CHAPTER ELEVEN
MERRITT
Hollis picked the restaurant, a small Vietnamese place near her office that Whitaker had never once set foot in, and somewhere between the appetizer and the entrée it struck me that this was the first meal I'd eaten in weeks that had nothing to do with managing anyone else's crisis.
"You ordered for me," I said, when the spring rolls arrived without either of us having discussed them.
"I've known you seventeen years, Merritt.
I know what you order when you're stressed, when you're happy, and when you're pretending you're not thinking about your husband.
This is stressed-and-pretending, so I got you the spring rolls and the extra chili oil, because apparently your coping mechanism these days is pain I can control. "
"That's disturbingly accurate."
"I contain multitudes." She poured tea for both of us without asking, another habit worn smooth by nearly two decades of the same booth-adjacent friendship, and for a moment we simply ate, the ordinary rhythm of two women who'd shared a dorm room before either of us had husbands or scandals or crisis managers, back when the biggest disaster either of us faced was a shared bathroom and a broken window unit in August.
"Remember the apartment on Denning Street?" I asked.
"The one with the radiator that only worked in July?
God, yes. I still think about that place every winter.
" She smiled, the particular smile that belonged only to people who'd survived something together, however small.
"You used to make grilled cheese at two in the morning like it was a personality trait. "
"It was a personality trait."
"It still is. I've seen your freezer." She reached over and stole one of my spring rolls without asking, another old habit, and her expression shifted, softened, the preamble settling into something more serious underneath it.
"So talk," she said, once the waiter had cleared the first round of plates.
"You've been giving me the highlight reel for a month. I want the actual footage."
I told her all of it, the canceled interview, the luncheon, the misprinted envelope, the website changes, Sabine's visit, laid out in order the way I hadn't yet laid it out for anyone, not even myself.
Hollis listened without interrupting, which was unusual for her, and when I finished, she sat back and turned her water glass slowly on the table for a moment before she spoke.
"I'm not going to tell you to leave him," she said. "That's not my call to make, and honestly, I don't think that's even the question you're actually asking me."
"What's the question, then?"
"You tell me. But here's what I keep coming back to, listening to all of that.
Fenner caused this entire mess. Fenner's the one whose name is actually attached to a federal investigation.
And Fenner still gets to show up at receptions, still gets his photo taken smiling next to senators, still gets to exist in public exactly the way he always has.
" She leaned forward. "You didn't do anything, Merritt.
Your dad did something thirty years before you even met Whitaker.
And somehow you're the one who's disappeared from your own life while the man who actually caused this walks around free as a bird.
If you're not the problem, why are you the only person being hidden? "
I didn't have an answer. I sat with the question the way you sit with a splinter you've finally located after days of feeling it without seeing it, small and precise and suddenly impossible to ignore.
"I don't know," I finally said. "I keep telling myself there's a strategy I'm not seeing. That Whitaker's weighing risks I don't have access to."
"Maybe he is. Companies do things that look insane from the outside and turn out to be calculated.
I'm not saying Whitaker's some kind of villain twirling a mustache behind closed doors.
" Hollis reached across the table and put her hand over mine.
"I'm saying that even if every single decision has a defensible business logic behind it, at some point you're allowed to ask whether the cost of that logic is one you agreed to pay.
Because from where I'm sitting, nobody's actually asked you.
They've just started making the withdrawals. "
We talked for another hour after that, about easier things eventually, her upcoming trip, my mother's garden, but Hollis's question stayed lodged where she'd planted it, and it was still there when I left the restaurant and started walking toward where I'd parked, three blocks through a part of downtown I didn't usually have reason to visit.
That was when I saw the banner.
It hung across the front of a building I passed on the way to my car, a massive vinyl advertisement for Bellamy Aeronautics' upcoming Innovation Gala, the same event I had attended every single year for nine years running.
Whitaker's photograph filled most of the banner, professional and composed, BELLAMY AERONAUTICS: BUILT ON TRUST printed beneath his face in letters three feet tall.
I stood on the sidewalk and looked at it for longer than made sense, people moving around me on the sidewalk, and tried to remember when anyone had mentioned this year's gala to me at all.
I checked my phone right there on the street, scrolling back through weeks of messages between Whitaker and me, and found nothing.
No conversation about what I'd wear. No discussion of the guest list, the caterer, the seating charts Sabine usually fussed over for weeks in advance. Nothing.
I had attended every gala since before we were married. I had never once, in nine years, needed to be formally invited to an event that was, by every practical measure, also my own.
This year, apparently, I did.
I got in my car and sat there for a while without starting the engine, Hollis's question circling back around with new weight now that I had something concrete to hang it on.
If you're not the problem, why are you the only person being hidden.
I thought about Fenner's photograph from the reception weeks earlier, easy and smiling beside the exact people his conduct had endangered.
I thought about the website, restored now in name only, my contributions reduced to a clause in a paragraph that used to be entirely mine.
I thought about Sabine's visit, sensible, delivered like a compliment and carrying an accusation underneath it.
And I thought about a banner three feet tall, advertising an event I might not even be invited to attend, hanging over a sidewalk in a city where I had spent nine years learning exactly how to be a wife this family wouldn't need to hide.
I drove home slower than usual that night, taking the long way past the river even though it added twenty minutes to the trip, because I wasn't ready yet to walk into a house where I would have to decide whether to ask Whitaker directly about the gala or wait, again, to see whether the invitation would simply fail to arrive the way so many other things had failed to arrive over the last six weeks.
I already suspected which one it would be. I just wasn't ready, that night, to hear him confirm it out loud.