Chapter Eight — Grace
The week started with a genuine win, a promising early conversation with Fontaine about expanding the contract further down the road, tentative but real, and I spent most of Monday walking Priscilla and Tiffany through what a bigger workload would actually require, staffing projections spread across the big table like a puzzle none of us had quite solved yet.
"We could bring on a part-time production assistant instead of another full designer," Priscilla suggested, pen tapping against the table. "Keep the design work concentrated with the two of us and Tiffany, and let someone junior handle the physical logistics."
"That could work. I don't want to grow so fast we lose the quality control that got us here in the first place."
"Agreed. Slow and solid beats fast and sloppy every time."
Marcus, listening from his corner of the table, added his own two cents. "For what it's worth, I'd rather train someone new myself over a few weeks than throw a stranger straight into the Ashford chaos. Slower onboarding, fewer mistakes."
"That's a good point. Let's build in the training time from the start instead of assuming someone walks in ready."
I left that meeting feeling steadier about the business than I had in weeks, the specific satisfaction of a decision made carefully instead of reactively, and carried that steadiness with me into the weekend, where it promptly collided with something considerably less solid.
I ran into Priya at a farmers market on a Saturday morning, the first time I'd seen her since the divorce filing, and though we'd never been especially close, we'd always been friendly at the handful of dinners and holiday parties where our lives had overlapped over the years.
"Grace." She looked good, better than I expected, her hair shorter than I remembered, a kind of lightness to her that hadn't been there the last time I'd seen her. "It's been a while."
"You look wonderful. I mean that. Whatever you're doing, it's working."
"Divorce, apparently. Highly recommended, ten out of ten, would leave a bad marriage again." She laughed at her own joke, a little rueful underneath it. "Sorry. Gallows humor. I'm working on it."
"You don't have to apologize for that with me."
"How are you doing? I heard about you and Garrett. I'm so sorry."
"Don't be. I'm better than I've been in years, honestly, which probably says something ugly about the marriage.
" She picked through a crate of peaches, testing one for ripeness.
"Garrett's still figuring that part out.
He's been going to those dinners with your husband a lot, I hear. The venting sessions."
Something in my chest went alert without my fully understanding why. "Magnus mentions them sometimes."
"I used to hate hearing about those dinners when we were still together.
Garrett would come home from one of them and be strange for a few days, kind of distant, like he'd been talked into feeling sorry for himself by a table full of guys with the exact same complaint.
" She paid for her peaches, not quite looking at me.
"No offense to Magnus. I actually always liked him.
I just think that particular table of men isn't great for anybody's marriage, including the ones that are still standing. "
"What do you mean, strange?"
"Quiet. Distant, like I said. Once he came home and asked me, completely out of nowhere, if I ever regretted marrying so young.
I laughed it off at the time. I think about it differently now, obviously.
" She shrugged, a little sad underneath the shrug.
"Hindsight makes everyone a genius, unfortunately, usually after it's too late to use it. "
I laughed it off at the time, the comment landing somewhere between an old friend's grievance and an offhand observation, and told myself Priya was allowed to be bitter about a group of men who'd apparently spent a year listening to Garrett complain without ever challenging the story he kept telling himself.
It wasn't until weeks later, replaying the conversation in an entirely different light, that I understood she'd been trying to warn me too, in her own oblique way, and I'd been too comfortable in my own marriage to hear it.
The networking mixer was for a regional small-business association I'd joined the year before, mostly for the referrals, sometimes for events like this one where I stood around with a glass of bad chardonnay making conversation with people I'd probably never work with.
I'd spent the first half hour talking to a woman who ran a competing stationery shop two towns over, an oddly friendly rivalry that had produced two referrals for each of us over the years, and traded notes on vendors and printing costs the way you do with someone who understands your specific headaches better than most of your actual friends.
Alden was there, unexpectedly, representing his firm's community outreach arm, standing near a table of pastries he wasn't eating.
Someone near the bar, a man I didn't know, wearing a name tag that said his name was Curtis, made an offhand joke about men who married their college girlfriends and spent the next twenty years wondering what they'd missed out on, the kind of joke that gets a round of tired laughter from people who've heard some version of it a hundred times.
Alden didn't laugh. He went very still, his drink halfway to his mouth, and something about his face made my stomach turn over slowly, a suspicion with no shape yet, just weight, the specific unease of watching someone react to a joke like it was a threat instead of a joke.
