9. The Asset #2
“This absolutely calls for a celebration.” I made myself sound delighted, already building the menu in my head.
“You’ve earned it. Why don’t you go put your feet up in the den, pour yourself something good, and let me take care of the rest?
I’ll make your favorite. We’ll have a real evening, just the two of us. ”
His guard dropped. This was the script he’d wanted, the wife coming back into line the instant he started winning, rewarding his success by taking care of him.
He didn’t hear refusal because I hadn’t given him one.
I’d given him something better, something that flattered him so completely he forgot there had ever been anything to refuse.
“See, this is what I’m talking about.” He kissed the top of my head, the perfunctory thanks you’d give a good employee.
“Us, back on track. I knew you’d come around once things settled.
” He was already loosening his tie, already drifting toward the den and the good scotch and the evening he thought he’d won.
“Don’t take too long in here. Come sit with me. ”
“I won’t be long.” I was already reaching for my keys.
He went. From the den came the sound of him settling into his chair, followed by the clink of the bottle and the long exhale of a man at the summit of his own life.
I did not cook.
I stood in my kitchen and took out my phone. I ordered from the expensive place across town that he liked and always claimed we couldn’t afford on a weeknight. Lamb, the dish he always eyed on the menu and then talked himself out of. Forty-five minutes, the app said.
I set the phone on the counter and leaned against it. Through the doorway I could see a sliver of him, his sock feet up on the ottoman, his glass catching the lamplight. A man marinating in a victory he thought he’d engineered.
There was a time the deception would have cost me something. I’d have felt the lie of it. The wrongness of letting him believe I was tending to him while I did nothing of the kind. Some leftover wifely conscience would have nagged at me to just make the man his dinner.
I waited for it now, and it didn’t come.
The space it left behind was quiet, almost pleasant.
He had spent two months letting me believe I was the problem, that my body and my hormones were what strained the marriage.
All while he ran his other life on the side and recited his clever plan to his mistress in a cabana.
He’d managed me. He’d told me what I was and expected me to live inside it. I was simply, finally, managing him back, and I found I had a real talent for it.
He looked so happy in there. So completely, stupidly safe.
I finally allowed myself a genuine smile, the exact one I kept strictly hidden. He’d get his celebration dinner. He’d think his wife made it.
He’d think his marriage was mending and his career was made and his picture was holding. Glowing and certain, he’d carry all of it into a gala in a few weeks. Straight to the one woman in the world who burned down anyone who lied to her about exactly this.
Pride first. The fall came after. I knew the sequence perfectly, and I had all the patience in the world.
The doorbell rang forty-five minutes later.
I paid the driver at the door and tipped him well.
I carried the bags into the kitchen while Elliott called from the den that something smelled incredible.
It did. It smelled like a restaurant, because it was one.
He wouldn’t know the difference. He had never once paid close enough attention to me to learn what my actual cooking smelled like.
I slid the lamb onto the wedding china, the good set we got out twice a year. I arranged it to match the photographs on the restaurant’s site. I buried the takeout containers at the bottom of the trash, under the morning’s coffee grounds.
Then I poured him more of the good scotch. I poured myself sparkling water in a wine glass to play the part and brought the tray into the den.
“There she is.” He sat up, delighted, and took the plate like it was a trophy. “God, Maeve, you didn’t have to do all this.”
“You only make partner once,” I said and settled into the chair across from him.
He ate like a happy man. He told me the lamb was perfect, that I’d outdone myself, that he’d forgotten I could still pull off a dinner like this. He meant it as a compliment.
I thanked him and watched him chew food he thought my hands had prepared. I felt a strange, floating calm. I was sure doing this would feel worse than it did.
“This is what I missed,” he said, gesturing with his fork at the table, the lamplight, the two of us.
“This. Us. We lost it for a while there, but this is what it’s supposed to be.
” He was getting sentimental, the scotch and the triumph loosening him.
“I know the last couple months were rough. The arrangement, all of it. But I think we needed it, honestly. I think we needed to shake things up to remember what we have.”
He believed it. That was the thing I kept relearning about my husband, the depth of his talent for believing whatever made him comfortable. He had decided, that night, that the ‘open marriage’ had been a clever ‘growth exercise’ that worked.
That his wife was restored to him, his career was made, his life looked exactly like the commercial he’d sold to a roomful of strangers. Every piece of that was constructed from nothing but his own need for it to be true.
“We did need it,” I agreed and lifted my water glass. “To remembering what we have.”
He clinked his scotch against it, beaming, and drank to a marriage that had ended weeks ago in a cabana where he didn’t know I’d been standing.
I held my glass through the silence after, letting him savor a victory that belonged entirely to me.
I smiled at him across the candlelight like the ‘devoted wife’ he was about to parade in front of Eleanor Hearth.
He carried the picture so well. I was going to let him carry it all the way to the gala.
Then I was going to take it from him in front of everyone he wanted to impress, and I was going to enjoy it.