2. Erika
— ? —
Erika
The candles have burned down to nubs.
I bought them this afternoon at a little boutique in Silver Lake, tall tapered things in a shade of ivory that the saleswoman promised would complement our dining room perfectly, and she was right, they look beautiful against the reclaimed oak table we picked out together in Napa, back when we still did things like weekend trips and furniture shopping.
Back when I wasn’t eating dinner alone four nights a week.
I rearrange the napkins for the third time, adjusting the fold, smoothing invisible wrinkles.
The pasta sits in its serving bowl, no steam rising because it went cold an hour ago.
I made it myself from Kai’s grandmother’s recipe, the one he taught me when we were dating, back in his cramped college apartment with the broken radiator and the view of a brick wall.
We’d been so young and so deliriously happy. He’d stood behind me at the stove that first time, arms wrapped around my waist, guiding my hands through the motions with his grandmother’s handwritten recipe card propped against the backsplash and his voice patient and warm in my ear.
“More garlic,” he’d said. “Grandma always says you can never have too much garlic.”
“I think I overdid it.”
“You definitely overdid it.” He’d laughed, kissing my neck. “We’ll order pizza.”
We’d laughed about it for months, and it became our thing, the too-much-garlic story, the first of a thousand inside jokes that made up the architecture of us.
Now the pasta sits perfectly cooked and completely cold, and my phone sits face-up on the table with Kai’s last text glowing like an accusation.
KAI: Running late. Don’t wait up.
I refresh the screen for the hundredth time and check for new messages, and there’s nothing.
This is our first-date anniversary. Five years ago tonight, he asked for my number outside a dive bar near campus.
We’d both been caught in an unexpected rainstorm, both ducked under the same awning, and he’d looked at me with rain dripping from his hair and said, “I feel like the universe is trying to tell us something.”
I’d told him the universe was telling us to invest in umbrellas.
He’d laughed so hard he snorted, and I’d known right then that I was in trouble.
I check my phone again, and there’s still nothing.
The candles flicker, their light dancing across the empty chair across from me.
I should blow them out, put away the food, change out of this dress I bought specifically for tonight, and accept that he’s not coming, but I don’t, because hope is a stubborn thing, and I’ve gotten very good at swallowing disappointment with a smile.
I rehearse what I’ll say when he walks in.
We need to talk about this, Kai. I can’t keep eating alone.
I feel like I’m disappearing in this marriage.
But even in my head the words sound whiny and demanding, like I’m asking for too much, like I’m being unreasonable for wanting my husband to show up for dinner on our anniversary.
He’s building his parents’ legacy, and I knew who he was when I married him. Didn’t I?
Eight o’clock passes. I refold the napkins.
Nine o’clock. I move the pasta to the kitchen, cover it with foil. Maybe he’ll want it when he gets home.
Ten o’clock. I sit back down at the table because I have no idea what else to do with myself, and when my phone finally buzzes I grab it so fast I nearly knock over my wine glass.
KAI: Really sorry, babe. This is taking forever. Don’t wait up.
I read it three times. Two texts in five hours, both telling me not to wait.
I type out a response: It’s our anniversary.
My thumb hovers over the send button while I imagine him seeing it, the guilt that would flash across his face, the apology he’d compose full of promises he won’t keep, and then I delete it, because what’s the point?
He knows what day it is, he knows and he’s still not here, and no amount of guilt-tripping is going to change that.
I should be mad, and I am, somewhere underneath the exhaustion and the creeping numbness that’s been settling over me like fog, but mostly I just feel tired of waiting, tired of rehearsing conversations we’ll never have, tired of making excuses for a man who can’t be bothered to make it home for dinner.
I don’t blow out the candles or clear the table.
I sit there in the flickering light, watching wax pool on the tablecloth, and I think about how a marriage can die without screaming fights or slammed doors, just with silence and absence and the slow erosion of all the little things that used to matter.
The candles burn lower, and I keep waiting.
The front door opens at 11:52 p.m.
I know the exact time because I’ve been watching the clock like it owes me money.
“Babe?” His voice echoes through the foyer. “You still up?”
I don’t answer.
His footsteps approach, and he appears in the dining room doorway, still in his work clothes, tie loosened, hair disheveled like he’s been dragging his fingers through it all night.
I watch his face cycle from confusion at the candles still burning, to recognition at the table set for two, to guilt as his eyes land on me.
“Shit.” He scrubs a hand over his face. “Shit, Erika, I’m sorry. I completely lost track of time.”
“I noticed.”
“The meeting ran long. I couldn’t just walk out in the middle of it.”
“You could have texted.”
“I did text.”
“Twice. In five hours. Both times telling me not to wait.”
He winces. “I know. I’m an asshole.”
He sets a pastry box on the table, from the French bakery I love, the one that closes at eight but apparently stays open late for billionaires with guilty consciences.
“I brought chocolate croissants. Your favorite.”
