Chapter 2
Rose
The speeches continue.
Jack introduces other key team members, acknowledges investors, thanks the event planners. The room buzzes with the particular energy of wealthy people enjoying their own success.
Crystal clinks against crystal. Perfume layers over perfume. I catch fragments of conversation around me: acquisition rumors, vacation homes, private school admissions.
Eventually, Jack’s finds the small of my back with his hand. A warm pressure, familiar. He guides me forward half a step.
“And this,” he says, his voice shifting into the polished, public register he uses for donors and press, “is my wife, Rose.”
The difference between the two introductions lands like a physical weight against my ribs. Melissa received childhood stories, personal admiration, the raw warmth of genuine feeling. I receive four words and a hand on my lower spine.
“Rose keeps everything running at home while I’m building the company into the ground,” Jack adds with a practiced laugh. The room laughs with him. It’s meant as a compliment. The good wife. The supportive partner. The woman who holds down the fort.
Someone near the front—a silver-haired man in a suit that probably cost more than most people’s cars—raises his glass. “To the beautiful wife behind every successful man,” he says, and several people murmur agreement.
Jack turns to me and presses a kiss against my temple. His lips are warm. His attention is already elsewhere. I can feel it in the slight tension of his body, the way his eyes have already begun scanning the room over my shoulder.
“Jack.” Melissa’s voice, close beside us. She materializes as though summoned by the vacuum of Jack’s distracted attention. “The Decker group is asking about the Singapore expansion. Do you have a minute?”
“Of course.” Jack’s entire posture changes. He straightens. Focuses. “Rose, do you mind? I’ll catch up with you.”
I don’t mind. I say it automatically. The words have lived in my mouth for so long they’ve worn grooves in my tongue. I don’t mind. It’s fine. Go ahead.
He’s already moving, already leaning toward whatever Melissa is showing him on her phone, already disappearing into the particular intensity he reserves for problems and opportunities.
I watch them walk away together. Melissa’s hand brushes his forearm.
Jack nods at something she says. They have their own language, those two. A shorthand built across decades.
I take another glass of champagne from a passing tray. The bubbles are fresh this time. Sharp against my throat.
A woman I don’t recognize stops beside me. “You must be so proud of him,” she says. Her eyes are kind. She means it.
“I am,” I say. And I am. That’s the complicated truth beneath everything else. I am proud of my husband. I have watched him build something extraordinary from nothing. I have stood beside him through failures and victories. I have loved him through all of it.
The woman smiles and moves on. I remain where Jack left me, champagne in hand, smile intact, a wife-shaped space in a room full of people who have come to see my husband.
Across the ballroom, Jack laughs at something Melissa says. The sound carries. Open. Unrestrained. The laugh he used to give me, once, before life became so complicated that joy became a scarce resource he rationed carefully.
I take another sip. The champagne tastes like nothing at all.