Chapter Four — Grace
Magnus zipped up the back of my dress that evening while I fought with an earring backing, the two of us moving around each other in the bathroom mirror with the specific choreography of twelve years spent getting ready in the same small space.
"You look good," he said, meeting my eyes in the mirror instead of saying it directly, which he'd always done, some leftover shyness from our first years together that had never fully worn off.
"You say that every time."
"It's true every time."
"You're required to say it. It's in the marriage contract."
"I read that contract very carefully. There's a whole clause about earrings." He took the backing from my fingers when I fumbled it a second time, fixing it himself with more patience than I had left for it. "There. Now you look good and you can hear."
"You should have been a jeweler instead of running a logistics company. You have a gift."
"I have exactly one useful skill with small metal objects, and it's earring backings. Don't get too excited."
"It's very exciting to me right now, given the alternative was walking into this gala looking like I'd lost an earring in a wind tunnel."
He laughed, tucking a loose strand of my hair back into place with the same unthinking care, and checked his watch. "We should go. You know how Whitcombe gets if people arrive after the receiving line breaks up."
"You mean you know how Whitcombe gets. I've met the man twice."
"He remembers you both times. That's more than he does for most people."
The Whitcombe Foundation gala was the kind of event where Magnus was genuinely in his element, moving through a ballroom full of donors and board members and people he half-knew with the particular charm of a man who'd learned to be likeable long before he'd learned to be rich.
I wore the green dress he liked, the one he'd once told me made him forget what he was supposed to be saying mid-sentence at a dinner party three years ago, and he kept his hand at the small of my back the entire night, steering us gently through the crowd like I was something worth navigating carefully around.
"This is my wife, Grace," he said, over and over, to donors and board members and the mayor's chief of staff and a woman who ran a foundation for arts education that I'd been trying to get a meeting with for months.
"She runs Sable and Ink, the design studio that did the invitations for the Ashford gala last spring. You should see the work."
Every time, without fail, there was a little pride in his voice that had nothing performative about it, nothing that suggested he was saying it because it was expected.
I noticed it because I'd noticed its absence in other marriages over the years, other husbands who steered their wives toward the edges of a room like furniture that didn't quite match the rest of the decor, who introduced them with a vague gesture and moved on before anyone could ask a follow-up question.
That was never Magnus. Whatever else was true, I want to be honest that it was never that.
The valet who took our car even commented on it, a young man who clearly worked enough of these events to notice patterns. "You two come here a lot?"
"Often enough," Magnus said.
"You can always tell the couples who actually like each other. Most people hand off the keys and walk in already arguing about who's talking to who first."
"We're arguing about porch swings instead. Healthier argument."
"Sounds like it."
He steered me toward the arts education foundation director himself, a sharp-eyed woman named Ilsa Vance who I'd emailed twice without a response, and made the introduction so smoothly it barely registered as engineered.
"Ilsa, this is my wife, Grace. She's been trying to get five minutes of your time for months, and I told her tonight was the night to just ambush you in person instead of waiting on email. "
Ilsa laughed, surprised into it. "Is that true?"
"Completely true," I admitted. "I have three emails sitting unanswered in your inbox as we speak."
"I get four hundred emails a day. Show me what you've got right now, in the next thirty seconds, or I'll forget again by Monday."
I pulled up photos of the Ashford invitation suite on my phone, my hands only a little unsteady, and watched her expression shift from polite interest into something sharper, more engaged.
By the time the band started up again, she'd given me her direct line and told me to call Tuesday, a lead that would eventually turn into the studio's first arts nonprofit client the following spring.
Magnus caught my eye across the room afterward and gave me a small, private thumbs up, and I felt, in that moment, exactly as lucky as I believed myself to be.
The band played something slow near the end of the night, and Magnus found me at the edge of the dance floor without a word, just his hand extended, and we danced the way we always did at these things, badly, both of us laughing more than actually moving in time with the music.
"You're stepping on my feet," I said.
"You're stepping on my feet."
"I am wearing significantly more dangerous shoes than you are. If anyone's feet are at risk here, it's yours."
"Fair point." He pulled me a little closer, resting his chin against my temple, and for a moment neither of us said anything, just moved slowly in a loose circle among a dozen other couples doing the same thing, and I thought, the way I thought at least once at every one of these events, that I could not remember the last time I'd wanted to be anywhere else.
