4. Natalie
CHAPTER FOUR
Natalie
Ifelt beautiful walking into the Factory on Saturday night, which was not a thing I let myself feel often enough to take for granted.
The green dress did what I'd hoped it would do, and I'd spent an embarrassing amount of time on my hair, twisting it up and taking it back down twice before settling on something loose enough that Daniel could still run his fingers through it without ruining it.
Daniel's hand found the small of my back the second we stepped out of the car, and he leaned in close enough that I felt his breath against my ear.
"You're going to be a problem tonight," he murmured. "I'm going to spend the whole speech thinking about getting you out of that dress instead of thanking anybody."
"Please thank people. I fronted the caterer deposit."
He laughed, the real laugh, head back, and kissed my temple, and for the first twenty minutes of the evening everything was exactly what I'd pictured.
We moved through the crowd together, his arm at my waist, and he introduced me to people, some I knew and plenty I didn't, a decade of new faces belonging to a company that had outgrown the version of itself I remembered.
The venue had been transformed, string lights strung across the exposed beams, a jazz trio in the corner, Whitney's centerpieces on every table looking exactly as good as she'd promised they would, low arrangements of white hydrangea and eucalyptus that she'd been fussing over via text since six that morning.
I found her near the bar and hugged her too hard.
"You did an amazing job."
"I know." She grinned, surveying the room with the satisfaction of a woman who'd been up since five. "You look incredible, by the way. Green was the right call."
"Daniel picked it out, technically. Three years ago. I just kept it."
"Smart man." She squeezed my arm. "Go be a trophy wife for one night. You've earned it."
"I'm not a trophy wife."
"I know, I'm being annoying. Go enjoy your husband's big night."
I did, for a while. A man I didn't recognize, older, silver-haired, wearing the kind of watch that suggested he owned several nurseries, shook my hand near the hors d'oeuvres table and asked how long I'd been with Kessler Outdoor.
"Since the beginning," I said, smiling. "I'm Daniel's wife."
His eyebrows went up, genuine surprise, quickly smoothed over. "His wife! I had no idea Daniel was married. I'm so sorry, I should have realized. It's lovely to meet you."
I laughed it off. "It's fine. We keep a low profile."
"Well, he's a lucky man." He wandered off toward the bar, and I stood there for a second turning the interaction over, deciding it meant nothing.
Some men simply didn't clock other men's marital status; Daniel wasn't the kind of executive who wore his personal life like a lapel pin.
It wasn't strange. It was just a stranger being a stranger.
I found Marcus and his wife, Deanna, at their table a few minutes later, and Deanna, who I actually liked quite a bit despite seeing her maybe twice a year, pulled out the chair beside her and made me sit for a few minutes and tell her about the Sparrow Hill project, since she'd heard about it secondhand from Marcus and wanted the real version.
It was a good, ordinary conversation, the kind I used to have constantly at these events years ago, and for those few minutes I felt entirely at ease, entirely myself, a woman with her own accomplishments to discuss rather than simply an accessory to someone else's evening.
The second time the mistake happened, twenty minutes later, it landed differently.
A woman in her fifties, someone from the trade association board judging by her lanyard, approached with genuine warmth and said, "You must be so proud of everything Daniel and Rebecca have built. That Cartwright Farms project alone, it's remarkable what the two of you have done."
I opened my mouth to correct her, gently, the way I had with the silver-haired man, and then registered what she'd actually said. Not Daniel and Natalie. Daniel and Rebecca.
"I'm Daniel's wife," I said. "Natalie."
Her face did something complicated, a fast recalibration, embarrassment chased almost immediately by an attempt to cover it. "Oh, of course, I'm so sorry, I just assumed, Rebecca's always the one at these things, I didn't mean anything by it."
"No, of course not," I said, and smiled, and meant it as much as I could mean anything in that moment, because it was, on its face, an understandable mistake.
Rebecca probably was always the one at these things.
I hadn't been to a Kessler Outdoor function in over a year.
People built assumptions out of whoever they actually saw standing next to Daniel, and lately that had not been me.
I found Whitney near the florals table a few minutes later, still recalibrating, and told her what had happened, keeping my voice light because the alternative felt like making too much of it in the middle of a party.
"That's not nothing, Nat." Whitney's eyebrows were up, her arms already crossed in the specific posture she got when she was gearing up to be more outraged on your behalf than you were allowing yourself to be. "Twice in twenty minutes. That's not a coincidence, that's a pattern somebody built."
"It's an easy mistake to make. She's at everything. I'm at nothing."
"Whose fault is that, though? Not yours, is what I'm saying." Whitney glanced across the room toward where Rebecca stood near the stage, laughing at something, entirely at ease. "You're allowed to be more bothered by this than you're letting yourself be."
"I'm a little bothered."
"You're a professional at pretending you're not bothered. I've known you fifteen years, I can see the seams." She squeezed my arm, gentler now. "I'm not saying blow up his big night. I'm saying don't talk yourself out of what you're noticing just because it's inconvenient timing."
I promised her I wouldn't, and mostly meant it, and let her get back to fussing over a centerpiece that had shifted, and went to find Daniel, who caught me by the hand and pulled me toward a knot of people near the bar, already introducing me before I'd fully arrived.
"This is my wife, Natalie," he said, and I felt myself relax a little, hearing him say it plainly, unprompted, to a stranger who hadn't even asked.
I used to be the one who knew where he needed to be next.
I told myself that thought didn't mean anything either.
I got a glass of wine. I talked to Marcus's wife about her daughter's soccer schedule.
I let Daniel pull me onto the small dance floor before the speeches started and I let his hand at the small of my back erase, for four minutes, everything I'd just spent half an hour quietly cataloguing.
"You having fun?" he asked, spinning me under his arm with more confidence than skill, nearly clipping an elbow into a passing waiter, which made us both laugh so hard we had to stop dancing for a second to recover.
"I'm having a great time," I said, and in that moment, with his hand warm against my spine and the trio playing something slow, I believed it completely.
It was only later, once the lights dimmed for the speeches and the room turned toward the small stage at the front, that the evening's earlier moments started arranging themselves into something with a shape I didn't like, though I still couldn't have told you, sitting at our table with Daniel's jacket draped over my shoulders against the venue's aggressive air conditioning, exactly what that shape was going to turn out to be.