Chapter 2 – June
JUNE
The restaurant is one of those places where the menu doesn't have prices and the hostess greets Matt by name before he's finished telling her.
I wear the navy dress. He notices—hand on the small of my back as we follow her to the table, a murmured you look beautiful against my ear—and I let myself take the win.
Tanya and Rob are already seated. She stands when she sees us, and for half a second she's coming toward me, and then she pivots, smooth as anything, and wraps both arms around my husband's neck.
"Matty. God, look at you. City life agrees with you."
"T." He hugs her back, easy, familiar, and I watch Rob watch them. There's nothing on Rob's face. He's tall, blond, good-looking in the way of men who've never had to develop a personality, and he doesn't get up. He gives Matt a chin nod and me a once-over that lands somewhere south of polite.
"June." Tanya finally turns to me, and we do the hug, the cheek-kiss, the whole performance. "You look amazing. This city agrees with you too."
"It agrees with everyone tonight, apparently."
She laughs and touches Matt's arm. Of course she does. She touches him every chance she gets.
We sit. Menus. Rob orders a whiskey before the server's finished introducing himself, and Tanya orders a sparkling water, and I blink at that before I can stop myself.
"You're not drinking?"
Something crosses her face. Quick, there and gone. "Just not feeling it tonight."
Tanya Curtis has never not felt it. I've watched this woman put away a bottle of pinot at a Tuesday barbecue and then open another.
Once, at our old house, she drank three margaritas while Matt fixed her garbage disposal, sitting on the counter swinging her legs and telling him he was the only man who'd ever been good to her.
I remember standing in the doorway with the chips I'd brought out, and neither of them noticed me for a full minute.
"More for me," I say, and order the wine.
The first hour goes how it always goes. Tanya asks Matt about the spring line, the new stores, the move.
She asks him nothing about me, and asks me nothing at all, and I fill the space by asking about Tanya’s work.
She gives me four sentences. Then she turns back to Matt and it's Matty, remember when we snuck into that concert in eleventh grade, and Matt laughs, and Rob stares at his phone, and I drink my wine.
I watch Rob between courses. He orders a third whiskey before his entrée arrives. When Tanya mentions the new house they're looking at, he says, "We're not looking, I already told you the one I want," without looking up from his plate, and Tanya's smile goes tight and she changes the subject.
This is the pattern. I've seen it for sixteen years.
Tanya collects men who treat her badly—loud ones, cold ones, ones who flirt with waitresses while she's in the bathroom.
Rob is a shinier version of the same product.
It's why she's never made a real move on Matt.
Matt is kind. Matt opens doors and remembers birthdays and apologizes with his whole face.
That's never been what Tanya wants. She wants the man who makes her chase.
But sometimes, every once in a while, she looks at my husband a certain way.
Across a table, when he's mid-laugh at something she said, when his attention is fully on her. Her eyes go soft and steady and she’ll hold that look a beat too long, and I’ll feel it in my stomach, and then she’ll blink and be Tanya again, helpless and harmless, asking him to open a jar.
She's doing it right now. He's telling some story about a supplier in Milan, hands moving, and she's watching him with her chin on her fist, and Rob is checking his phone, and nobody sees me seeing her.
"Come dance with me," she says suddenly, grabbing Matt's wrist.
"There's no music, T."
"There's always music if you're fun." She's already up, tugging him. "June, you don't mind, do you? You've had him for years, give me four minutes."
She says it with a wink. She always says it with a wink. The wink is the whole trick—make the boundary-crossing cute enough that objecting makes you the problem.
"By all means," I say, and lift my glass.
There's a small space near the bar where a couple other diners are pretending not to watch.
Tanya pulls Matt into it and puts her arms around his neck and sways to music that doesn't exist, and Matt—give him this—keeps it loose and brotherly, hands at her waist, laughing at something she's saying into his shoulder.
Other diners smile. It looks charming from the outside.
It always looks charming from the outside.
