Chapter Six — Magnus
Grace was at the studio late again that evening, deep into the second phase of the Ashford rollout, and I left her a plate in the fridge before heading out, a habit that had become so automatic over the years I barely registered doing it anymore.
I texted her from the car. Dinner with the guys.
Left you the chicken. Don't work past nine, you have that Charleston call in the morning.
She sent back a single thumbs up and a photo of Marcus asleep sitting upright at his desk, and I laughed alone in my car in a parking garage, feeling, for just a moment, entirely and uncomplicatedly happy with my life, before I walked into Hendrick's and undid a piece of it without meaning to.
I sat in the car for an extra minute before going in, replaying the photo of Marcus asleep, thinking about how much I liked this specific, unglamorous version of our life, dinners with the guys balanced against her late nights at the studio, both of us building things separately that somehow still fit together into one shared existence.
I had no idea, walking across that parking garage, how badly I was about to describe that exact life to a room full of men as something that had cost me.
Hendrick's again, the same private room, the same crowd minus Perry, who'd had a family thing come up, though Dale had brought along a colleague named Whit I didn't know well, a commercial lender who spent most of the meal talking about a boat he was thinking of buying.
Garrett had started drinking earlier and harder now that the divorce paperwork was actually moving, the abstract grief of the last dinner curdling into something more specific and more bitter now that he'd seen the actual numbers, the actual division of twenty years of shared life into two columns on a lawyer's spreadsheet.
He'd already ordered a second round before I'd finished my first drink, and something in the specific speed of it told me the evening was going to be heavier than the last one, that whatever the mediation session had surfaced that week was still sitting close to the surface, looking for somewhere to land.
"You know what kills me?" Garrett said, well into his second bourbon before the appetizers had even arrived.
"She gets the house. Fine, I get that, the kids need stability.
But I keep thinking about all the versions of my life that got closed off the day I put a ring on her finger, and now I don't even get the thing I gave all that up for. "
"That's not fair to Priya," Alden said. "You're not exactly innocent in how this ended."
"I'm not saying I'm innocent. I'm saying the math doesn't work. You give up your twenties, your risk tolerance, your whole sense of who you are outside of being someone's husband, and then twenty years later you're supposed to just be grateful you got to do it."
"Some men would say they got a family out of it," Whit offered, not unkindly.
"I got a family. I also got a version of myself I never got to meet." Garrett gestured at the table with his glass. "You ever think about that, Magnus? The guy you'd have been if you hadn't gotten married at twenty-six?"
Dale, who'd been mostly quiet, leaned in. "I think about it with the dealership all the time. Who I'd have been if I'd taken that Austin job instead of staying for my dad. Some nights I think I'd have been happier. Other nights I think I'd have just found a different thing to resent."
"At least you'd have found out," Garrett said. "I don't even get the comfort of wondering anymore. I know exactly what the other version would've looked like, because Priya's about to go live it without me."
I'd been quiet through most of this, working through a plate of food I wasn't really tasting, and the question landed somewhere I didn't expect it to, a soft spot that had apparently been forming since the last time we'd sat in this exact room having a version of this exact conversation.
"You ever think about that?" Garrett pressed, when I didn't answer right away.
Dale jumped in before I could speak. "I think about it constantly, if it helps you feel less alone in the wondering. Doesn't mean I'd actually undo any of it. Wondering and wanting to undo something aren't the same animal."
"That's a fair distinction," Whit said. "I wonder about plenty I wouldn't actually trade."
"You ever think about what you'd have done differently?" I said instead of answering directly. "If you'd waited. If you hadn't gotten married at twenty-six the way I did."
"I already told you what I'd do differently. I'd have learned who I was first."
"I married too young," I said, and the words came out easier than they should have, like a door that had been slowly worked loose over the last two weeks finally swinging open the rest of the way.
"I never really got the chance to be selfish.
Every decision I've made for more than a decade has had another person's needs built into it from the start.
Where we lived. When I could travel. Whether I could take a risk that might not pay off for years. "
Alden set his fork down, something sharpening in his expression. "You're talking like Grace ruined your life."
