5. Natalie
CHAPTER FIVE
Natalie
The board chair took the podium first, running through the evening's minor awards, best new installation, rising professional under thirty-five, a lifetime achievement plaque for a nursery owner who'd been in the business since before either Daniel or I was born, before working up to the main event.
I sat with my hand loose in Daniel's under the table, half listening, half still turning over the woman's mistake from earlier.
Daniel and Rebecca. It kept surfacing, a small stone I couldn't stop running my thumb over.
Rebecca's table was two down from ours, close enough that I could see her without turning my head.
She was laughing at something the man beside her had said, radiant in a way that had nothing to do with vanity and everything to do with belonging, the specific ease of someone who had never once had to wonder whether she was supposed to be in the room.
She wore navy, understated, expensive in the quiet way that didn't announce itself, and I found myself noticing, with a specificity that surprised me, that she looked less like a romantic rival and more like a colleague who had simply been photographed beside my husband so many times that the two of them had started to read, visually, as a matched set.
I glanced back toward Whitney, who was watching the whole room from her spot near the florals with the sharp, slightly territorial attention of someone who had spent all week making sure every arrangement matched the color palette she'd promised, and caught her eye for a second.
Whitney lifted her eyebrows a fraction, a silent are you okay, and I gave her a small nod that I mostly meant.
An important-looking man in his sixties, one of Kessler Outdoor's biggest commercial clients, whose name I recognized from years of dinner-table shorthand, Frank Delacroix, who owned half the strip malls in three counties, stopped beside our table on his way back from the bar.
He shook Daniel's hand warmly, congratulated him on the pending award, and then turned to me with the easy confidence of a man who thought he already knew the answer to his own question.
"And this must be Rebecca," he said, extending his hand to me. "Daniel's told me so much about the two of you and this whole operation. Quite a team you make."
The words landed in the middle of our table like something dropped from a height.
"I'm his wife," I said. "Natalie."
The man's face went through the same fast recalibration I'd already watched twice that night, mortification arriving a half beat behind the words.
"Oh, God. I am so sorry. I just assumed, I've seen you two at so many of these things together, I thought...
" He trailed off, clearly unsure how to finish a sentence that had nowhere good left to go.
Daniel, to his credit, corrected it immediately, warmly, no hesitation.
"This is Natalie, my wife of eleven years.
Rebecca's my business partner, she's over at table four.
" He said it lightly, already moving to smooth the moment over, and the client apologized twice more and retreated toward the bar looking like a man who wanted the floor to open beneath him.
At table four, Rebecca laughed, easy and unbothered, and called across the small distance, "Happens all the time, Frank, don't worry about it," and the moment dissolved into the general noise of the room, everyone moving on, the client rejoining his table, the trio starting a new song.
Everyone moved on except me.
Someone near the bar, close enough that the phrase carried, said "work wife" and laughed, and I couldn't have told you afterward who it was or what exactly prompted it, only that Daniel, catching the tail end of it, grinned and called back, easy, half joking, the way he joked about everything, "Rebecca and I have been the old married couple around here for years, ask anybody. "
He said it the way he said most things, without weight, a throwaway line meant to smooth an awkward moment into something everyone could laugh at together. I watched three people at the neighboring table actually laugh.
I went very still.
Daniel felt it, I think, some change in the pressure of my hand under his, because he glanced over, still mostly smiling, and said, "What?"
"Nothing," I said, and it wasn't nothing, but the lights were already dimming further, the emcee was already stepping to the microphone to introduce the evening's major award, and there was no room in that moment, in that dress, at that table, to explain to my husband that a joke he'd made without thinking had landed somewhere just beneath my sternum and stayed there.
I looked for Marcus's wife, hoping for some small, ordinary distraction, and found her already watching the stage, oblivious, and looked instead toward the back of the room where Whitney stood with her arms crossed, no longer even pretending to fuss with the centerpieces, just watching me with an expression I recognized because I'd worn it myself, on her behalf, at other tables, other years.
She mouthed something I couldn't quite make out.
It might have been you okay. It might have been something less kind about Daniel, delivered with the particular loyalty of a best friend who had decided, on my behalf, that a line had been crossed even if I hadn't decided that myself yet.
Beside her, I noticed Ben, who'd come stag as he usually did to these things, watching the same little scene with an expression that had none of his usual easy humor in it.
He wasn't looking at Rebecca. He was looking at his brother, and something in his face made me think, for the first time that night, that I wasn't the only person in the room who'd noticed.
"Ladies and gentlemen," the emcee said, "it is my great pleasure to present this year's Mid-South Green Industry Excellence Award."
Daniel squeezed my hand once, quick, delighted despite himself, and I squeezed back because some part of me was still, underneath everything, so proud of him that the pride simply overrode whatever else was trying to surface.
Whatever the joke had meant, whatever the client's mistake had meant, whatever the whole evening had been quietly building toward, it could wait.
This moment belonged to him, to us, to the version of the night I had walked in expecting.
The emcee began reading the nominee copy, twelve years of growth, the Cartwright Farms redevelopment, community investment, employee retention, and I sat up straighter, already smiling, already reaching for the version of pride I'd been saving up all week, with no idea yet how completely the next five minutes were about to take it away from me.