I look at the croissants, and at the man I married, who looks exhausted and sorry and completely unaware of how many times I’ve sat in this exact chair, waiting.
“Dinner was five hours ago.”
“I know.” He rounds the table, crouches beside my chair, and takes my hands in his, tracing circles on my wrists with his thumbs while his eyes do that soft pleading thing that’s gotten him out of trouble since the day we met. “Baby, I’m sorry. I fucked up. Let me make it up to you.”
“You can’t keep doing this, Kai.”
The words come out before I can stop them, quiet but there, finally there.
He blinks. “I know. I know I’ve been distracted.”
“Four dinners this month, and you’ve missed three of them.”
“This thing at work is just consuming everything right now.”
“I know what this thing is. I know it’s important.” I pull my hands from his, and surprise flickers across his face, because I never pull away. “But I’m important too. At least, I thought I was.”
“You are.” He stands and starts pacing. “Jesus, Erika, of course you are. You’re everything. You know that.”
“Do I?”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“It means I spent five hours sitting at this table tonight, Kai. Five hours checking my phone every thirty seconds and watching the candles burn down and telling myself you’d make it, you’d show up, this time would be different.”
“I’m sorry.”
“And then I told myself to stop being dramatic. Told myself you’re building something important, that I knew who you were when I married you, that I should be more understanding.”
“Baby…”
“I don’t know how much more understanding I can be.”
The words hang in the air between us and his jaw tightens, and for a moment I think he might actually hear me, might actually see what I’ve been trying to tell him for months.
Then he steps forward, cups my face in his hands, and kisses me.
It’s a good kiss, because it’s always a good kiss with Kai, soft and full of promise.
“I’ll do better,” he murmurs against my lips. “I swear. After this deal closes, after everything settles down, I’ll be here. Really here.”
“You said that last month.”
“I mean it this time.”
I want to push harder, hold my ground, demand more than promises and pastries and kisses that taste like apology, but I’m so tired, and he’s here now, finally here, and some pathetic part of me just wants to feel close to him again.
So I let him pull me up from the chair and kiss me again, deeper this time, and lead me upstairs and make me forget, at least for a little while, that I’m starting to feel like an afterthought in my own marriage.
The forgetting doesn’t last. It never does.
In the morning, he’s gone before I wake up.
A note on his pillow: Had to run. Early meeting. Love you.
I stare at the words for longer than I should, tracing his handwriting with my fingertip. He used to leave me actual love letters, pages of them, filled with poetry he’d stolen from dead writers and promises he’d made up himself, and now I get six words and a heart drawn in the corner.
I drag myself out of bed and into the home office that’s technically his but has become functionally mine, to check his week before I go in to my desk outside his.
My job, my contribution to the empire we’re supposedly building together, is managing his life, his calendar, his endless parade of meetings and obligations.
His schedule for the week loads on the screen.
Monday: Work. Late. Tuesday: Dinner, work. Wednesday: Meetings all day. Thursday: Dinner. I. Lockhart, private.
The name catches my eye. Isabella Lockhart. I recognize her from galas and functions and the glossy pages of society magazines, red hair that always looks freshly styled, green eyes that miss nothing, bone structure that probably came with a pedigree attached.
I met her once, at a charity event last spring, when Kai introduced us and she looked me up and down with a smile that never reached her eyes.
“So you’re the wife,” she’d said. “How charming.”
There was no “nice to meet you,” no “I’ve heard so much about you,” just “the wife,” like I was an accessory, a footnote, a thing to be tolerated until it could be replaced.
She spent the rest of the evening circling Kai with sharp smiles and calculated proximity, looking at me like I was dirt she’d scraped off her designer heel.
Her father is the family that owns those two lots downtown, the ones Kai’s father drew a whole block around and never got, the thing Kai has been chasing for a year, the thing that keeps him at work until midnight, the thing that matters more than anniversary dinners and cold pasta and a wife who’s starting to wonder if she even exists anymore.
One dinner. Private.
I stare at the screen until my eyes burn. It’s business, I tell myself, her father is difficult, this is how these things get done, and I say the words in my head over and over trying to make them feel true, and they don’t.
I don’t mention it that night, or the next, or the one after, and three days pass in a blur of silence and absence.
On Thursday, the day of that dinner, I text him at six: Coming home for dinner?
He doesn’t respond until nine: Sorry, running late. Don’t wait up.
I stare at the message with my thumb hovering over the keyboard, and I could ask where he is, could demand an explanation, could finally say all the things I’ve been swallowing for weeks.
Instead, I put my phone face-down on the counter and eat cold leftovers standing over the sink, alone, while somewhere across the city my husband has dinner with a woman who looked at me like I was nothing.
I don’t cry, because I’m too tired to cry. I just stand there in the quiet kitchen, chewing food I can’t taste, and feel the cold thing in my chest grow heavier and settle deeper and make itself at home.
On Friday, I stop organizing his calendar, and he doesn’t notice.