CHAPTER SIX
PARIS
I planned the date night myself, because I had started to understand that if I waited for Mark to plan one, I would wait indefinitely, and I booked the corner table at the Italian place on Charles Street where we’d gone on our first anniversary, back when an anniversary dinner meant splitting a bottle of eleven-dollar wine and calling it extravagant.
I told Imani about it that week, over coffee near her school, and she’d asked, half joking, whether I was staging an intervention disguised as a date.
“I’m trying to remember who we used to be before all of this,” I told her, and she squeezed my hand and told me that sounded like exactly the right instinct, and wished me luck, and told me to text her after.
That morning, looking for the plumber’s confirmation email on the shared calendar app we both still used out of habit, I noticed a recurring entry two Thursdays running that just said Dinner, S.R.
, seven o’clock, no location, on nights Mark had told me he was catching up on paperwork alone at the office.
I kept looking at it longer than I meant to, cycling through a dozen boring explanations, a check-in dinner, a working meal, the ordinary friction of running investor relations for a nine-billion-dollar fund.
I closed the calendar without asking him about it.
Tonight was supposed to be about finding him again, not building a case against him, and I wanted, badly, to protect that plan from the entry sitting quietly in a browser tab I’d already closed.
Mark was twenty minutes late, then forty, texting apologies about a call running long, and when he finally arrived at the restaurant he kissed my temple before he sat down, an old habit from Chelsea Street that had somehow survived every renovation of our life since, and asked the waiter for the same red we’d split on our first anniversary, if they still carried it.
They did. He remembered the vintage without checking his phone for it, which struck me as its own small miracle these days.
“Tell me the Harborview news first,” he said, before the bread even arrived. “You’ve been holding something back all week, I can tell.”
I told him about the hospital board’s approval, the actual number, fourteen percent fewer readmissions in the pilot data, and watched something light up in his face that had nothing to do with performance for anyone in the room, because there was no one else in the room who mattered to either of us that night.
He asked good questions, specific ones, whether the equipment lead time would push the spring launch, whether Dahlia was ready to run the intake protocol solo if I ever needed to step back from it.
“You’re already planning for me to have a life outside this,” I said, teasing him. “Should I be worried?”
“I’m planning for you to run half of Boston’s rehab clinics in ten years and for me to be unbearably smug about knowing you before it happened.” He topped off my wine. “Your turn. Ask me something that isn’t about Ridgeway.”
I asked him whether he still wanted to go back to Portugal, a trip we’d talked about for three years running and never once managed to book, and he told me, with real enthusiasm, about a fishing village near óbidos he’d read about that had exactly one restaurant and no cell service worth mentioning, and for twenty minutes we planned an entire imaginary week, which beach, which ruins, whether we’d rent a car or regret it immediately on the narrow roads.
It felt, for that handful of minutes, like the old rhythm again, easy and specific and entirely ours.
“We should actually book it,” I said. “Not talk about it for a fourth year.”
“I’ll have Petra block off two weeks in the fall calendar before the fund close eats the whole quarter.
” He reached across the table and laced his fingers through mine, an ordinary gesture that still, after all these years, calmed me a little.
“I mean it this time. I want one week where nobody at Ridgeway knows how to reach either of us.”
“I’ll believe it when I see boarding passes.”
“You’ll see boarding passes.” He squeezed my hand once, and for a moment I let myself believe him completely, no reservation attached, the way I used to believe every promise he made before the promises started needing footnotes.
The waiter came to clear the second course, and I let myself relax so completely into the evening that I nearly missed the first buzz of his phone against the table.
Then it lit up fully, Sabine’s name at the top of the screen, and he turned it face down without reading it, which somehow felt worse than if he’d read it in front of me. The whole temperature of the table dropped by several degrees in the time it took him to set the phone back down.
“Who’s that,” I asked, keeping my voice as flat as I could manage.
“Work thing. It can wait.”
“It’s almost nine, on a Friday, during our anniversary dinner.”
“Investor relations doesn’t run on a nine-to-five, Paris.” He said it with the particular weariness he used now when I asked anything that touched on Ridgeway, as though my curiosity were an inconvenience he was too polite to name directly.
“I didn’t ask about investor relations. I asked who texted you at nine o’clock during our anniversary dinner, two minutes after we were talking about óbidos.”
“Sabine. It’s Sabine. She handles half my calendar, you know that.”
“I know her name,” I said. “I don’t know her. I’ve seen her in more photographs than I’ve spoken to her in person, and now, apparently, she has a standing spot on your calendar with no location attached that I only found out about because I was looking for the plumber.”
Mark went very still. “You’ve been looking at my calendar.”
“It’s our shared calendar, Mark. I wasn’t looking for anything. I found it because it’s right there.”
His jaw tightened, and he reached across the table for my hand in a gesture that felt more like damage control than affection.
“You have nothing to worry about,” he said.
“There’s nothing there. She’s an employee, and those dinners are prep for the fund close, nothing more interesting than spreadsheets. ”
“I didn’t say I was worried about something being there,” I said, though hearing him deny it unprompted told me the thought had been sitting closer to the surface of both our minds than either of us had said aloud until now.
“Then what are you saying?”
“I’m saying you just told me she handles half your calendar in the same breath as telling me there’s nothing going on, like those two facts live in completely separate rooms and I’m supposed to only look at the one you’re pointing at.”
“That’s not fair. Sabine’s job is my calendar. That’s a real job description, not a cover story.”
“I know it’s her job. I’m asking why her job requires a standing dinner with no address attached that you never once mentioned to me, on a night you told me you were working alone.”
“Because it’s a work dinner, Paris. I don’t itemize every work dinner for you. You don’t itemize every patient you see for me.”
“I’d tell you if one of my patients had a standing spot on our shared calendar,” I said, and watched him flinch, just slightly, in a way that told me the comparison had landed harder than he wanted to admit.
I didn’t have the whole picture of it yet, only pieces, Nadine’s dress, the benefit I hadn’t been told about, Owen’s careful silences whenever Ridgeway came up at family things, the way Mark’s face had just gone still at the mention of a calendar we both technically owned.
“I’m saying I feel like I’m disappearing from your life a little at a time and I can’t get you to notice it long enough to talk about it,” I said, and Mark looked at me like a problem he didn’t have the bandwidth to solve tonight, and told me he loved me, and paid the check, and we went home, and neither of us mentioned it again for eleven days.
We made love that night, slowly, tenderly, both of us reaching for something we could still find in each other even when everything above it had gotten complicated, and afterward Mark held me and told me, quietly, that he was sorry he’d been distracted lately, that he’d do better.
I believed him completely in that moment, a promise made in the dark by someone whose weight against my back still felt like home.
I didn’t ask him about the calendar entry.
I told myself I would, another night, when the evening hadn’t already given me back the husband I’d missed too badly to risk losing again so soon.
That night I lay awake next to him thinking about Imani, who I hadn’t told the full truth in two weeks, who would ask me questions I didn’t yet want to answer honestly. I thought I would call her tomorrow. I fell asleep before I decided whether that was true.
In the morning, Mark was already up when I woke, humming something tuneless in the shower the way he always did when a deal was going well.
I lay there a few minutes listening to the water running, his off-key attempt at a song neither of us could ever name.
He came out with a towel around his waist, kissed my forehead on his way to the closet, asked whether I wanted the last of the coffee or if he should make a fresh pot, entirely himself, entirely present.
I couldn’t point to a single morning like this one and call it evidence of anything wrong.
That, and not for the last time, was the hardest part of all of this.