Chapter Two
Townes
He had a recurring dream that he was in a house with many rooms and Winona was in one of them and he kept opening doors and finding only more hallways.
He had not told her about the dream. He had not told her about most things lately, which he understood, in his better moments, was the root of the problem—not a symptom of it.
He was a man who had always managed his inner life privately.
His father had been the same way, contained, reliable, not given to confession.
It had served him well in his career. He was a partner at a mid-sized investment firm, forty years old, known for his steadiness, his precision, his ability to read a room and hold his cards.
These were valuable qualities in a man who worked with money.
In a marriage, he was increasingly aware, they were not enough.
He sat in his car in the parking garage for six minutes before going into the office, which was a thing he had started doing because the moment between leaving the house and arriving at the next place had become the only time he felt neither performance nor failure. Just himself, in between.
He thought about Winona's face last night.
The way she had said nothing when he could see plainly that it was not nothing.
He had wanted to push, and he had not pushed, because—why?
Because he was afraid of what she would say.
Because the distance had become something they both maintained now, a structure neither of them knew how to dismantle without everything falling.
He was not stupid. He knew the marriage was in trouble.
He knew it was largely his fault in the way that erasure is a fault—not the dramatic fault of action but the quieter one of absence.
He had let himself be consumed. The firm, the long hours, the constant assessment of risk that bled into his personal life until he was assessing risk there too, the risk of saying the wrong thing, the risk of opening a conversation he didn't know how to finish, the risk of I miss you, Win, I miss you so much I don't know what to do with it landing somewhere and breaking them both.
He was afraid that if he said the true things, she would tell him it was too late.
So he said nothing. And the silence compounded.
He got out of the car and went into the building.
Madrigal Merrill was waiting in his office.
Not the conference room—his office, which meant she had charmed one of the assistants into letting her in, which was entirely within her capabilities.
She was one of those women who moved through institutional space as though she had already been granted whatever she was about to ask for.
Early thirties, tall, the kind of precise beauty that looked strategic.
She stood at his window looking out at the city and turned when he came in with a smile that had too much intention in it.
"Madrigal." He kept his voice level. "We have a conference room for meetings."
"I know." She didn't move from the window. "I wanted somewhere quieter."
She was a new client—technically a referral through his colleague Brycen—who had significant assets tied up in a gallery business and a family trust, and who had, in the three weeks since she had become his client, developed a habit of treating the professional relationship as something more fluid than it was.
He had noticed it and done what he typically did with things that required management, he had managed it, setting clear parameters, keeping meetings short, copying Brycen on everything.
"I have fifteen minutes before my nine o'clock," he huffed.
"I'll only need ten." She crossed to the chair across from his desk and sat, crossing her legs with a deliberateness that he noted and filed away. "I wanted to talk about the Cashermell holdings before the group meeting."
She did not, as it turned out, want to talk only about the Cashermell holdings.
Within three minutes the conversation had drifted—subtly, with the practiced ease of someone who did this often—from portfolio restructuring to a dinner she wanted to host for her financial advisors, which he was invited to, which was presented as professional and clearly was not.
Her eyes moved over him with an assessment he recognized and did not return.
"I'll send someone from the client relations team," he stated, without pause. "They handle those events."
A brief flicker crossed her face—recalibration. Then the smile returned. "Of course. But I was hoping for you specifically, Townes. You understand my situation better than anyone."
"I'll make sure whoever attends is fully briefed." He stood, which signaled the end. "If you want to take the Cashermell question forward, let's put it on the agenda for Thursday's meeting."
She stood too. She was close to his desk and she did not immediately step back. "You're very disciplined," she provided, and the word disciplined in her mouth had a specific texture that he didn't acknowledge.
"I try to be efficient," he remarked. "Jaynelle will see you out."
After she left, he stood at his own window for a moment, then called Brycen.
"Your gallery client," he described, when Brycen picked up. "We need to redistribute. I'm pulling back to an advisory role."
"Everything okay?"
"Nothing I can't manage," he pointed out.
Which was true. What he did not say—what he did not say to Brycen or to Winona or to anyone—was that Madrigal Merrill made his skin feel surveilled in a way he did not like, and that the specific look she had given him as she left his office was not the look of a woman who considered the matter closed.
He should have told Winona. He thought about telling Winona.
He decided not to, because the telling would require context he hadn't given her, and the context would open questions about how long he had been managing it, and the questions would require honesty about the fact that he had been managing it alone—the same way he managed everything—and that honesty felt like a door that led to the argument he was afraid of having.
He closed the door without opening it.