw.” He doesn’t sound happy about it. “Why are you packing up? I thought we could get dinner after this.”
“I have work in the morning.” I zip up my supply bag. “Early deliveries.”
“You always have early deliveries.”
“Yes. That’s how the flower business works.”
He catches my arm as I reach for the last bucket. “Hey. Stop. What’s going on?”
“Nothing.”
“Maren.”
“I said nothing.”
“You’ve been avoiding me all day.”
“I’ve been doing my job.” I finally look at him. “You know, as the florist. The one you hired. To put flowers on tables.”
His jaw tightens. “That’s not fair.”
“What’s not fair?”
“Making it sound like I don’t-” He stops, runs a hand through his hair. “We barely saw each other today. I thought you’d find me. I looked for you during the break, and you were gone-”
“I saw you plenty.”
“For five seconds at a time.”
“It was enough.”
“Enough for what?”
I heft the bucket onto my hip. “Enough to learn that your Mandarin once caused a diplomatic incident. Or that there’s something called the Pittsburgh incident that you and Rachel never talk about. Or that Denver required an expensive bottle of bourbon.”
He stares at me.
“You never told me that,” I say.
“Told you what?”
“Exactly.”
“Maren, it’s work. Half of it would bore you to death.”
“You used to tell me boring things.” I move past him toward the exit. “You used to come home and tell me everything. Every stupid detail, every pipe that burst, every trip that went wrong. I used to know what your days looked like.”
“You still do.”
“Do I? Because I just learned more about your last three years from a magazine interview than I’ve heard in the last six months of marriage.”
He follows me. Of course he follows me. Rhodes has never let a conflict go unfinished, not in business and not with me. It’s one of the things I used to love about him.
“You know me better than anyone,” he says.
I stop at the door. My hands are full of flowers, my chest is full of something that feels like grief and anger and exhaustion all tangled together.
“Do I?” I ask.
“Of course you do.”
“Then why do I feel like I watched a stranger give an interview today?” I turn to face him.
“You and Rachel, you have this whole world. Inside jokes, shared disasters, a decade of stories I’ve never heard.
And I’m standing in the corner arranging roses, learning about your life from a writer who met you four hours ago. ”
“Rachel’s my colleague. She’s been there for the work stuff because the work stuff is her job.”
“And what’s my job, Rhodes?”
He opens his mouth. Closes it.
“I used to be the one you debriefed with,” I say, quieter now.
“I used to be the person who heard about the burst pipes and the bad translations and the scary risks. Remember? You’d come home and tell me everything, and I’d sit there with my wine and listen, even when it was boring, because it was your boring.
It was your life. And I wanted to know it. ”
“You still can.”
“When? When you get home at midnight, or cancel our plans because Singapore needs you? When you apologize for the twentieth time and promise to do better, and then the phone rings and Rachel knows what you’re dealing with because she was there and I wasn’t?”
He goes very still. “Is this about Rachel?”
“No. Yes. I don’t know.” I shift the bucket to my other hip. “It’s about the fact that I spent four hours in a building I helped you open, listening to someone else tell your story. And I didn’t recognize half of it.”
“The story’s the same. I’m the same.”
“You’re not the same. Neither am I.” I push through the door into the cold night air. “That’s the problem.”
He follows me to the van where Nora’s waiting. She takes one look at us and suddenly becomes very interested in checking the tire pressure.
“Maren, wait.” He catches my hand before I can climb in. “Don’t leave like this.”
“I have work.”
“So do I. I always have work, you always have work. If we only talk when neither of us has work, we’ll never talk.”
“Maybe that’s the point.”
He flinches. The words land harder than I meant them to, but I don’t take them back.
“I love you,” he says. Low, urgent. “That hasn’t changed.”
“I know you love me.” I pull my hand free. “I just don’t think I know you anymore. And I’m starting to wonder if you’d even notice the difference.”
I climb into the van and close the door.
Through the window, I watch him standing in the parking lot, tie loosened, hands at his sides. He looks the way he looked eleven years ago in my aunt’s shop, when he was a stranger with an impossible deadline and a willingness to let me take over.
I don’t know how to take this over. I don’t know how to fix a marriage by sheer force of will when my husband’s already given all his will to someone else’s dreams.
Nora starts the engine without comment. We pull away.
The last thing I see is Rhodes on his phone, already talking to someone who isn’t me.