Chapter 2
MADELEINE
The last guest left at eleven-forty.
Brian lingered longest, helping Madeleine carry wineglasses to the kitchen while Drew walked with Ruben, Lisa and Victoria to the elevator.
Brian was the kind of man who noticed when a hostess was tired, who dried a glass without being asked, and Madeleine liked him for it even as she wished he would leave so she could stop performing.
"Gorgeous evening, Mad. Really." He set the last glass on the counter. "You're wasted on dinner parties. You should be running a restaurant."
"I'd hate it. I only like cooking for people I actually want to talk to."
Brian grinned. "Then I'm honored." He kissed her cheek and let himself out.
Drew was back in the living room, loosening his tie. He'd switched from bourbon to water at some point, which meant he was thinking about the six a.m. call with the Singapore team, which meant he was already somewhere else. His phone buzzed on the coffee table. He glanced at it.
Madeleine blew out the candles. Wax had pooled in the holders the way she'd wanted, deep amber puddles that smelled like fig and cedar.
She carried them to the kitchen and scraped the wax into the trash with a butter knife, working each holder clean while Drew headed upstairs.
His footsteps moved overhead: bathroom, closet, the creak of the bedroom floor near his side of the bed.
She loaded the dishwasher and wiped the counters.
When she came upstairs, Drew was in bed with his laptop open, reading something that made his eyebrows pull together.
She unzipped her black dress, hung it in the closet and stood there for a moment in her slip, looking at the row of clothes she owned.
She'd bought the dress for tonight. She'd tried on four others before choosing it, had stood in the fitting room turning left and right in front of the mirror, thinking about the neckline, the way the fabric moved, whether Drew would notice.
He hadn't said anything when she'd come downstairs. He'd said looks great about the table.
She pulled on a cotton nightgown, washed her face and brushed her teeth and sat on the edge of the bed.
"Tonight was fun," Drew said, without looking up.
"Mm."
"Ruben is in on the next round. I could tell from the way he was talking about the infrastructure play. And Brian might come in too, once the Lisbon fund closes."
"Good." She rubbed lotion into her hands, working it between her fingers. The skin was still pink from the hot water earlier. "Drew."
"Yeah?"
"When did you and Victoria go to that restaurant? The one in Rittenhouse."
He scrolled something on his laptop. "Which one?"
"The carbonara place."
"Oh. Couple weeks ago, maybe? After the Keirson meeting. The whole team went. Why?"
The whole team. She turned that over. Victoria hadn't said the whole team. Victoria had said remember that carbonara as if two people who'd shared something, not six.
"She made it sound like it was just the two of you."
Drew looked up then. His face had the expression she'd come to recognize over seven years of marriage: a slight contraction around the eyes, a micro-adjustment of the mouth, as if he’d been asked to solve a problem he didn't think existed.
"It wasn't. Priya was there, and Tom, and I think maybe Jordan?
I don't know, Mad. It was a work dinner. "
"I know."
"Then what's the question?"
She folded her hands in her lap. The lotion was making her fingers slide against each other. "There's no question. I just noticed some things tonight and I want to talk about them."
Drew closed his laptop halfway. A concession. His version of turning toward her. "Okay."
"Victoria interrupted your San Francisco story to correct you. Do you remember?"
"That's what's bothering you? She was joking."
"I know she was joking. The thing that caught my attention was that you told me that story two weeks ago, at this table, and you didn't mention her. You told it like you handled the pitch alone. Tonight she told a version where she rescued it, and you agreed with her version. In front of everyone."
"Because her version was funnier."
"Maybe. But yours was the one you told your wife."
Irritation shifted behind his eyes. She watched it happen: the flicker of recognition, the half-second where he heard what she was saying, followed by the shutter coming down.
He opened his laptop again. "Maddie. She's my business partner.
We were at the same meeting. She filled in a detail I left out. That's all that happened."
"That's not all I'm talking about."
"Then what are you talking about?"
She'd rehearsed this in the kitchen, standing at the sink with the hot water running.
She'd planned to say it calmly, factually, presenting a case to a reasonable person.
