CHAPTER FOUR
PARIS
The Wentworth Society luncheon was three weeks off and I still hadn’t answered Nadine, and when she called to press me on it, she brought up the dress again within the first minute.
“Simone says she can still hold the navy,” Nadine said. “It photographs so much better than black, dear, and there will be photographers, the society always brings someone from the paper.”
“I have things I wear that I like,” I said. “I don’t need Simone to hold anything.”
There was a pause on the line, the kind Nadine was skilled at, that managed to communicate disappointment without a single unkind word in it. “Of course. I only meant to make it easier for you. These things can be a lot to navigate if you’re not used to them.”
“I’ve been to plenty of these things, Nadine.”
“I know you have, dear. I only mean the crowd shifts a little every year, and it’s nice to feel put together when you walk in.”
I wasn’t sure which stung more, the offer or the reason behind it. I told her I’d let her know about the luncheon and got off the phone faster than was strictly polite, and I sat with the dial tone feeling still in my ear for longer than I wanted to admit.
I thought about calling Roland instead, Mark’s father, who had always been gentler about these things, quieter, a man who noticed more than he said.
Roland had once told me, at a family dinner years ago, standing beside me at the grill while Nadine fussed over table settings inside, that he’d married Nadine when she was a schoolteacher’s daughter with two good dresses to her name, and that everything else had come later and never mattered as much as she now seemed to think it did.
“She forgets sometimes,” he’d said, flipping a burger with more concentration than the task required, “that everyone respects her now for who she was when she had nothing and worked for it. I remind her when I can. I don’t always manage to.
” He’d looked at me sideways then, something careful in his expression.
“You’re good for Mark the same way she was good for me, before all this.
Don’t let anyone talk you into thinking otherwise, including her. ”
I wondered whether Roland still remembered telling me that, or whether he’d let himself forget it the same slow way Nadine had, watching from the sidelines and saying nothing while the pattern repeated itself in the next generation.
There had been other corrections too, small enough on their own that I’d let each one go without much thought.
A dinner with two of Mark’s board members the previous spring, where I’d started telling the story of how I’d talked Owen out of passing on the second engineer, a story I loved because it was true and because it was mine, and Mark had touched my knee under the table, lightly, and said, “Maybe save the Ridgeway war stories for another time, sweetheart, Graham’s more interested in the fund’s current pipeline,” and I had stopped talking, obediently, and let Graham redirect the conversation toward numbers I had no stake in, and told myself it was a reasonable thing to ask of me, reading a room, nothing more.
Mark called Nadine’s suggestions helpful when I brought it up that night, standing at the closet while I hung up my work clothes. “She’s trying,” he said. “That’s just how she shows it.”
“She’s trying to fix me.”
“She’s not trying to fix you. She wants you to feel comfortable at these things.”
“I felt comfortable before anyone decided I needed help feeling comfortable,” I said, and Mark let out a slow breath, patient and a little tired, the one he’d started using with me lately, like I was a problem he was managing rather than a wife he was talking to.
“You used to like these events,” he said. “Or you used to be willing to come to them, at least.”
“I used to be invited to them.”
He didn’t have an answer for that one. He picked up his phone instead, which answered the question for him, and I stood there holding one of my own dresses, plain green wool, nothing Simone at Trevi would have held for anyone, remembering a Christmas party at the loft years ago when Mark had told two investors, unprompted, that his wife had better instincts about people than anyone he’d ever hired, that she’d called both of the engineers he’d almost passed on and been right both times.
He had been proud of me in front of people who mattered to him.
I could still feel that pride now, an old ache that came back most often late at night, uninvited.
I hung the green dress back in the closet and thought about how many small suggestions it had taken, from Nadine and from Mark both, before I’d started keeping a mental list of which of my own clothes were appropriate, which stories were suitable for dinner, which parts of myself photographed better in navy than in the person I actually was.
None of it had felt like an attack when it happened.
Each piece had arrived wrapped in concern, in help, in making things easier for me.
Laid end to end now, it added up to something else entirely.
Later that night, though, the evening took a turn in a direction I hadn’t expected.
Mark put his phone down entirely, an event rare enough that I noticed it immediately, and asked me, without prompting, how the new post-surgical program at Harborview was coming along.
I told him about the funding gap we were still trying to close, the equipment we needed, the three surgeons who’d already agreed to refer patients if we could get it running by spring, and he listened, actually listened, asking questions in the right places, and for twenty minutes I had my husband back completely, the one who used to sit on the arm of the couch in Chelsea Street and want to know everything.
“You should let me look at the numbers,” he said. “If it’s a funding gap, that’s a solvable problem.”
“I don’t want your money for this, Mark. I want the clinic to earn it.”
“I know. I just meant I could help you build the pitch. I’ve built a hundred of those.”
I let him, that night, and we sat together at the kitchen island until almost midnight building a one-page case for the hospital board.
Mark commandeered my laptop within twenty minutes, the way he always did with anything resembling a spreadsheet, and I let him, because watching him work was, even now, one of my favorite things, the focus that came over his whole face when he was solving a problem he actually cared about.
“You’ve buried the strongest number,” he said, scrolling through my draft. “Readmission rates dropping fourteen percent. That’s the headline. Everything else is supporting evidence.”
“I was trying not to sound like I was bragging.”
“You’re allowed to brag about fourteen percent, Paris.
That’s not bragging, that’s math.” He’d looked up at me then, something warm and a little teasing in his expression.
“You know, for someone who spends her whole professional life telling people to push through discomfort, you’re remarkably bad at taking your own advice about this. ”
“I don’t remember asking Ridgeway’s founder for a lecture on confidence.”
“Free of charge. Least I can do.” He’d bumped his shoulder against mine, and for a moment it was so easy, so exactly like the two of us at the folding table on Albany Street arguing over a pitch deck at midnight, that I forgot entirely to be careful with him.
By eleven we had a draft we both liked, and by midnight we’d abandoned the laptop altogether and stayed at the island anyway, finishing the last of a bottle of wine, trading old stories neither of us had told in years, the time he’d nearly set off the smoke detector trying to cook me a birthday dinner in the Chelsea Street kitchen, the time I’d talked my way into a discounted apartment application by promising a landlord I’d fix his ailing houseplants, which I had, entirely by accident, since I’d never successfully kept a plant alive before or since.
It was, for those few hours, the best evening we’d had together in months, and I went to sleep remembering exactly why I’d married him in the first place, and woke up the next morning half convinced I’d imagined the last several months of drift, because surely a man who paid attention like that couldn’t also be the man who’d stood on the Langford steps with his hand on someone else’s back and never mentioned it.
Three mornings later, Mark looked up from his phone when I mentioned it again, this time about a dinner invitation from Nadine that specified black tie. “You okay?”
“Fine,” I said, because I didn’t yet have language for what I was starting to see, only its outline, and because the good night at the kitchen island had bought him, in my mind, a little more benefit of the doubt than he’d actually earned on his own.