"Ilsa Vance is going to change our year," I said into his shoulder.
"I know. I saw her face when you showed her the photos. You had her at the second slide."
"You set that whole thing up."
"I made an introduction. You did the actual work." He pulled back enough to look at me. "I like watching you do the actual work, for the record. It's one of my favorite things to watch."
Alden Frost found us near the bar, trailing his wife, Elodie, a soft-spoken woman I'd met exactly twice before, once at a fundraiser and once, briefly, at a mutual friend's holiday party.
Alden shook Magnus's hand with the particular warmth of men who like each other without quite being close, and then turned to me with an intensity that felt slightly off, like he was searching my face for something he expected to find and couldn't quite locate.
"Grace. It's good to actually talk to you properly. Magnus mentions you all the time."
"All good things, I hope," I said, joking, reaching for my glass.
Something crossed his face, there and gone so fast I almost convinced myself I'd imagined it. "Of course."
The four of us made small talk that circled harmlessly around the foundation's new wing and somebody's kid getting into Duke on early decision, and it was fine, unremarkable, except that Elodie kept glancing at Magnus in a way that didn't match the lightness of the conversation, quick, assessing looks she seemed to think nobody noticed, and Alden laughed at things a half-second too late, like he was performing attention instead of paying it.
"How's business?" Elodie asked me, at one point, when the men had drifted a few feet away to talk about something with a fellow board member.
"Busy. We just landed the Ashford Hotel account, actually. It's the biggest thing we've done."
"That's wonderful, Grace." She said it warmly enough, but there was something underneath it, a distraction she wasn't quite managing to hide. "You two seem good. Happy."
"We are."
"That's good. That's really good." She said it twice, which I noticed only in hindsight, an odd repetition from a woman who otherwise chose her words carefully.
"I'm glad." The sentence came out strange, like it cost her something to say, and I kept it in the back of my mind without understanding why, the way you do with small oddities that don't yet have anywhere to attach themselves.
The men rejoined us a few minutes later, Magnus in the middle of some story about the board member's recent kitchen renovation gone wrong, animated in the specific way he got when he'd found someone new to charm.
He caught my eye across the small circle and winked, an old habit from the earliest years of our marriage when we used to communicate entire conversations across crowded rooms without saying a word, and I felt, watching him, the specific warm certainty of a woman who believed she knew exactly who her husband was.
Later, someone from the foundation board asked how long Magnus and I had been married.
"Twelve years," Magnus said, easy, automatic, his hand finding mine.
Alden's expression did something strange, a flicker, quick enough that I might have imagined it if I hadn't been half-watching him already since the moment we'd walked up. Elodie looked at her husband and then very deliberately did not look at me.
In the car afterward, windows down because the night had cooled off enough to be pleasant, I brought it up. "Did something happen between you and Alden? He and Elodie were both acting weird all night."
Magnus kept his eyes on the road, hands loose on the wheel. "No. Why?"
"He just seemed off. Kept looking at me like he was trying to solve a math problem. And Elodie kept looking at you the same way."
"I didn't notice." A beat, longer than felt entirely natural. "Long week for both of them, maybe. Alden's dealing with some zoning issue on a property downtown. Maybe they're having their own stuff going on that has nothing to do with us."
"Maybe." I let the conversation drift, tired enough that pressing further felt like more effort than it was worth. "The band was good tonight, at least. Better than last year's gala band. Do you remember last year's band?"
"The one that only knew three songs and played all three of them twice?"
"That's the one."
"I remember Ilsa's husband trying to request something from the nineties and the lead singer just staring at him like he'd asked for something illegal."
"You have an oddly specific memory for terrible wedding bands."
"I have an oddly specific memory for you laughing at terrible wedding bands. The rest is just context."
I let it go, because there was no reason not to, because my husband had spent the entire evening with his hand on my back telling anyone who'd listen how proud he was of me, because the version of the night I'd experienced was warm and easy and entirely consistent with the marriage I thought I had.
It did not occur to me, not even once, that the strangeness in that room had anything to do with something he'd said about me in a room I hadn't been in.
I fell asleep on the drive home, my head against the window, and Magnus carried my shoes inside when we got there because I'd taken them off somewhere around the third mile, a small, ordinary kindness that meant nothing and everything, the way most of the good parts of a marriage do.