6. Scarlett
— ? —
Scarlett
The ballroom is all crystal and candlelight, and I am sitting at table nine.
I know what that means. Everyone knows what that means. Table one is for family, for the inner circle, for the people who matter. Table nine is for wives who don’t.
Beck is across the room, next to his mother, next to an empty chair with a name card I can’t read from here. He didn’t see the seating chart until we walked in. I know because I watched his face when he realized, watched the flash of anger that crossed his features before he smoothed it away.
He mouthed sorry from across the room. I smiled back because that’s what a good wife does.
It cost me more than he’ll ever know.
“Mrs. Cooper, you must be so proud of that colt,” the woman next to me says. She’s the wife of someone, I can’t remember who. They all blur together at these things. “Seventy-four thousand dollars. That’s remarkable.”
“Thank you.” I take a sip of wine I don’t taste. “It was a lot of work.”
“I’m sure Beck is thrilled.”
I’m sure he is. I’m sure he’s telling everyone at table one all about it right now, all about the colt he raised, the program he built, the success he earned.
The empty chair at table one fills.
She’s beautiful. That’s my first thought. Long dark hair, easy smile, a green dress that looks effortless and expensive at the same time. She hugs Beck like she’s known him forever, because she has. She hugs Roselle like they’re old friends, because they are.
Camille Wheeler, finally in the flesh.
I watch Beck’s face as he pulls out her chair while he leans in to say something that makes her laugh. I watch his hand rest on her shoulder for just a moment too long.
This is who she is, I think. This is what I’m competing with.
She’s not a stranger, or some woman he met at a conference or a bar or a business meeting. His childhood best friend. The girl who grew up across the road, who knew him before the big money and the empire. The one who got away.
The one who came back.
The senator’s wife at table one is showing everyone something on her phone. I can hear her voice carrying across the room, high and excited.
“Oh, Beck, look at this! Camille sent me the video. Your little girl saying Daddy for the first time!”
My stomach drops.
I was there when Josie said that. I was in the room, holding her, when she looked at Beck and said “Da-da” and he nearly cried. I remember thinking I need to get that on video, I need to send it to my sister, I need to save this moment.
But I didn’t have my phone. And somehow Camille has it.
Camille, who has been at Salt Fork for six months. Camille, who has never met my daughter.
I stand up so fast my chair scrapes against the floor.
“Excuse me,” I say to the wife of whoever. “I need some air.”
I walk out of the ballroom, through the lobby, past the coat check and the valets and the women in evening gowns who look at me like they know something I don’t. I find a quiet corner by the door and I stand there with my back against the wall and my hands shaking and I watch.
Through the glass, I can see table one. I can see Beck leaning back in his chair, laughing at something Camille said.
I used to be the one who made him laugh like that. I used to be the one he leaned toward, the one he touched without thinking, the one whose jokes he actually found funny.
When did that change? When did I become the wife at table nine while another woman made him laugh at table one?
I go back in. I have to. The dinner isn’t over, and the auction is starting, and Beck Cooper’s wife can’t just disappear in the middle of the county’s biggest cattlemen’s event.
I’m sliding back into my seat when I hear it.
“Such a beautiful barn,” the senator’s wife is saying. “We toured Salt Fork last month, and I just couldn’t believe it. So modern, but classic at the same time. Who designed it?”
Camille glances at Beck. Beck doesn’t say anything.
“Beck, mostly,” Camille says. “He’s been working on it for years.”
I watch him. I watch him hear another woman give credit for my work. He says nothing.
He knows those are my drawings. He knows my name is in the corner of every single blueprint. And he’s sitting at table one, letting Camille tell everyone it’s his.
I can’t stand up and shout actually, that’s my design, I drew it three years ago for Lone Elm before someone’s friend here decided to give it to someone else. I can’t make a scene. I can’t even catch his eye, because he’s not looking at me.
He’s looking at her.
The auction starts. Someone wins a heifer for more money than I made in my entire life before I married Beck Cooper. The wine keeps flowing and the laughter keeps coming.
I sit at table nine and smile and clap and pretend I’m not watching my marriage fall apart from across the room.
Later, in the car, Beck reaches for my hand.
“I’m sorry about the seating,” he says. “I didn’t know until we got there. My mother did the chart, and you know how she is.”
I let him hold it for about four seconds. Then I take it back.
“Scarlett.”
“You keep saying that. You know how she is.” I’m watching the fence posts go by in the dark, one after another after another. “Like it’s just something that happens to us.”
“What was I supposed to do, make a scene?”
“You were supposed to move a card.”
“What?”
“A card.” I turn and look at him. “A little folded piece of paper with my name on it. You pick it up, you put it next to yours, you sit down. Nobody in that room says a word to you about it. You’re Beck Cooper. You could’ve burned the place down and they’d have thanked you for the light.”
His jaw does the thing it does. “It’s one dinner.”
“It’s THE dinner.”
“That’s not fair.”
“Isn’t it?” I hear my voice climbing and I don’t stop it. “Name one part of this evening where I should feel okay.”
He doesn’t.
We drive. The heater’s too high and I don’t touch it.
“She had a video of Josie,” I say. “Did you know she had it?”
“I did not- yes, Scarlett. I gave it to her.”
“For what reason?”
“I didn’t think-”
He takes a long moment to reply.
“Nothing bad happened. That’s what’s important,” he finally says.
“Right. Of course, that’s what’s important for you,” I say.
The road goes on. Somewhere out there is our fence line, our cattle, our hundred thousand acres, and I can’t see any of it.
He goes quiet at that. Actually quiet, not the kind where he’s loading up an answer. For a second I think he’s going to say something real.
Ten miles of nothing. He clears his throat twice and doesn’t use it.
Then his hand moves off the gearshift and onto my knee. Warm, familiar, and it lands there like the conversation is over because he’s decided it’s over.
“Let me make it up to you when we get home,” he says.
I look at his hand.
I think about all the times that hand has ended an argument. All the times I let it, the times I woke up the next morning and couldn’t remember what I’d been asking for, only that I’d stopped asking.
“You don’t even know what you’d be making up for.”
“Then tell me.”
And God, I almost do. It’s all sitting right there at the back of my teeth. The seating chart, the video, the barn, Salt Fork, the red pen bleeding all over my office calendar.
But he’s already looking at me like a problem he’s about to solve, halfway to the fix.
And I know exactly how it goes if I start: he’ll say the right things, and he’ll put his hands on me, and by morning it’ll be smoothed over like it never happened, and nothing will have changed except that I’ll have used up the last of it.
So I don’t.
“I’m tired,” I say.
His hand stills. “What?”
“I’m tired.” I move it off my knee and set it back on the console between us, like something I’m returning. “It’s been a long night. I just want to go to sleep.”
He doesn’t say anything for a long moment. Then he puts his hand back on the steering wheel and looks at the road.
“Okay,” he says. “Okay, sweetheart. We’ll just go to sleep.”
He doesn’t notice what it means.