CHAPTER NINE
PARIS
The peonies sat on the kitchen island for four days before I let myself stop being suspicious of them, and Mark was, for most of that week, more present than he’d been in months, home for dinner three nights running, asking about the post-surgical program’s launch date, even coming with me on a Saturday to walk through the space at Harborview where the new equipment would go.
He fixed the sticking cabinet in the kitchen that had annoyed us both for a year, unprompted, a small domestic repair that used to be an ordinary part of our life together and had somehow become rare enough to notice.
It was, I told Imani that week, the best stretch we’d had in a year, and I wanted so badly to believe it was the new normal that I nearly missed the invitation entirely.
I found it by accident, a stiff card in the recycling bin under a stack of catalogs, the Ridgeway Capital Founders’ Circle dinner, spouses and partners welcome, dated two weeks earlier, a dinner Mark had told me was closed to anyone outside the firm.
I held it up when he got home. “You said this was a firm-only thing.”
He looked at the card for a second too long before he answered. “It got expanded. Last minute.”
“It says spouses and partners welcome, right here, and it’s dated two weeks ago, which means you had it before you told me it was firm-only.”
“Paris, it was a work dinner. You would have hated it. Two hours of people talking about carried interest and fund performance.”
“That’s not the point,” I said, and heard my own voice climbing in a way it rarely did. “You didn’t ask me if I wanted to go and decide it wasn’t for me. You decided that for me, and then told me something that wasn’t true so I wouldn’t ask questions about it.”
“I wasn’t lying to you. I was trying to spare you a boring night.”
“You don’t get to decide what I find boring,” I said. “You used to ask. You used to say, this one’s going to be dry, do you want to skip it, and I’d decide for myself. Now you decide for both of us and call it consideration.”
Mark set the card down on the counter and rubbed a hand over his face. “I don’t know what you want me to say. I’m trying to protect you from a part of my life that isn’t fun for anyone who isn’t neck-deep in it.”
“I was neck-deep in it before it had a name,” I said. “I was neck-deep in it when Ridgeway was a line of credit with my signature on it and four guys who hadn’t slept in three days. I don’t need protecting from the part where it worked.”
“That’s not what this is about.”
“Then tell me what it’s about, Mark, because from where I’m standing it looks exactly like you deciding, over and over, that I’m not equipped to handle your own company’s dinners.”
“I’m not saying you’re not equipped. I’m saying some of it genuinely isn’t worth your evening, and I’m trying to save you from the parts that aren’t.”
“You don’t get to make that call unilaterally and then lie about making it,” I said. “That’s the problem. Not whether the dinner would have bored me. Whether you trust me enough to let me decide that for myself.”
He didn’t have an answer for that, not one he was willing to say out loud, and the argument didn’t resolve so much as run out of air, both of us retreating to separate rooms, the invitation still sitting on the counter between us like evidence neither of us wanted to pick back up.
I sat on the edge of the bed for a long time afterward, listening to him move around downstairs, the small sounds of a man trying to look occupied rather than avoidant, a cabinet opening and closing, water running longer than it needed to.
I thought about calling my sister in Providence, and then didn’t, because I still didn’t have language for what I’d say if she asked how things were, and because saying it out loud to someone outside this house would make it permanent in a way I wasn’t ready for yet.
That night, unable to sleep, I did something I hadn’t let myself do before, which was go back through the last year and a half with deliberate skepticism instead of the automatic trust I’d extended by default.
I still had the digital invitation from the spring gala for a hospital board Mark sat on, forwarded to my personal email months ago and then apparently forgotten by both of us, marked staff and immediate leadership only.
I pulled up the gala’s own recap page from the hospital’s site and found a photograph, four rows down, of at least three other board members’ wives seated at the head table.
I remembered the fund manager’s retirement dinner that same fall, an event Mark had described to me as strictly professional, no plus-ones, an evening I’d spent alone with takeout and a rerun of a show we used to watch together.
Sabine had posted a single photo from that dinner on the firm’s internal newsletter, tagged with the fund manager’s name and, unmistakably, his wife’s.
I thought too of the June barbecue Imani had mentioned without meaning to, an event apparently already on Elliot’s calendar through a client connection, that hadn’t made it onto mine at all.
I checked my email out of habit, and found, buried three folders deep in a promotional inbox I rarely opened, an evite from Ridgeway’s events coordinator sent six weeks earlier, spouses and families welcome, that I’d apparently glanced at once and archived without registering it, assuming, from the subject line alone, that it was another vendor’s marketing email rather than an actual invitation with my own name on the recipient list.
Our accountant, Denise, still auto-synced Mark’s reimbursed travel expenses into our joint tax archive every quarter, a habit left over from years earlier when we’d filed as a small household business and never bothered to change the setup once Ridgeway got big enough to have its own accounting department entirely separate from us.
I hadn’t thought about that archive in over a year.
I opened it that night looking for nothing in particular and found, near the top, the Chicago folio, submitted and approved three weeks earlier.
Adjoining suites. Both their names on the same document, same nights.
I sat with the laptop open for a long time, working through the boring, reasonable explanation on my own, deal teams keeping odd hours, needing to move between rooms without disturbing a whole floor, the same explanation Mark had given me once before, years ago, about other deals with other colleagues who weren’t Sabine.
The explanation held up perfectly well on its own logic.
It still didn’t make me feel any better, not for one single minute.
I remembered, too, a conversation from over a year earlier, back when Ridgeway had just closed its second fund, when Mark had told me, almost offhand, that most spouses didn’t come to the quarterly investor dinners anymore, that it had become an industry norm rather than anything specific to us.
I’d believed him completely at the time, because I had no reason not to, and because the explanation fit neatly with everything else he told me about a world I’d never worked in myself.
Sitting at the kitchen island now, I wondered how many of my beliefs about that world had started exactly that way, offered once, confidently, by the one person I trusted to tell me the truth about it.
Each piece alone had felt, at the time, like a reasonable exception.
Laid end to end, at eleven o’clock at night with the invitation still downstairs on the counter and the Chicago folio still open on my screen, they built something I could no longer explain away as coincidence.
I counted six events, over eighteen months, where Mark had told me spouses weren’t included and where I now had reason to believe that wasn’t true, plus a recurring dinner on his calendar with no location attached, plus an airport departure lounge on a Sunday he’d told me was an office day, plus a hotel arrangement that had a perfectly boring explanation and still sat wrong in my stomach regardless of how many times I talked myself through it.
I went to bed angry, and angrier still that I was already rehearsing how I’d forgive him for this by morning, the same way I’d forgiven a dozen smaller versions of it before.