9. Rhodes
— ? —
Rhodes
The meeting room is too cold. It’s always too cold, Rachel keeps it at sixty-eight because she says it keeps everyone alert during long meetings, and I’ve never argued because I’ve never cared about the temperature of a room where I spend twelve hours a week.
Maren would hate it. Maren runs cold, always stealing my jacket at restaurants, pressing her freezing feet against my calves in bed like I’m a personal heating pad.
I wonder if she slept at all last night. I didn’t.
“Rhodes?” Rachel’s voice cuts through my thoughts. “The Hendricks rep wants to know about the spring timeline.”
“Tell them we’ll have numbers by next Friday.”
“I already did. They want to hear it from you.”
“Then set up a call.” I’m staring at my laptop without seeing it, running through last night’s conversation for the hundredth time.
You stopped seeing me. She’s wrong. She has to be wrong.
I see her every day. I notice things about her all the time, her laugh, her hands, the way she hums while she works.
Except I can’t remember the last time I heard her laugh at something I said. I can’t remember the last time I watched her work.
“Rhodes.” Rachel’s standing in front of my desk now, arms crossed. “You’ve been staring at the same email for ten minutes.”
“I’m thinking.”
“You’re spiraling.” She sits down in the chair across from me, the one clients usually take. “Is this about the photos?”
I look up. “What do you think?”
“I think your wife saw something innocent and made it into a federal case because she’s insecure about-”
“Stop.”
Rachel blinks. “Excuse me?”
“I said stop.” I close my laptop. “Maren isn’t insecure. She isn’t overreacting. And whatever you’re about to say about her, I need you to not say it.”
“I was going to say she’s insecure about the amount of time we spend together, which is reasonable, but also not something that should affect how we do our jobs.”
“Maybe it should.”
“What does that mean?”
I lean back in my chair. The fluorescent lights are giving me a headache, or maybe that’s the three hours of sleep and the seventeen cups of coffee I’ve consumed since Maren walked up those stairs and didn’t look back.
“It means we need to change some things.”
“Like what?”
“No more meetings in hotel rooms. Even early ones. Even about contracts.”
Rachel’s face goes carefully blank, the expression she uses in a standoff when she’s recalculating her position.
“Rhodes, that photo was taken by someone who was specifically trying to make it look bad. We can’t restructure our entire working relationship around what trolls on the internet might think. ”
“This isn’t about the internet.”
“Then what’s it about?”
“It’s about the fact that my wife looked at that photo and, for thirty seconds, didn’t know if I’d been faithful to her.” I hear my voice go hard. “Eleven years. She’s trusted me for eleven years, and one picture was enough to make her wonder. That means something’s wrong.”
“Yes, with her expectations.”
“Rachel.”
“I’m serious.” She leans forward. “We’ve operated this way for five years. Early meetings, late calls, travel together when the deals require it. Your wife has never had a problem with it before.”
“Maybe that’s because I’ve never given her a reason to think about it before. Or maybe-” I stop. Force myself to finish. “Maybe she’s had a problem with it for years, and I just never noticed.”
Rachel is quiet for a moment. When she speaks, her voice is different, softer, almost wounded. “Are you saying I’ve done something inappropriate?”
“No.”
“Because I haven’t. I’ve never, Rhodes, I’d never try to-”
“I know.” And I do. Rachel is a lot of things, driven, intense, occasionally cutthroat, but she’s never been unprofessional. Never crossed a line. “This isn’t about what you’ve done. It’s about what I should have noticed.”
“Which is?”
“That we look like something we’re not.” I rub my eyes. “To Maren, to the internet, to the entire industry, apparently. The Architectural Digest article called you my partner in building an empire. My wife read that and wondered where she fit.”
“That’s not my fault. I didn’t write the article.”
“You didn’t correct it either.”
Rachel’s jaw tightens. “Neither did you.”
She’s right. She’s right, and I hate it.
“Look,” she says, her voice cooling by degrees, “if you want to restructure how we work, that’s your prerogative. You’re the one in charge. But I need you to understand that I’ve done nothing wrong, and being punished because your wife has insecurities isn’t-”
“She doesn’t have insecurities. She has eyes.
” I stand up, suddenly unable to sit still.
“You and I spend more time together than she and I do. You know my schedule better than she does, know what I’m stressed about, what I’m excited about, what I’m planning next, and my wife finds out about my trips from calendar invites. ”
“That’s your marriage, Rhodes. That’s not about me.”
