Chapter 2
Viv
We parked in front of the house a little after midnight, headlights sweeping the stucco and glass like searchlights at a prison break.
Adrian left the engine running as he answered a flurry of texts, thumb tapping so fast it looked like Morse code.
I counted the seconds in my head. At forty-three he finally set the phone aside and looked over at me, his face half-lit by the dash.
“You’ve been really quiet since dinner,” he said.
I stared at the geometric shadows the streetlights made on our garage door. “I’m tired.”
He turned toward me, the way he did in boardrooms when he wanted to signal that he was about to solve someone’s problem. “Are you upset about the speech? I figured you’d be happy I was so brief. Usually you tell me to keep it under ten minutes.”
“I noticed you thanked everyone but me.”
He frowned, as if he hadn’t considered this possibility. “That’s not true. I thanked you at the end. I said you were my everything.”
“You said, ‘and thanks to my wife for putting up with me.”
Adrian blinked. “That was a joke, Vivi. I thought you liked it when I didn’t get too sentimental. And this was about the company’s origins, you know? So I thanked the people who were there at the start. Celeste was there. You came in later, during the early expansion.”
I took a deep breath and exhaled.
I said nothing. It seemed beside the point to correct his version of our timeline.
He shifted in his seat, exasperated but trying to hide it.
“Look, if it’s that important, I’ll make a statement tomorrow.
We can post something on the company page.
I’ll say how much you sacrificed for this, how none of it would have worked if you hadn’t kept our lives together when things were insane. Would that help?”
“No,” I said.
He looked at me as if I’d just told him the Wi-Fi was down. “Then what do you want?”
I opened my mouth, closed it. The problem was, I wasn’t sure what I wanted either. Maybe just to be missed, or for him to see how it felt to watch him orbit a whole other universe with someone else’s gravity at the center.
Adrian tried again, more gently this time. “Vivi, I don’t want this to become something it isn’t. Celeste is just an old friend. You know that, right?”
I nodded, even though I wasn’t sure it was true, and even if it was, it didn’t matter. The damage had been done, and not by Celeste. The damage was the realization that I had been watching him drift for years and only just now noticed we were no longer tethered to the same sky.
He reached out, cupped my hand, thumb tracing the ridge of my knuckle. “I love you,” he said, and the words had the comfortable friction of a well-worn t-shirt.
“I know,” I said.
We went inside. I slipped off my shoes at the door, padded upstairs, and changed into a t-shirt and leggings.
I washed off the makeup, watched the gold and black swirl down the sink in little rivers, then went to the guest room where I knew the boxes from my old studio were still stacked.
I hadn’t opened them since we moved. For years, I told myself it was because there was no space; then I blamed the girls’ after-school schedules, the construction on the house, my own lack of discipline.
The truth was, I’d stopped wanting to remember what I’d given up.
The guest room was cold, the windows always closed because Adrian couldn’t sleep if he sensed a draft anywhere in the house.
The overhead light was harsh, so I clicked on the little reading lamp by the window and crouched next to the first box.
The cardboard was still taped shut, but I found a knife in the closet and sliced it open, careful not to cut too deep.
Inside: folders of pattern paper, a jumble of fabric scraps, a plastic ziplock bag of seam rippers and chalk.
It smelled like dust and old glue. I lifted a sketchbook from the middle, flipped it open, and was surprised by the neatness of my own handwriting.
The first page was a list of names, possible labels for a someday business:
Laurent Atelier
V. Laurent SF
Studio Vivienne
I smiled, despite myself, and turned the page. Swatches glued in the margins, long-legged croquis posed like dancers in a warmup. Some of the designs were embarrassingly earnest; others looked like they could have been pulled straight from a Paris runway.
At the bottom of one page was a photo: me, twenty-four, hair pulled back, a dress pinned to a mannequin and my arms spread wide, laughing at something off-camera.
I tried to remember the joke. I tried to remember how it felt to be that person, hungry and a little arrogant, certain I’d one day walk into a room and be recognized for something that was mine alone.
I found another photo, this one of me and Adrian, before the first million, before the launch, before anything but hope.
We were in the kitchen of our first apartment, standing over a pan of something burnt.
He was laughing; I was giving him a look of comic horror.
There was flour on his shirt and a streak of it on my cheek. I didn’t remember being so pretty.
I turned the page. Near the back of the sketchbook was a single line, written in block letters:
Laurent Atelier. San Francisco. Before I’m thirty.
I checked my phone. It was 1:13 a.m., and I was thirty-eight years old.
From the hallway, I heard Adrian’s voice—soft, at the tail end of another call. I stood up, closed the sketchbook, and placed it back in the box.
For a moment, I considered carrying it into our bedroom, setting it on the pillow next to Adrian’s head. As if he’d open it and see what he’d forgotten. As if he’d even remember that I once wanted something other than him.