She was a reasonable person. She could do this without sounding jealous or insecure or any of the words wives got called when they named what they saw.
"You turned your chair away from Ruben to face her. You refilled her glass before mine, before anyone's. You have a restaurant you go to together that I didn't know about. When she walks into a room you look at her the way you used to look at me."
The last part came out before she could stop it, and it hung there, exposed, rawer than anything else she'd said.
Drew sat up against the headboard. He rubbed his face with both hands, and when he dropped them his expression had changed from defensive to something worse: patient. The long-suffering patience of a man being asked to address a concern he found beneath him.
"You're overthinking this."
He said them gently, which made it worse, because gentleness from Drew in this register wasn't tenderness.
It was management. She'd seen him use the same tone on junior employees who brought problems he considered trivial.
I hear you. Let me reframe this for you. The issue is smaller than you think.
"I'm telling you what I saw.”
"And I'm telling you there's nothing to see. Tori is my co-founder. We spend twelve hours a day together. We have shorthand, we have inside jokes. That's what happens when you build something with someone. It doesn't mean anything."
"I didn't say it meant something."
"You said I look at her the way I used to look at you. What am I supposed to do with that?"
"Listen to it."
He exhaled through his nose. "I am listening.
I'm telling you that what you're describing is a professional relationship that has a lot of trust in it, and I'm sorry if it felt uncomfortable tonight, but asking me to be less close to the person I run my company with because you're reading things into a dinner party is not reasonable. "
Not reasonable. There it was. She'd walked into this conversation knowing it was a possible destination and here they were anyway, arrived in under five minutes. She’d described what she saw, with examples, and he’d translated her observations into a character flaw.
She wasn't reporting. She was reading things in.
She wasn't perceptive. She was overthinking.
Madeleine looked at her hands. The lotion had dried. Her skin was clean and she could still feel the ghost of the hot water underneath.
"I'm not asking you to be less close to her. I'm asking you to hear me when I tell you that I spent the evening feeling like a guest in my own house."
"That's not fair."
"It's what happened."
"You planned the dinner. You chose the menu, the wine, the seating. You were the center of the whole evening."
"I was the infrastructure of the whole evening, Drew. There's a difference."
He stared at her. She could see him working through it, running her words through the same analytical framework he applied to everything: Is this a real problem or a perceived problem? Does this require action or reassurance? She knew which side he'd land on. She always knew.
"I think you're tired," he said. "You worked hard on tonight and you're reading too much into a normal situation. Tori respects you. She said your dinner was stunning."
"She said I do this well. Like it's a skill. Like I'm the person who does the dinners."
"You are the person who does the dinners. You're incredible at it. That's a compliment."
Madeleine pulled the covers back and got into bed.
She reached for the lamp on her side and paused with her fingers on the switch.
In the yellow light, Drew's profile was sharp and familiar: the jaw she'd traced with her thumb on their wedding night, the brow that furrowed when he was solving problems, the mouth that used to find hers in the dark without being asked.
She loved that profile. She had loved it for seven years. Loving it had never been the issue.
"I'm going to sleep," she said.
"Maddie.” He put his hand on her arm. His palm was warm, and the touch had the shape of an apology without containing one. "I love you. You know that. Tori is not a threat to us. I promise."
She turned off the lamp. In the dark, his hand stayed on her arm for a few more seconds before he shifted back to his laptop, the screen casting blue light across the ceiling.
She lay on her side and looked at the closet door, which she'd left open. She could see the edge of her black dress hanging there, the one she'd bought and tried on four times in a fitting room and worn tonight for a man who'd told the table it looked great and hadn't told her anything at all.
Tori is not a threat to us.
He'd said it with such certainty. With the absolute confidence of a man who believed his wife was permanent, who'd organized his life around the assumption that Madeleine would always be here, in this bed, in this penthouse, planning the dinners and clearing the plates and turning off the lamp.
Who'd never once considered that the opposite might be true.
That permanence was a choice, not a condition, and he hadn't been making it in months.
Madeleine closed her eyes and didn't sleep for a long time.