CHAPTER TWO
MARK
Sabine caught the elevator door before it closed and stepped in beside me still laughing about something Beckett had said, and I was laughing too, the easy laugh I’d perfected for rooms like that one, and it wasn’t until we hit the lobby that I remembered Paris had texted me twice that afternoon and I hadn’t answered either one.
I told myself I would call her from the car. I did not call her from the car.
The Beacon Hill benefit had been Petra’s idea, or more precisely Petra’s insistence, framed the way she framed everything, as an opportunity Ridgeway couldn’t afford to pass up.
Beckett was on the preservation society’s board.
Beckett controlled access to two other funds we wanted in on before the next raise.
Beckett’s wife liked Sabine, who had gone to Wellesley with her, who knew which spoon was for what and which senator’s name to drop and when to let a silence sit instead of filling it, all the fluencies that had never come naturally to Paris and that I had, somewhere in the last several years, stopped believing she needed to learn.
I hadn’t decided that consciously. That was the part I couldn’t have explained to anyone, not even to myself in the honest hour before sleep.
I hadn’t sat down and thought, I will stop taking my wife to things.
What I had thought, each time, was smaller and more reasonable.
Paris would be bored. Paris would feel out of place.
Paris had said more than once, years ago, that she found these events exhausting, all those people performing warmth at each other, and I had taken that complaint and quietly built a policy out of it, sparing her from something she’d never actually asked to be spared from anymore.
The strange thing was that ten years earlier, in the loft on Albany Street, I had wanted Paris in every room I was ever allowed into.
I remembered the first real investor meeting Ridgeway ever landed, a pension fund manager named Girard who’d agreed to take a call more out of pity for a friend of a friend than any real interest in three guys with a whiteboard, and I had insisted, over Owen’s objections, that Paris sit in on it, because I’d wanted Girard to see the whole picture, the woman who believed in this before there was anything to believe in.
Girard had liked her instantly. He’d asked her more questions than he’d asked me.
I had been so proud that day I could barely sit still.
I couldn’t say when I’d stopped wanting that. By the time Ridgeway managed real money, the rooms had changed shape, and I’d started editing the guest list of my own life without ever announcing it, even to myself.
I thought about a due diligence meeting two years earlier, my first real audience with an old-money family office that had been managing generational wealth since before my grandparents immigrated, and how the patriarch, a courtly man named Whitfield who’d made a point of mentioning his great-grandfather’s seat on the Boston Stock Exchange within the first five minutes, had asked me, not unkindly, where my people were from.
“Started with nothing, myself and three friends,” I’d said, the line I’d already begun rehearsing by then, the one that made the story sound like scrappy triumph instead of what it had actually felt like, which was terror. “Built it from a shared apartment and a lot of instant coffee.”
Whitfield had smiled the smile of a man complimenting a dog that had learned a new trick. “Self-made,” he’d said, testing the phrase like it amused him. “We don’t see much of that in this room.”
I had wanted, badly, in that meeting, to be the kind of man Whitfield’s family had always managed money for, not a man they occasionally decided to take a chance on.
Every deal after that carried that same hunger, the wish to stop being the interesting exception and start being simply, unremarkably, one of them.
Sabine, with her Wellesley pedigree and her ambassador father, made rooms like Whitfield’s easier to sit in.
Paris, with her Dorchester clinic and her double shifts, was a truth I had started, without ever deciding to do it on purpose, to treat as one more thing that made those rooms harder.
I had gotten the Whitfield allocation, in the end, a substantial one, and I had told the story of that win at three separate internal meetings without once mentioning that Paris had been up until two in the morning the night before helping me rehearse answers to exactly what Whitfield had asked.
She had known, better than I had, which parts of the truth would land as charming and which would land as a liability.
I had used her instincts and left her name out of the retelling, and at the time it had felt like nothing at all, an oversight too small to notice, let alone confess.
Sabine was good at these rooms in a way that made my job easier, and I had let that convenience calcify into habit without examining what the habit cost. At the benefit, Dorian Beckett had shaken my hand and said, with real warmth, “And this must be the woman keeping you sane through all this,” nodding at Sabine, and I had laughed and said something about Sabine keeping the investors sane, which wasn’t a correction so much as a deflection, and Beckett hadn’t pushed, and Sabine hadn’t corrected it either.
The moment passed the way it always did, small enough on its own not to register as anything.
Later in the evening, a woman I didn’t recognize, someone’s wife or daughter, had asked Sabine how long she and I had been together, and Sabine had laughed and said, lightly, “Oh, we’re not, I just work with him,” and the woman had looked embarrassed and moved on quickly, and I had watched the whole exchange from six feet away and said nothing, because saying something would have meant interrupting a conversation that was, strictly speaking, none of my business to interrupt.
That was the excuse I gave myself in the moment.
Walking to the car afterward, I could already tell it was a thin one.
Earlier that same week, before the benefit, Owen and I had grabbed lunch at the same sandwich place near Albany Street we’d eaten at during the company’s first winter, more out of habit than nostalgia, and Owen had brought up, unprompted, a photo he’d found while cleaning out an old hard drive, one of Paris standing at the loft’s single window with a mug of coffee, laughing at something out of frame, taken the week we’d closed our first real client.
“You remember what she said that day,” Owen asked, sliding the sandwich wrapper aside. “When Girard’s people finally wired the funds.”
“She said we should celebrate with something better than instant noodles for once.”
“She said, and I quote, now don’t any of you idiots blow this on something stupid, act like you’ve done this before even though none of us have.
” Owen had laughed at the memory, warm, unguarded, the way he rarely laughed anymore in meetings full of people who hadn’t been there for any of it.
“She kept us honest before any of us knew what honest was supposed to look like in this business. I think about that more than you’d probably guess. ”
I had laughed too, that day, genuinely, and for the length of that sandwich the two of us were easy with each other again, uncomplicated by fund performance or investor sentiment.
It didn’t survive the walk back to the office, where Petra was waiting with the week’s press schedule and three drafts of talking points for the Beacon Hill benefit that never once mentioned my wife’s name.
Owen texted me around ten. You couldn’t get Paris a sitter for two hours?
Owen didn’t have kids and Paris and I didn’t either, so I knew what he meant, and I didn’t answer that one either.
Owen had been there in the loft on Albany Street when we were three guys and a whiteboard and a line of credit Paris had cosigned with her own name on it, back when her paycheck from some clinic in Dorchester was nearly the only money coming in for the four of us for the better part of a year.
Owen remembered things about that period that I had started, without quite admitting it to myself, treating as history rather than present tense.
In the car home I opened the text thread with Paris and looked at it for a while.
Tied up, don’t wait on me. Nothing since.
I typed sorry, long night, tell you about it tomorrow and then deleted it, because tomorrow I wouldn’t tell her about it, the same way I hadn’t told her about the last four things like it.
Not telling her had become its own kind of lie.
Each individual thing I withheld still felt too small to bother mentioning.
I got home at midnight. Her breathing had the even rhythm of actual sleep, or a good imitation of it.
I didn’t turn on the light to check which.
I told myself that was kindness. I lay down beside her and, out of some habit older than the last two years, reached for her hand under the blanket, and she let me take it, and for a few minutes, holding her hand in the dark with neither of us saying anything, I let myself believe that whatever was happening to us was still small enough to fix without ever having to name it out loud.