“Maybe it’s about both.”
She stares at me. I stare back.
“What do you want me to do?” she asks finally. “Quit?”
“No. I want you to help me figure out how to be better at both things. My job and my marriage.” I sit on the edge of my desk.
“No more hotel room meetings. No more late calls that aren’t absolutely necessary.
When we travel, we’re photographed together constantly, so let’s be photographed separately sometimes - in the elevator, in the car. I don’t know, figure it out.”
“This is ridiculous.”
“Maybe.” I shrug. “But I’m not losing my wife over optics.”
Rachel stands. She’s angry, I can see it in the set of her shoulders, the precision of her movements as she gathers her tablet and her coffee cup. “Fine. Whatever you need.”
“Rachel.”
She stops at the door.
“I appreciate everything you do. Everything you’ve built with me. But Maren was here first. She’ll be here after.” I hold her gaze. “I need you to remember that.”
Hurt flickers across her face, then something I can’t name. Then it’s gone.
“I’ve never forgotten it,” she says quietly. “You’re the one who seems to.”
She walks out. The door clicks shut behind her.
I sit in the empty meeting room for a long time, trying to figure out if she just told me something I should have already known.
The Sinclair is transformed.
I almost don’t recognize it when I walk in four hours later, the lobby filled with scaffolding, workers moving in careful choreography, flowers everywhere. Actual everywhere. Climbing the columns, cascading from the mezzanine, spilling across tabletops in colors I didn’t know existed.
Maren’s work, her vision, her hands - making something beautiful out of what was just a building.
I spot her across the room, directing two of her team members as they adjust a massive arrangement near the entrance. Her hair’s pulled back in a messy bun, and she’s wearing jeans and the old Bellamy Blooms t-shirt she’s had since before we met. She looks exhausted. She looks incredible.
She looks like someone who hasn’t noticed I’ve walked in.
“Careful with the orchids,” she’s saying. “They bruise if you breathe on them wrong. Nina, can you check the temperature in the east ballroom? If it’s above seventy, we need to talk to facilities.”
“On it.” Nina hurries off, pausing to give me a look I can’t quite read as she passes.
I approach slowly, hands in my pockets, feeling like a stranger in my own building.
“Hey.”
Maren doesn’t turn around. “The installation should be done by tomorrow evening. We’ll do final adjustments the morning of.”
“Okay.”
“The east ballroom’s going to need extra support for the hanging pieces. I talked to your events team already.”
“Good. That’s, good.”
She’s still not looking at me. She’s adjusting something in the arrangement, her fingers moving with the practiced precision of someone who’s done this ten thousand times.
“How are you?” I ask.
“Busy.”
“Maren.”
“What do you want me to say, Rhodes?” She finally turns, and her eyes are red-rimmed, her jaw set. “That I slept great? That I woke up feeling refreshed and optimistic about our future? I have a gala to finish installing. I’m doing my job. That’s what you need from me right now.”
“That’s not all I need from you.”
“Well, it’s all I’ve got.” She turns back to the flowers. “If you have notes on the arrangements, talk to Nina. I need to check on the centerpieces.”
She walks away, and I let her go because I don’t know what else to do.
I wander through the building, watching her team work.
They’re good, efficient and careful, moving around me like I’m furniture.
Nora’s here too, I notice, overseeing the ballroom installations.
She catches my eye once and gives me a look that says I’m not the one who needs to believe that right now just as clearly as when she said it out loud.
Eventually I end up in the corner of the main ballroom, watching Maren work on something at a small side table. It’s separate from the main installations, a personal project, maybe, smaller and more delicate than the dramatic pieces surrounding it.
I walk closer.
It’s a bouquet. Compact, intentional, nothing like the extravagant arrangements taking over the rest of the room.
Simple flowers in unexpected combinations, ranunculus, obviously, because that’s always been our thing, but also sweet peas and some kind of vine I don’t recognize and herbs that smell like the garden she planted our first summer in the house.
“Who’s that one for?”
Maren goes still. Her hands stop moving.
“Seriously?”
“What?”
She turns to face me, and the expression on her face is something between disbelief and devastation. “It’s yours, Rhodes.”
“Mine?”
“For the anniversary.”
I stare at her, then down at the bouquet, and something cold settles in my chest.
“I make you one every year,” she says quietly. “Since The Sinclair opened. Every anniversary. It’s-” She stops. Swallows. “You used to photograph them. You used to save the cards.”