6. Ariah
— ? —
Ariah
The table is set and the Marchetti wine is breathing.
The candles are lit, casting warm shadows across the dining room, and the pasta is keeping warm in the oven, and the twins have been fed and bathed and are currently in the living room with Piper, who flew in from New York two days ago because she said she could hear in my voice that I needed her.
She was right. I did need her. I just didn’t want to admit it.
“You look beautiful,” Piper says, appearing in the doorway. She’s got Lucy on her hip and Luca trailing behind her, both of them in their pajamas and slightly sticky from the gelato she bribed them with to keep them quiet during my preparations.
“I look desperate,” I correct, smoothing down the front of my dress - the same one I wore to our first anniversary, back when I still believed this marriage could become something real. It still fits, barely. I’m choosing to take that as a sign.
“You look like a woman who’s putting in effort for her husband. That’s not desperate. That’s romantic.”
“It’s pathetic.”
“It’s both. Both can be true.” She sets Lucy down and shoos the twins toward the living room. “Go pick out a story. Aunt Piper will be there in a minute.”
When they’re gone, she turns to me with an expression I know too well - the one that says she’s about to tell me something I don’t want to hear.
“Don’t,” I say preemptively.
“I didn’t say anything.”
“You were about to. I could see it in your face.”
She sighs, leaning against the doorframe. “I just think you should prepare yourself. For the possibility that he might not…”
“He said he’d be here.”
“He says a lot of things, Ari.”
I want to argue with her, but I can’t, because she’s not wrong. Pietro makes promises like other people make grocery lists - with full intention of keeping them, right up until something more urgent comes along. And there’s always something more urgent than me.
“He’ll be here,” I say again, willing it to be true. “This is our anniversary. Six years. He knows how much it matters.”
Piper doesn’t say anything, but her expression speaks volumes.
She’s met Pietro, watched us navigate the complicated dance of our marriage over the years, seen enough to form her own opinions about the likelihood of him showing up.
She’s too kind to voice them out loud, but I can read them in the set of her mouth, the slight furrow of her brow.
“Go,” I tell her. “The twins are waiting. I’ll be fine.”
She hesitates, then crosses the room and pulls me into a hug that smells like her familiar perfume and feels like home in a way this enormous house never has. “Call me if you need me,” she says against my hair. “I’ll be in the guest room with the monitor. Just come get me.”
“I will.”
She squeezes once more, then releases me and disappears down the hall, and I’m alone with my beautifully set table and my carefully prepared dinner and the gnawing certainty that I’m about to be disappointed.
* * *
Seven o’clock comes and goes.
Then eight.
Then eight-thirty.
I’ve moved from the dining room to the kitchen to the living room and back again, checking my phone every few minutes even though I know, I know, that watching for a message doesn’t make one appear. Piper has put the twins to bed and is stationed in the guest room, ready to intervene if needed.
The candles have burned down to stubs, the wine has been breathing so long it’s practically hyperventilating, and my beautiful romantic dinner is slowly transforming into a beautiful romantic disappointment.
At nine o’clock, my phone buzzes.
I grab for it so fast I nearly knock over my wine glass, and my heart is pounding as I swipe open the message, hoping, praying, that it’s Pietro saying he’s on his way.
It’s not Pietro.
It’s Serena, which makes me pause, because I don’t remember giving her my number.
But Rosaria has never met a private boundary she couldn’t turn into household information, and apparently my phone number is no exception.
Ariah! I hope I’m not interrupting your evening.
I just wanted to let you know that Pietro’s completely buried here, the final prep meetings are running SO late, and he feels absolutely terrible about it.
I can tell how much he wanted to be home tonight.
You should surprise him! Bring him something from your dinner, I know he’d love that.
He’s been talking about your anniversary all day. - Serena ??
I read the message three times, trying to parse the tone, trying to understand why this woman I barely know is texting me about my own husband.
There’s nothing overtly wrong with it. It’s friendly, even thoughtful, the kind of message one woman sends another to help smooth over a rough situation.
So why does it make my skin crawl?
He’s been talking about your anniversary all day. If that were true, wouldn’t he be here? Wouldn’t he have found a way to leave the office, to prioritize his wife, to show up the way he promised?
But maybe Serena’s right. Maybe he’s trapped, genuinely trapped, and he needs me to come to him. Maybe this is my chance to bridge the gap, to meet him in the middle, to prove that I’m still willing to fight for us even when he makes it so goddamn hard.
I look at the dinner cooling on the counter. The wine. The candles, burned down to nothing.
Then I start packing the food into the nice basket, the one we got as a wedding gift and never used, and I tell myself this is romantic. This is fighting for my marriage. This is what a good wife does.
* * *
The office building is quiet at this hour, most of the staff long gone, but the security guard recognizes me and waves me through without question.
Lights still burn on the upper floors where the launch team has been camped out for weeks. I take the elevator up with the basket in my hands and a cold sweat on my palms that has nothing to do with my lingering illness.
I should have texted him. Should have called. Should have done something other than show up unannounced with a basket of pasta and wine like some kind of desperate housewife cliché.
But Serena said to surprise him, and some stubborn part of me wants to prove that I can still be spontaneous, still be the woman who does unexpected things, still be someone other than the quiet, faded wife waiting at home.
The hallway outside his study is empty.
I stop just beside the door, close enough to hear but out of sight of anyone seated inside. The door is slightly ajar, and I can hear voices inside, Pietro’s low murmur and others I don’t recognize, the cadence of a phone call or a speakerphone conversation.
And then I hear it.
His voice, raw and tired, carrying through the gap in the door: “I don’t know if I should have married her. The love isn’t there like it used to be.”
The basket slips from my hands.
I catch it before it crashes to the floor. Barely, my fingers closing around the handle at the last possible second but the sound I make is something else entirely, a small wounded noise that escapes before I can stop it.
I don’t know if I should have married her.
The love isn’t there.
The words repeat in my head, over and over, drowning out everything else. The voices still murmuring inside the office, the hum of the building’s ventilation system, the frantic pounding of my own heart.
Six years of marriage, reduced to a single sentence. Six years of trying, of hoping, of convincing myself that the distance was temporary and the silences were normal and the slow erosion of everything we built was just what happened to marriages after a while.
He regrets me.
My husband, the man I made my vows to, the father of my children, the person I learned to love even though I never expected to, regrets marrying me.
I don’t know how long I stand there, frozen in the hallway with dinner going cold in my hands and my entire world collapsing around me.
Long enough for the voices inside to shift, for someone to laugh at something I can’t hear, for life to continue on the other side of that door as if nothing catastrophic has happened.
Then I turn, very slowly, and I walk back to the elevator.
I don’t drop the basket. I don’t make a scene. I don’t burst through the door and demand an explanation, don’t scream or cry or do any of the things that might feel satisfying in the moment.
I just leave.
The elevator doors close behind me, and the numbers tick down, and somewhere above me my husband is still talking about how he wishes he’d never married me, and I stand perfectly still with mascara starting to run down my cheeks and think:
Now I know.