"She didn't." I meant that. I still believe, even now, that I meant that in the moment. "But marriage changes what you can do. That's just true, whether or not you resent it. You stop being a single variable in your own equation. You become half of something, and the other half gets a vote."
"Half of something you chose, though," Alden said. "That's different from something imposed on you."
"I know that. I'm not saying it wasn't my choice. I'm saying the choice still has a cost, even when you'd make it again."
"Would you do it again?" Whit asked, genuinely curious, the way you ask a question at a dinner party without noticing you're standing on the edge of something. "Knowing what you know now?"
"I might not do it at all."
The table went a little quiet, the way it does when someone says something too honest for a business dinner, something that crosses from the safe territory of hypothetical grumbling into a statement that actually means what it says.
Alden looked at me for a long moment, something like concern moving across his face.
"Even if the woman was Grace?" he asked, and I understood later that he'd asked it as a lifeline, a chance for me to correct course before I said something I couldn't take back, the exact kind of question a friend asks when he's hoping you'll hear how it sounds out loud.
I had every opportunity, in that half-second, to close the door I'd left open.
To say of course, obviously, Grace isn't the problem, marriage in the abstract is the problem, and even that isn't really true, I'm just tired and Garrett's divorce has gotten into my head and I'm saying things I don't mean.
Instead I said, "Yeah. Even Grace."
Nobody said anything for a moment. Garrett laughed, too loud, clearly relieved to have company in his misery, raising his glass like I'd said something to be toasted.
Alden didn't laugh. He looked almost sick, glancing toward the door like he wished he could leave the conversation entirely, like he'd been hoping for a different answer and gotten confirmation of the thing he'd been afraid of instead.
I felt it the second it was out of my mouth.
A specific, cold discomfort, the sense of having said something true in the wrong direction, aimed at a target that had done nothing to deserve it.
I could have fixed it in the next ten seconds.
I could have said her name and taken it back, told the table I didn't mean it, that Grace was the best decision I'd ever made and none of this was actually about her.
Dale, oblivious to the weight of what had just happened, launched into a story about a zoning appeal he was fighting downtown, some dispute over a setback variance that had been dragging on for months, and the table's attention shifted gratefully toward something that didn't require anyone to sit with discomfort.
Whit picked the thread up a minute later, back to the boat he still hadn't bought, weighing the merits of a twenty-four foot center console against something smaller and easier to trailer, and for a few minutes the dinner resumed its ordinary shape, men talking about ordinary things, no one acknowledging that something had just cracked open at the table and been quietly stepped over.
I picked up my drink instead and let the conversation move on to something else, and told myself it didn't matter, because Grace would never hear about it, because it was just talk, the kind of thing men say to each other at dinners that don't mean anything outside the room they're said in.
Alden was quiet for the rest of the meal. He caught my eye once, near the end, and there was something in his expression I chose not to examine too closely, something that looked almost like disappointment, and I told myself that was his business and not mine.
He walked out to the parking lot at the same time I did, and for a second I thought he might say something, but he just clapped me on the shoulder, a gesture that felt more like concern than camaraderie, and said, "Get home safe," in a voice that carried more weight than the words themselves.
"You too."
"Yeah." He hesitated by his car door. "Take care of yourself, Magnus."
It was such an oddly specific thing to say that I thought about it the whole drive to the studio, turning it over, trying to decide if I'd imagined the strange note underneath it. I hadn't. Alden knew something had shifted at that table, even if he couldn't have named exactly what.
I stopped at the studio on my way home, a habit I'd picked up over the years when I wanted to see Grace's work in progress without interrupting her actual workday, the building dark except for the security light over the back entrance.
Through the window I could see the Ashford mood boards still pinned up from the week's work, her handwriting on a dozen sticky notes across one wall, and I stood there for a minute in the parking lot looking at the physical evidence of everything she'd built, feeling a specific, uncomfortable dissonance between the man who'd just said what he'd said at Hendrick's and the man standing in this parking lot, genuinely in awe of his own wife.
I drove the rest of the way home telling myself the same lie I'd been telling myself for weeks, that words said in a private room stayed in that room, that Grace would never have any reason to learn about a conversation that had happened somewhere she'd never been. I was wrong about all of it.