CHAPTER FOURTEEN
PARIS
Imani came over the afternoon of the gala with a garment bag, a bottle of wine we didn’t open until after, and a bag of takeout from the Thai place we’d been ordering from since college, because she’d correctly guessed I hadn’t eaten anything all day.
“Sit,” she said, setting containers out on the kitchen island like we were having any ordinary Saturday. “You’re not walking into that ballroom running on nerves and coffee.”
We ate standing at the counter, the way we always did, and for a while the conversation had nothing to do with Mark or Ridgeway at all.
Imani told me about a parent conference that had devolved into a genuine shouting match over a seventh grader’s science fair volcano, complete with a father who’d insisted the whole thing was rigged against his son specifically.
She told me Elliot’s firm had finally won the commission for the theater renovation downtown, the one he’d been chasing for a year, and that he’d celebrated by falling asleep on the couch at eight-thirty with the blueprints still spread across his chest.
“He’s going to be insufferable about crown molding for the next six months,” Imani said. “I’m already bracing for it.”
“I love that man.”
“Everyone loves that man. That’s the problem. Nobody ever tells him no.” She stole a piece of my chicken. “How’s the post-surgical thing? Still on track?”
I told her about Dr. Okonkwo-Reyes, the credentialing scramble, Dahlia’s two extra hours, and Imani listened with the delighted attention she always gave anything I’d actually built with my own hands, asking good questions, genuinely proud in a way that had nothing performed about it.
She told me, in turn, about a college friend of ours neither of us had spoken to in years who’d apparently resurfaced online selling essential oils with an intensity that had taken over her entire personality, and we spent a good ten minutes laughing about a woman we hadn’t thought about since our twenties, the kind of easy, inconsequential laughter that had nothing to prove and nowhere urgent to be.
“Remember the year we drove to Maine for New Year’s and the heater died in your car halfway there,” Imani said, apropos of nothing, wiping her eyes. “We wore every piece of clothing we packed and still nearly died.”
“We stopped at that diner and the waitress gave us free pie out of pity.”
“Best pie of my life. Genuinely. Trauma pie always tastes better.” She reached over and squeezed my hand, still laughing, and for a moment the whole evening ahead of me felt distant and manageable, just one more hard thing among many hard things Imani and I had survived together, none of which had ever actually broken either of us for good.
Only once the food was cleared did she unzip the garment bag and sit me down at the mirror, asking, point blank, whether I actually wanted to go tonight.
“I have to go.”
“That’s not what I asked.”
I thought about it honestly, turning the question over the way Imani always made me do.
“I want to go as the person who built that company alongside him,” I said finally.
“I don’t want to go as an apology for existing, or as a corrected seating chart, or as a problem Petra Lennox managed at the last minute.
If I can walk in as the first version, I want to be there.
If I can only manage the second, I’d rather stay home. ”
“Then let’s make sure it’s the first version,” Imani said, and got to work on my hair.
Halfway through, I caught myself reaching for a different pair of shoes than the ones I’d originally picked out, a more conservative navy pair I hadn’t worn in over a year, shoes that photographed well and disappeared into a crowd instead of standing out in it.
My hand was actually on the box before I noticed what I was doing.
“What’s wrong with the gold ones,” Imani asked, watching me in the mirror.
“Nothing. I just thought maybe something quieter.”
“You’ve been wearing those gold shoes to every good night out we’ve had in three years. Since when do you need quieter shoes for a party celebrating a company you helped build?”
I looked at the navy box in my hand for a moment longer, then put it back on the shelf and picked up the gold ones instead, feeling almost silly at how much better the small decision made me feel.
“Since apparently I’ve gotten very good at making myself smaller without noticing I was doing it,” I said.
“Well. Noticed now. Fixed now.” Imani handed me the shoes and went back to my hair.
Somewhere in the middle of doing my makeup, Imani asked, conversationally, whether I had a plan for what I’d say if someone asked how Mark and I met, and I caught myself already reaching for the shortened version, met young, dated through his early business years, married once things stabilized, a tidy two sentences that skipped over the double shifts and the fear and everything those years had actually felt like.
“That’s not even true, really,” I said, hearing myself say it out loud. “It’s not a lie. It’s just missing everything that actually happened.”
“So don’t tell that version.”
“What if someone thinks less of him for it? For needing me that much back then?”
“Then that’s a strange thing for anyone to think less of,” Imani said, meeting my eyes in the mirror. “Being loved enough that someone worked doubles for you isn’t an embarrassing detail, Paris. It’s the best thing anyone could say about either of you.”
I thought about the loft on Albany Street while she finished my hair, the folding table where Owen and the engineers used to eat the sandwiches I brought, the night Mark had stood up in front of two investors and told them his wife had better instincts about people than anyone he’d ever hired.
I thought about Costa and the pastitsio, a story I still hadn’t told Mark I knew he’d forgotten, and decided that if tonight gave me an opening, I would tell it myself, to whoever asked how the company survived its hardest year, whether Mark liked hearing it retold or not.
I decided, standing in front of the mirror in the deep blue dress and the gold shoes, that I was not walking into that gala as an apology for existing.
I was walking in as the person who had helped build the thing they were all there to celebrate, in the shoes I actually liked, telling the stories I actually remembered.
Imani poured us each a small glass of wine before I left, more ritual than indulgence, and raised hers toward mine. “Whatever happens tonight,” she said, “you already know who you are. Nobody in that ballroom gets to hand that back to you or take it away. You walked in with it.”
“What if it’s bad,” I said. “What if I get in there and it’s exactly what I’ve been afraid of?”
“Then you’ll come stay with us, and we’ll figure out the next part together, and you’ll survive it the same way you’ve survived every hard thing before this one.” She squeezed my hand. “But don’t walk in already braced for the worst. Walk in as yourself. Let them meet her.”
“You ready?” she asked, when the car outside honked.
“No,” I said. “But I’m going anyway.”
She squeezed my hand once more, the way she did, and I picked up my bag and walked out to the car Mark had waiting.
He was already standing beside it, and when he saw me come down the steps, his whole face went unguarded for a second in a way I hadn’t seen from him in months, and for that one moment I watched my husband look at me exactly the way he used to, plainly delighted, unable to help it.
He crossed the sidewalk before I’d finished coming down the last step and kissed me, once, careful of my lipstick, and told me I looked beautiful in a voice that had nothing performed in it at all.
In the car, he reached over and took my hand the way he used to on the drive to any important thing, and for a few minutes we talked easily, about nothing, about the driver’s radio station, about a billboard we’d passed a hundred times and never once discussed, and it felt, for those few minutes, like any ordinary couple on their way to any ordinary evening, easy in a way I hadn’t let myself expect tonight.
He loved me. I didn’t doubt that. He wanted me too, in a way that had nothing to do with anyone else in that ballroom. Both were true, and so was this: the man holding my hand in the back of that car had spent the last year making less and less room for me in his own life.
The Langford came into view, lit up and enormous, and Mark squeezed my hand once before the car stopped. “Ready?” he asked.
“No,” I said, echoing Imani without quite meaning to. “But I’m going anyway.”
He laughed, and it was a real laugh, and for one more moment before the driver opened the door, I let myself believe the whole night might actually go the way I’d decided, walking out of my own bedroom an hour earlier, that it would.