Chapter 13
The dinner was Sophie Liang's idea. Sophie, who had been two years ahead of Annabel at Columbia and now ran a small design firm out of a converted warehouse in Dumbo.
Sophie, who sent group texts with too many exclamation points and believed that eight people around a table could fix anything.
She had texted the invitation on Tuesday — Low-key dinner Saturday, just the usual suspects, my place in Tribeca, bring wine or don't, I have too much anyway.
Annabel almost said no. She had been saying no to most things for weeks now, letting her world shrink to the gallery and Corinne's couch and the bland walls of the Murray Hill rental.
But Sophie wasn't part of the Stirling orbit.
She predated it entirely. And the thought of another Saturday night alone with the separation agreement's ghost — Judith had called off the Monday signing, and now it sat in limbo she refused to examine too closely — made her chest tight.
She said yes.
She wore a linen blouse she'd bought before the marriage and jeans that still fit the way they were supposed to. No jewelry except the watch, nine years old, its face slightly scratched from a hundred gallery installations. She looked fine. She looked like someone who was holding together.
Sophie's Tribeca apartment was a third-floor walkup with exposed brick and mismatched chairs.
The table was a reclaimed door on sawhorses, set with cloth napkins that didn't match either.
There were seven guests. Annabel counted them from the doorway: Sophie's husband Greg, two women from her design firm, a poet Annabel vaguely recognized from a reading at the 92nd Street Y, his wife, and —
Alistair.
He was standing by the kitchen island with a glass of red wine, and the sight of him hit her like a hand against her sternum.
Not because he looked different. Because he did.
He was wearing a navy sweater she didn't recognize, no jacket, no cufflinks, no watch that cost more than her first car.
His hair was slightly longer than he usually kept it, the silver at his temples more pronounced.
He looked like he hadn't been sleeping well but had stopped trying to hide it.
He saw her at the same moment. His hand tightened on the glass. He didn't smile.
"Annabel." Sophie appeared beside her with a hug that smelled like garlic and rosemary. "I should have told you. I invited you both separately and then realized — but I didn't want to uninvite either of you, and it felt worse to warn you because then it becomes a thing, and I just thought —"
"It's fine," Annabel said. Her voice came out steady. That was something.
"It doesn't have to be weird."
"It's fine, Sophie."
It was not fine. But making it a thing would be worse. She knew the math of small dinner parties — eight people, one table, nowhere to hide. Leaving would be conspicuous. Staying meant three hours of proximity to a man whose presence still rearranged the air in any room he entered.
She took the glass of wine Sophie pressed into her hand. She chose the seat farthest from him, between Greg and the poet's wife, a woman named Dana who taught middle-school English and talked with her hands.
For the first hour, she managed. The food was good — roast chicken, some kind of grain salad, bread that Greg had apparently made himself.
Conversation moved the way it does at tables where people mostly like each other: overlapping, easy, full of references to shared jokes Annabel only half-remembered.
She talked to Dana about a ceramics exhibition at the Whitney.
She talked to Greg about the bread. She did not look at Alistair.
Except she did. Small glances, involuntary, the way you check a wound.
He was quieter than she expected. The Alistair she knew — the Alistair she had been married to for eight years — commanded tables.
Not loudly. He wasn't the kind of man who dominated a conversation with volume.
But he had a gravity to him, a way of listening that made people want to perform for his attention, and then rewarding them with a comment so precise it felt like being seen.
She had loved that about him once. She had sat beside him at a hundred dinners and watched people lean toward him like plants toward light.
Tonight he was different. He listened, but he didn't steer.
He laughed at Greg's story about the sourdough starter without adding his own.
When the poet — his name was James, Annabel had placed him now — asked about Stirling Capital, Alistair gave a short answer and redirected to James's upcoming collection.
It wasn't performance. She knew his performances.
This was something else. Something stripped back.
She hated that she noticed.