I found him alone near the coat check twenty minutes later, ostensibly checking his phone but really, I thought, waiting for an excuse to leave early.
I'd almost let him go without saying anything, telling myself I was imagining the whole thing, that a man being uncomfortable at a bad joke wasn't evidence of anything at all.
But something about the specific quality of his discomfort, the way he'd gone still instead of just uncomfortable, kept pulling at me across the room until I found myself walking over before I'd fully decided to.
"Alden." I kept my voice light, casual, the tone of someone asking a small question instead of the large one underneath it. "Is there something you think I should know?"
He looked at me the way a man looks at a door he doesn't want to walk through, his jaw working like he was chewing on several different sentences and rejecting all of them. "Grace, I don't think this is the place—"
"I'm not asking you to gossip at a networking mixer. I'm asking you a direct question because you keep looking at me like you're bracing for something."
"It's not really mine to tell, Grace. I hope you understand that's not the same as saying there's nothing to tell."
That answer, evasive as it was, told me almost as much as a direct one would have. I felt something settle in my stomach, cold and certain, the specific dread of having a suspicion confirmed by someone's carefully chosen refusal to confirm it.
He was quiet for a long moment, long enough that the silence itself became an answer, long enough that I watched him actually consider telling me and then watched him decide against it.
"You need to talk to Magnus," he said finally, and then he found an excuse to be somewhere else, mumbling something about needing to say goodbye to a colleague before he was gone, leaving me standing by the coat check with a half-empty glass of chardonnay and a sentence that felt heavier than anything he'd actually said.
I drove home with the radio off, replaying every strange look, every flicker, every unfinished sentence from the last month, trying to assemble them into something that made sense and couldn't quite manage it.
Elodie's odd comment at the café. The strange energy at the gala.
Now this, a direct instruction from a man I barely knew, delivered like a warning he'd been holding onto for weeks and finally couldn't hold anymore.
Magnus was on the couch when I got in, laptop open, reading glasses pushed up into his hair, a mug of tea gone cold on the side table.
He looked up and smiled, the same smile he'd been giving me for twelve years, and asked how the mixer went, and pulled me down onto the cushion beside him without waiting for an answer, his arm settling around my shoulders like it belonged there, his other hand still typing something with two fingers on the laptop balanced on his knee.
"Good crowd?" he asked.
"Fine. Same faces as always. Elaine from the stationery shop two towns over says hi, by the way. She's thinking about referring us some overflow work if her studio gets slammed this spring."
"That's generous of a competitor."
"We're friendly competitors. It's a small enough market that being petty about it doesn't actually help either of us.
" I leaned into him, feeling the steady rhythm of his breathing under my cheek, and studied his face for something, anything, some crack in the ordinary evening that would explain the last hour.
There was nothing. He looked exactly like a man reading emails on a Wednesday night, tired around the eyes, glasses slightly crooked, entirely unremarkable.
Nothing about him looked like a man harboring a secret that would end my understanding of our marriage.
That was the part that unsettled me most, more than Alden's warning, more than Elodie's strange face.
Not suspicion, exactly. The complete absence of anything to be suspicious of, sitting right next to the fact that three different people now seemed to be circling something they didn't want to say out loud.
I didn't ask him that night. I told myself I needed more before I did, that confronting a marriage over a coworker's odd behavior and a stranger's cryptic instruction would make me sound paranoid, would ask him to defend himself against nothing concrete.
"You're quiet," he said, closing the laptop, noticing me finally.
"Just tired. Long week."
"You want me to make you some tea? I make excellent tea. It's my one domestic skill besides ruining garlic."
"You don't ruin garlic."
"I burn it approximately forty percent of the time and you've just gotten used to it."
"That's a generous estimate. I'd put it closer to sixty."
"I refuse to accept that statistic without an independent audit."
"I'm your independent audit. I live here. I've seen the pan."
"The pan doesn't testify in this household."
"It would if it could. It's seen things."
"The pan and I have an understanding. Mutual discretion."
I laughed, and let him make the tea, and by the time he brought it to me on the couch, warm mug pressed into my hands, the unease from the mixer had receded enough that I could almost convince myself it had been nothing at all.
I fell asleep against his shoulder while he finished his emails, and some part of me was already awake in a different way than I had been a month before, cataloging, waiting, watching for the next piece.