CHAPTER EIGHT
MARK
Sabine and I flew to Chicago for the Halloran deal, two days that turned into three when the term sheet stalled over an indemnification clause neither side wanted to move on first.
The hotel had put us on adjoining floors of the same suite tower, standard practice for deal teams working past midnight who needed to move between rooms without waking the whole hallway, and my assistant had booked it that way without asking, the same arrangement we’d used on a dozen deals before this one.
I signed the expense report at the end of the trip and saw both our names listed side by side under the same folio number, adjoining suites, three nights, and registered, looking at it on the screen, exactly how it would read to someone who hadn’t been in either room and didn’t know the difference between logistics and anything else.
Nobody but Ridgeway’s accounting department would ever see that report, I told myself, and approved it without changing a thing.
The negotiation itself went well enough that the optics barely registered at the time.
On the second day, Halloran’s lead counsel tried to slip an indemnification cap into the revised term sheet that would have left Ridgeway holding the bag on any post-closing litigation, a move clearly designed to see whether we’d notice it buried on page thirty-one of a redline nobody wanted to read closely at six in the evening.
Sabine caught it in real time, flagged the exact clause number without looking down at her own copy, and walked the room through three quarters of comparable fund performance from memory, cool and unhurried, until Halloran’s team backed off the cap entirely rather than keep arguing a point they’d clearly hoped would slide through unnoticed.
“Where’d you learn to do that,” their lead partner asked her afterward, not quite hiding his admiration. “Cold, from memory, no notes.”
“Practice,” Sabine said, already moving on to the next agenda item, and I watched the whole room recalibrate around her competence the way rooms always did, the earned respect of people who’d just watched someone outwork them at their own game.
She was, by any measure, worth every dollar Ridgeway paid her, and worth considerably more than that on a week like this one.
At the closing dinner, one of Halloran’s partners raised a glass and said, with real sincerity, “To Mark and his better half, who’s clearly the one keeping this deal from falling apart.”
The table laughed, warmly, and Halloran’s wife, seated two chairs down, leaned toward Sabine and asked, with the easy familiarity of someone who’d assumed the same thing all week, whether we’d met at a mutual friend’s wedding or through work.
Sabine answered kindly, professionally, the correction so smooth it barely registered as a correction at all, and the wife apologized, embarrassed, and the whole table moved on to dessert within thirty seconds, as though nothing at all had happened, which was, I was beginning to understand, exactly the problem.
Nothing ever felt like it had happened. Each moment dissolved too quickly to leave a mark on anyone but me, and even on me it barely lasted the length of a dessert course before I’d moved on to the next redline in my head.
It happened again the next morning, at breakfast, when a junior associate from Halloran’s side asked Sabine, entirely without guile, whether she and I had met at Wellesley’s business school partnership event, assuming some shared history that explained why we moved through the deal room so seamlessly together.
Sabine corrected that one herself, quickly and kindly, but I noticed she was starting to do the correcting more often than I was, and I noticed, too, that I hadn’t once, across three days in Chicago, mentioned Paris’s name to anyone at Halloran.
There had been natural openings. I simply hadn’t taken them, and it hadn’t occurred to me until Sabine’s correction made the absence obvious.
Later, in the hotel bar, Sabine brought it up herself, unprompted, over a glass of wine she was only half drinking. “People keep doing that,” she said. “The partner tonight isn’t the first. The associate this morning wasn’t either.”
“I know.”
“Does it bother you?”
“It bothers me that it happens at all,” I said, which was true, if not the whole truth, because what actually bothered me, underneath that, was how easy the correction had become to skip, and how little it seemed to cost me professionally when I skipped it.
“Why doesn’t Paris come to these?” Sabine asked. Not accusing. Genuinely curious, the way she asked most things.
“She’s not really built for the travel schedule. Her work’s in Boston, and it’s real work, not something she can hand off for three days whenever a deal drags.”
“Plenty of spouses travel for one deal a quarter.”
“She’s not most spouses,” I said, meaning it as a compliment and hearing, the moment it left my mouth, how it could sound like the opposite.
The truth, which I didn’t say to Sabine that night, was that traveling with Paris had always required a different kind of effort than traveling with a colleague.
Paris asked questions in these rooms that colleagues never bothered with, wanted to know what Halloran’s people actually cared about outside the deal, noticed things about the room’s dynamics that took me years of practice to see on my own.
It used to make these trips better. Lately it had started to feel like one more variable to manage on top of a term sheet that already required my full attention, and somewhere in that shift I’d stopped asking her to come at all, telling myself it was a scheduling problem rather than admitting I’d started preferring these trips without her.
Sabine studied me for a second longer than was comfortable.
“For what it’s worth,” she said, “I like Paris. What little I’ve met her, at the holiday party two years ago, she asked me more questions about my actual life than anyone else in that room did.
I don’t love standing in for a marriage I’m not part of.
” It was the most direct thing she’d said to me in two years of working together, and I didn’t have a ready answer for it.
“You’re not standing in for anything,” I said, too quickly.
“Mark.” She said my name the way you’d correct a child who was about to touch something hot. “People at that dinner tonight think I’m your wife. That’s not nothing. That’s not on me to fix by myself, and it isn’t fair to keep leaving it for me to manage.”
“You’re right,” I said. “I’ll handle it.”
“You said that after the Wellesley thing at breakfast too.”
“I know what I said.”
“I’m not trying to pile on, I promise. I just think it’s worth saying out loud once, since nobody else in this building seems willing to.
” She finished her wine and set the glass down with a small, final click.
“Whatever’s happening at home, that’s yours to sort out.
But when clients assume I’m your wife, I’d like you to start correcting them instead of leaving it to me. ”
I meant it when I said it, the same way I’d meant it the last three times something like this had come up, and then the Halloran term sheet came back with three redlines that needed attention before midnight, and I didn’t call Paris that night either, and somewhere on the flight home the next morning I found myself rehearsing, uselessly, the conversation I still hadn’t had with my own wife about why my life had stopped making the kind of sense I’d assumed it still made.
Sabine wasn’t wrong about any of it. I understood the optics were bad, understood I’d let Paris disappear from three straight professional trips without ever explaining why, understood I’d become someone who managed these situations rather than fixed them.
What I still couldn’t quite locate, flying east over Ohio with the Chicago skyline already behind us, was why any of it had happened in the first place.
I kept insisting to myself, stubbornly, that it was simple bad scheduling and worse communication, nothing that couldn’t be sorted out with better logistics next quarter.
I landed at Logan at nine that night and, instead of going straight home, stopped at the flower shop near the airport that stayed open late, and bought Paris the peonies she actually liked instead of the roses I usually defaulted to when I was buying flowers out of guilt rather than intention.
This was going to be the correction Sabine had asked for, I told myself, driving home with them on the passenger seat.
Better communication. Fewer trips without her.
A cleaner story next time someone asked.
It felt, in the car that night, like a plan.
It would take considerably longer than I expected to understand it wasn’t one.