The second hour was harder. The wine softened the edges of the table, and the conversation broke into smaller clusters.
Dana excused herself for the bathroom. Greg went to check something in the kitchen.
And suddenly Annabel was on the exposed side of the table, and Alistair was two seats away, and Sophie's design partner Lena was asking them both about a restaurant that had opened on the Bowery.
"We went once," Alistair said. He caught himself. "I went. A client dinner. The food was good. Overpriced."
The correction landed between them like a stone in still water. We had been his default for eight years. Every sentence built for two. She watched him register the slip, watched the brief tightening at the corners of his mouth.
"I heard the pasta is worth it," Lena said, oblivious.
"The pasta was worth it," Annabel said, because she had been there too — a different night, with Corinne, two weeks ago — and because agreeing with him about pasta felt survivable.
He looked at her. Not the careful, guilt-weighted looks from the benefit or the gala. Just looked at her, the way you look at someone who said something ordinary. And the ground shifted under her by half an inch.
James told a story about getting locked out of his own book launch.
It was funny — the image of a man in a sport coat trying to explain to a bouncer that the poster in the window had his face on it.
Annabel laughed. And then Alistair said something dry and quiet about the time he'd been turned away from his own office building by a new security guard, and the table laughed, and Annabel laughed too.
She caught it a half-second too late. The sound was already out of her. Real laughter, unguarded, at something her husband said. It ran through her like a crack in plaster — not the wall coming down, just the first fracture line running through it.
She stopped laughing. Picked up her wine. Alistair didn't press it. He turned back to James and asked about the bouncer, and the moment passed.
But the warmth of it stayed. A warm spot on a cold wall.
#
Dinner ended the way Sophie's dinners always ended — with too much wine left and Sophie insisting everyone take a bottle home.
The group spilled down the stairs in twos and threes.
The night air was warm, thick with late summer.
The street was narrow and cobblestoned, and Annabel's heels caught twice on the uneven stone.
She had parked three blocks east. Alistair, she knew without asking, would have a car waiting. She said her goodbyes quickly — a hug for Sophie, a wave for the rest — and started walking.
His footsteps fell into pace beside her. Not close. A full arm's length of sidewalk between them. She didn't speed up. She didn't slow down. She kept her eyes forward.
"You don't have to walk me," she said.
"I'm parked this direction."
She glanced at him. He might have been lying. She couldn't tell, and the fact that she couldn't tell — that she used to be able to read every shift in his face — made her throat ache.
They walked in silence for half a block. The street sounds filled it: a cab honking on West Broadway, music from a bar with its door propped open, someone laughing on a fire escape above them.
"The show," he said. "I heard two of Seo-yun's prints sold."
"Three now. And a Tomás piece, pending."
"That's good. That's — I'm glad it's going well."
She didn't answer. They reached the corner and waited for the light, standing side by side like strangers.
Except strangers didn't carry eight years of shared weight.
Strangers didn't know which side of the bed the other person slept on or how they took their coffee at six in the morning or what sound they made when they were trying not to cry.
The light changed. They crossed.
"How are you doing?" she asked. She didn't know why she asked it. The words came out before the decision formed, like her voice had slipped past the checkpoint her brain was supposed to be running.
He was quiet for three steps. Four.
"I'm in therapy," he said. "Twice a week. A woman named Dr. Chen, on the Upper West Side. She's — she doesn't let me get away with anything."
Annabel looked at him. He wasn't watching for her reaction. He was looking straight ahead, his hands in his pockets, his jaw set in a way that wasn't hard so much as held. Like he was keeping himself by force of will.
"I didn't know that," she said.
"I didn't tell anyone. Ronan knows, because he manages the calendar.
But I —" He stopped walking. She stopped too, because the alternative was to keep going and leave him standing there, and something in her wouldn't let her do that.
Not tonight. "I'm not telling you because I want credit for it. I'm telling you because you asked."
She waited.