CHAPTER THREE
PARIS
Dahlia found me in the supply closet at the clinic restocking resistance bands and asked, entirely without malice, whether it was surreal being married to someone who got photographed with movie-star types at black-tie things every other week.
Dahlia Reyes was twenty-seven, two years out of her doctorate, sharp enough that I’d started giving her the harder post-op cases within her first six months, and unfiltered in a way I mostly loved because it meant I always knew exactly where I stood with her.
She had a habit of narrating her own thoughts out loud mid-sentence, and a genuine, uncomplicated fascination with a life she assumed must be glamorous because she’d only ever seen the photographed parts of it.
“Which photo,” I said, keeping my voice light.
“The Beacon Hill one. The woman in green is gorgeous. Do you know her?”
“She works with Mark.”
Dahlia nodded like that settled something and went back to restringing a resistance band, and I stood there with a box of therabands in my arms, struck by how strange it was that a stranger knew more about my husband’s public life than I did.
I hadn’t told Dahlia I hadn’t known about the benefit. I hadn’t told anyone that.
I finished restocking and went out to see my next patient, a sixty-one-year-old retired firefighter named Gerry recovering from a torn rotator cuff, and for forty-five minutes I forgot completely about the photograph, because that was the gift physical therapy had always given me, a room where the only thing that mattered was whether a body could move a little further today than it had yesterday.
Gerry told me, halfway through a set of resisted external rotations, that his granddaughter had been born the week before, and pulled up a photo on his phone before I could stop him.
His whole face changed the way faces do when someone can’t find words fast enough for how they feel.
“You’ll want kids someday,” Gerry said, not really a question, the way patients who’d known me for months sometimes drifted into territory that would have felt intrusive from a stranger. “You’re good with people. Be a waste not to.”
“Someday, maybe,” I said, and didn’t say the rest of it, that Mark and I hadn’t talked seriously about children in over a year, that the subject had quietly slid off our list of things worth discussing the same way so much else had, replaced by his calendar and my own growing sense that our marriage needed solving before it could hold anything new.
Dahlia caught me afterward in the break room, unwrapping a sandwich with the same enthusiasm she brought to lunch every single day regardless of its contents. “Gerry show you the baby photos again?”
“Forty times. I’ve seen that child’s face more than I’ve seen my own niece’s this year.”
“He showed the whole waiting room too. Mrs. Alvarez cried. I think it’s contagious in here.” Dahlia grinned, then softened. “You looked a little far away during his session. You good?”
“Just tired,” I said, and Dahlia let it go, the way good coworkers do, tucking the observation away without pushing, though I could tell, even then, that she’d noticed something and would notice more before either of us said it plainly.
It wasn’t the first time I’d thought it. I had built a life inside these walls that had nothing to do with Ridgeway Capital or investor relations or anyone’s net worth, and it was mine in a way nothing else fully was anymore.
At home that evening I looked up the article again.
I’d already memorized it. I read it anyway, hoping the words would rearrange themselves into something kinder the second time.
They didn’t. Sabine Rothwell, head of investor relations, Wellesley, a foundation board seat, a father who’d been ambassador to somewhere.
The article mentioned that Ridgeway Capital’s founder had also attended.
It did not mention that Ridgeway Capital’s founder had a wife.
I made tea I didn’t drink and sat at the kitchen island with the laptop open, and I thought about the year we lived on Chelsea Street, back before any of it, when I picked up double shifts at a clinic in Dorchester so Mark could put every dollar of the seed money into payroll for the two engineers who believed in him before anyone else did.
I remembered bringing sandwiches to the loft on Albany Street because none of them had eaten since breakfast, turkey and provolone from the deli on the corner because it was the cheapest thing that felt like an actual meal, and Owen and the engineers looking at me like I’d descended from somewhere holy, and Mark catching my eye across the room with a look that said I see you, I know what this costs you, I will not forget it.
He had not forgotten it, exactly. He had simply stopped needing to remember it out loud.
Mark came home while I still had the laptop open, and he leaned over my shoulder before I could close it. Guilt and defensiveness crossed his face at the same time, gone almost as soon as they appeared.
“That’s from the benefit last week,” he said. “Beckett’s thing.”
“I saw. I didn’t know about it until Dahlia sent it to me.”
“It came together fast. Petra had us on the list two days before.”
“You could have texted me in those two days,” I said. “You texted me about picking up dry cleaning. You could have mentioned a black-tie event you were attending with a woman I’ve never met.”
“I didn’t think it was worth mentioning. It was work.”
“It’s worth mentioning when your hand is on her back in a photograph that’s now on three different society pages,” I said, and I watched him actually look at the photo again, as if he hadn’t fully registered it the first time. He looked genuinely surprised at how it read from outside his own head.
“That’s just how you stand for a photo,” he said, but it came out less certain than he meant it to.
I closed the laptop. “I’m not accusing you of anything, Mark. I’m telling you I found out about my husband’s evening from a coworker instead of from my husband, and I need you to understand why that isn’t nothing.”
He said he understood, and he sat with me for a few minutes at the island, and for a little while it felt almost like it used to, him asking about Gerry’s granddaughter, me asking about the term sheet that had eaten his week, both of us leaning into the old rhythm like it hadn’t gone anywhere.
It was good enough, that half hour, that I let myself believe the photograph had been an aberration rather than a preview.
I went to check the mail before bed, and there was a card from Mark’s mother, Nadine, thick cream stock, an invitation to a fundraising luncheon for something called the Wentworth Society.
Written on the bottom in Nadine’s careful hand: Paris, dear, I’ve taken the liberty of asking Simone at Trevi to hold something appropriate for you, size 8, in case you’d like to skip the shopping. So much easier that way.
I had worn a size 8 for fifteen years. Nadine had known that the entire time. The note wasn’t really about the dress. It was about appropriate, a word Nadine had started using around me the way other people used weather, casually, constantly, without seeming to notice she was saying it at all.
I remembered a Thanksgiving early on, before Ridgeway had a name that made headlines, when Nadine had pulled me into the kitchen to teach me her stuffing recipe and told me she was glad Mark had found someone who kept him honest. I remembered the warmth of that, real warmth, not performed, Nadine’s hands guiding mine over the mixing bowl, her laugh when I got the sage measurement wrong twice in a row.
I remembered something else too, a Christmas dinner the same year, when Mark’s cousin Deborah had asked me, over the cranberry sauce, in a voice pitched just loud enough for the whole table, whether it was strange working double shifts at a clinic while dating someone from Roland’s side of the family.
Nobody at that table missed what she meant by it.
Nadine had set down her fork, looked directly at Deborah, and said, evenly, “Paris works harder than anyone at this table, and she’s the reason Mark can afford to take the risks he’s taking.
I’d think about that before you finish that sentence.
” Deborah hadn’t finished it. Nadine reached over and squeezed my hand under the table, once, and I loved her fiercely for it, grateful the way you’re grateful to anyone who steps in front of you before you’ve even registered the blow coming.
I couldn’t point to when that Nadine had curdled into this one.
It happened gradually, one small correction at a time, until I noticed it had already happened.
Somewhere between defending me at a Christmas table and measuring me for a dress I hadn’t asked for, she’d stopped seeing what had once made her proud enough to fight for me, and started seeing, instead, all the ways I still resembled the woman working doubles that Deborah had once tried to use against me.
I put the card on the counter next to Mark’s cold dinner from two nights before, which I still hadn’t thrown out. Two marriages seemed to exist side by side now, the one where he loved me exactly as I was and the one that was actually happening to me, and I no longer knew which one to believe.