Chapter 3 #2
She started sleeping differently. She woke at three or four a.m. with her mind already running, cataloguing the previous day's evidence.
The way Drew had said we seventeen times during a twenty-minute conversation about work.
The way he'd described Victoria's presentation style with more admiration than the Broad Street Kitchen expansion proposal Madeleine had spent six weeks writing, the one that would double their capacity and add a weekend breakfast service for families in transitional housing.
He'd said that's great, babe and turned back to his laptop.
She'd stood in the doorway of his office holding the printed draft and understood that she could have been holding anything.
A receipt. A takeout menu. It wouldn't have mattered. The response would've been the same.
It was a morning before he went to work when she tried again.
Drew was at the kitchen island with his coffee and the Financial Times spread open in front of him.
The light through the penthouse windows was pale and wintry, and he looked relaxed for once, unhurried, and she thought: now. If not now, when.
She sat down across from him. "Can we talk about something?"
"Mm." He turned a page.
"Drew. Can you look at me?"
He looked up. His eyebrows rose, cooperative, waiting. Thirty seconds of his full attention and expecting her to be grateful for it.
"I've been feeling like we're not connecting," she said.
"And I don't mean the big stuff. I mean the daily stuff.
The small things. You came home Tuesday and I was telling you about the holiday menu at Broad Street and you cut me off mid-sentence to talk about Victoria's API insight. You didn't even realize you'd done it."
He was already shaking his head. "I didn't cut you off. You were finished."
"I wasn't finished. I was in the middle of a sentence about Gina's Saturday shift."
"Okay. I'm sorry. I was excited about the breakthrough. It was a big day."
"Every day is a big day, Drew. That's the problem. Every day there's a breakthrough or a crisis or a board call, and it's always more urgent than whatever I'm saying, and after a while—"
"Maddie." He folded the newspaper. He reached across the island and covered her hand with his. "I hear you. I do. And I'm sorry if I've been distracted. The Series B is consuming everything right now. Once it closes, things will calm down. I promise."
Once it closes. She'd heard that before.
Once the seed round closes. Once the product launches.
Once the Series A closes. Once the board stabilizes.
The horizon line kept moving and Drew kept promising that calm was just on the other side of it, and she kept believing him because the alternative was admitting that there was no other side.
That this was the marriage. That the distraction wasn't a phase but a structure.
"It's not about the Series B," she said.
"Then what's it about?"
She looked at his hand on hers. She could feel the warmth of it, the weight.
She wanted to say: It's about Victoria. It's about the fact that you talk to her for twelve hours and come home and give me the highlights reel.
It's about the carbonara restaurant and the San Francisco story and the way you light up when she walks into a room.
It's about the fact that I am disappearing in this marriage and you can't see it because you're looking at someone else.
But she'd said a version of this after the dinner party, and he'd told her she was overthinking it.
She'd said it again in bed, and he'd told her Victoria wasn't a threat.
If she said it a third time, she would become the wife who couldn't let it go.
The nag. The insecure one. And some part of her — the part that still cooked for him, still rubbed his foot on Friday nights, still made the coffee he forgot to drink — wasn't ready to be that woman.
"Nothing," she said. "Never mind."
"Hey." He squeezed her hand. "We're good. Right?"
She pulled her hand back and picked up her coffee. "We're good."
He smiled, satisfied, and went back to the Financial Times.
She sat across from him, drank her coffee, listened to the sound of him turning pages and thought: he didn't even notice I gave up.
He asked me to talk and when I stopped talking he was relieved.
He wanted the conversation to end more than he wanted the answer.
Madeleine decided she needed to cook. She went to the kitchen and started making soup, because the weather had turned and soup was the kind of cooking she did when she needed to think with her hands.
Butternut squash. She peeled, cubed, sautéed the onions and thought about the conversation she should have finished and didn't know how to finish.
Drew had responded. Sort of. And nothing had changed, which meant one of two things: either he didn't believe what she'd told him, or he believed it and didn't think it was a problem worth solving.
She didn't know which possibility was worse. One meant he doubted her perception. The other meant he'd weighed her unhappiness against the cost of adjusting and chosen to leave things as they were.
She added a pinch of nutmeg, a splash of cream and tasted it from a wooden spoon. It was good, but she was tired of making things that were good for a house that didn't taste them.
That evening, Drew came home at eight. He ate the soup, two bowls, and said it was perfect.
She watched his face while he ate and saw that he meant it.
He did love her cooking. He did love her.
That was the part that made the whole thing so hard to hold: she wasn't living with a man who didn't care.
She was living with a man who cared in a language she could hear but who'd stopped checking whether she was still in the room.
After dinner he went upstairs to take a call.
She heard him laugh, once, through the closed office door.
She washed dishes and blew out the candle Victoria had sent, the Baies one she'd lit while cooking because it was a beautiful candle and she refused to let the giver ruin the gift.
And then she stood in the dark kitchen and thought about the copper ice bucket from the flea market and how she'd loved it because it showed use.
Because it looked like something that had held things.
She was the ice bucket. She was the beautiful vessel that held everything together, showed the wear yet nobody polished.
Upstairs, Drew was still in his office, his voice a murmur through the door. She brushed her teeth, got into bed and lay there looking at the ceiling, listening to her husband talk to someone who wasn't her.
She turned on her side. On Drew's nightstand, his phone charged in the dark, the screen lighting up every few minutes with notifications she didn't read.
She closed her eyes and lay with her back to his side of the bed and fell asleep before he came in, or after.
She wasn't sure. It didn't matter. The distance between them had become the kind you couldn't measure in inches because it had nothing to do with space.
In the morning, Drew left before she woke up.
He'd made coffee and left it in the pot, which was his version of a love letter.
She poured a cup and drank it standing at the window watching the early light move across the buildings and thought about how many days in a row a person could feel invisible before it stopped being something that was happening to her and became something she was allowing to happen.
She didn't have the answer yet. But she was getting closer.