Rob watches them for exactly two seconds, then turns to me. "She does this everywhere we go."
"She's done it for as long as I've known her."
"Mm." He finishes his whiskey, signals for another. "Must be nice. Having a backup husband on retainer."
I set my glass down slowly. "Excuse me?"
"Kidding." He's not. We both know he's not. He leans back in his chair and looks at me with those flat blue eyes. "Relax, June. You're so serious. No wonder she has more fun with him."
I have a whole speech. Sixteen years of speeches, actually, filed away.
I swallow all of them and take a long drink of wine instead, because Matt is ten feet away laughing, and starting a war with Rob would only end one way—Matt confused, Tanya wounded, me cast as the jealous wife who ruined a nice evening.
Matt and Tanya come back to the table flushed and laughing, and she drops into her chair and grabs her sparkling water, and that's when it happens. She catches me looking at the glass and gets this expression—deliberate, rehearsed, thrilled with itself—and presses a hand to her stomach.
"Okay, I can't do it anymore. I was going to wait until dessert but I physically cannot.
" She looks at Rob, who does not look back at her, and then at us.
"I'm pregnant. Ten weeks. And—" she holds up her left hand, and there's a ring I've somehow missed all night, a decent stone catching the restaurant light, "—we're engaged. "
Matt makes a sound of pure delight and is out of his chair in a second, hugging her, thumping Rob on the back, asking when, how, have they told the parents. And I sit there for one beat, absorbing it, and then I'm up too, hugging her, and I mean it.
"Tanya, congratulations. Really. That's wonderful."
"You're happy for me?" There's something searching in it, oddly.
"Of course I'm happy for you." And I am.
Genuinely, almost giddily. Because a baby, a fiancé, a house—that's a life.
That's a whole life with its own gravity, its own orbit, its own sink to fix and its own Rob to call when the car makes a noise.
We just moved back to the city, back into Tanya's blast radius, and I've been dreading it for weeks without letting myself say so.
But this—this changes everything. This time she'll have her own center. This time she won't need mine.
I hug Rob too, which he accepts with a limp arm and a grunt, and I don't even care. I order champagne for the table and sparkling cider for Tanya and drink a toast to the baby and mean every word.
Matt catches my hand under the table halfway through dessert and squeezes it. When I glance at him, he's watching me with something warm in his eyes, and I realize he was nervous. About tonight, about me and Tanya, about how it would go. He wanted this to work.
It worked. I squeeze back.
In the car home he keeps talking—about the baby, about how Tanya deserves to be happy, about whether Rob seems "a little off" to me, and I say carefully that Rob seems tired, and Matt snorts and says tired is one word for it, and I laugh, and his hand rests on my knee the whole drive.
Forty floors up, the city spreads out below the windows, and he pours me the last of the wine and then doesn't let me finish it.
He takes the glass from my hand and sets it on the counter and kisses me in the kitchen of our half-unpacked apartment, slow at first, then not slow, his hands sliding under the navy dress he told me he liked.
"Hi," he murmurs against my mouth.
"Hi."
"I missed you. I know that's a stupid thing to say when we live together."
"It's not stupid." It's the truest thing he's said in months.
We don't make it to the bedroom. The couch is closer, the one that cost more than my first car, and afterward I lie with my head on his chest and his heartbeat under my ear and his fingers dragging idle lines up and down my spine.
His phone is somewhere. He hasn't looked at it in over an hour.
I notice. God help me, I notice, and it means that much.
"Things are going to be different here," he says into my hair. "I know the last few years have been a lot. The expansion, the hours. But we're back in the city, Tanya's getting married, having a baby—everyone's settling into their own lives. It's going to be good, June. I can feel it."
"Yeah," I say softly. "I think so too."
And I do. Curled against him in our new home, with Tanya engaged and pregnant and orbiting someone else for once, I let myself believe it. The city hums forty floors down. My husband's breathing slows toward sleep, his arm heavy and warm across my waist.
I close my eyes and let myself be happy.
I should know better by now.