CHAPTER THIRTEEN
MERRITT
Iput on the earrings Whitaker gave me for our fifth anniversary, small emeralds set in gold that he'd picked himself instead of leaving to an assistant, and I told myself, fastening them in the mirror, that this was a good sign, something that meant something rather than whatever else I could have worn tonight.
He hadn't said a single word about the gala all week.
Not one. I had waited for the conversation Hollis's question had made me brave enough to want, some version of Whitaker sitting across from me explaining honestly why this year might be different, and it hadn't come, and in the absence of that conversation I had made a decision of my own: I would get ready exactly as I always did, and I would go downstairs, and I would let him tell me himself if something had actually changed, rather than assume the worst on his behalf.
I wore the same dark green dress from that first night on the stairs, the one he'd told me made him forget what he was supposed to be doing, and I did my hair the way I usually did for these events. By seven I was as ready as I'd been for nine years of identical evenings.
Whitaker was waiting at the bottom of the stairs in his tuxedo when I came down, exactly where he always waited, checking something on his phone the way he always checked something on his phone.
He looked up when he heard me on the stairs.
He froze when he saw me.
It wasn't a dramatic freeze, nothing anyone else would have caught if they hadn't spent nine years learning every register of his face.
His expression simply stopped moving, an almost imperceptible pause between recognizing me and knowing what to do with the fact of me standing there in a dress and earrings, ready for an event he clearly hadn't expected me to be ready for.
I knew, before either of us said a single word, exactly what that pause meant.
The house was very quiet. Somewhere behind me, upstairs, a tap I hadn't fully closed was dripping into the bathroom sink, a small ordinary sound that seemed absurdly loud in the space where neither of us was speaking.
I stood on the third step from the bottom, one hand still on the railing, and watched him decide, in real time, what to do with his own face.
"You don't want me there," I said. Not a question. I was too tired, by that point, to ask it as one.
"Merritt..."
"You don't want me there tonight."
He came down the last few stairs slowly, and up close I could see how exhausted he actually looked underneath the tuxedo, weeks of sleepless nights compressed into the lines around his eyes. "It's not that I don't want you there. It's complicated. Tamsin thinks..."
"I don't care what Tamsin thinks. I'm asking you." I made myself hold his gaze, though everything in me wanted to look away and make this easier for both of us the way I'd made everything easier for weeks now. "Do you want your wife beside you tonight?"
The question sat between us in the hallway, simple enough that any honest man should have been able to answer it in a single word. Whitaker opened his mouth, and I watched him reach for that word, and I watched him not find it.
"I need tonight to be about the company," he finally said.
Those six words answered the question I'd been circling for weeks. I need tonight to be about the company. He had turned the company and me into competing claims on the same evening, and standing at the bottom of our own staircase, he had told me which one came first.
Standing there, I finally understood the plain fact beneath two months of focus groups, optics, and strategic calculations. Whenever his wife and his image came into conflict, his image had won, quietly and repeatedly, long before tonight made it impossible to pretend otherwise.
I didn't scream. I didn't cry, not yet, not where he could see it.
I reached up instead and straightened his tie, which had come slightly crooked the way it always did by the time he'd worked himself into a state of trying to explain something he knew he couldn't defend, and I smoothed the fabric flat against his chest with both hands.
"You look handsome," I said, and I meant it, because it was true and because some part of me still wanted, even now, to send him into that room feeling like the best version of himself.
"Merritt, please, let me explain..."
"Go, Whitaker. You're going to be late."
Outside, a car door opened and closed, the driver settling in to wait.
The tap upstairs kept dripping. Neither of us moved for a moment that stretched longer than it needed to, both of us standing in the space between the stairs and the door as though the right words might still arrive if we simply waited long enough for them.
"We'll talk about this after. I promise. I'll come straight home and we'll figure this out."
I kissed his cheek, brief and dry, and stepped back so he could reach the door. "You should go."
He hesitated one more moment, some part of him clearly aware that he was leaving something unfinished behind him, and then his phone buzzed with a text from Tamsin about the car being ready, and the moment closed the way every moment like it had closed for weeks now, urgency winning out over whatever needed saying.
I stood at the window and watched the car pull away from the curb, taillights receding down our long driveway and out onto the street, and I stayed there even after they'd disappeared entirely, watching an empty road in a green dress and emerald earrings he'd picked for me himself, five years ago, when giving me things had still felt like something he wanted to do rather than something he'd forgotten how to do under pressure.
He believed, driving away, that we would fix this after the gala. I could tell by the last thing he'd said, we'll figure this out, spoken with the easy confidence of a man who still thought a conversation could repair whatever this particular evening had just made undeniable.
I stood at that window a long time after the car was gone. In those quiet minutes, before I had made any formal decision, I understood that the conversation he was imagining when he got home was not the same conversation I was going to have with him.