CHAPTER THREE
LAUREL
The invitation for the regional builders' mixer came addressed to both of us, which felt, in hindsight, like it should have told me something about how rare that was becoming.
"You're actually coming to this one," Pierce said, holding the card up at the kitchen table like a winning hand of cards. "Small crowd, mostly people I like. Nobody's going to talk your ear off about interest rates."
"High praise."
"I try." He grinned at me over his coffee, and it was the easy, unguarded grin I'd fallen for at Ruthie's bar nine years earlier, the one that still made something in my chest loosen even after all this time. "Wear whatever you want. It's not a black-tie thing."
I wore a navy dress I'd had for years, comfortable and familiar, and Pierce wore a suit without a tie, and we drove to the venue, a converted warehouse space downtown, with the windows down and the radio playing something neither of us particularly liked but sang along to anyway, badly, at a red light, until the driver next to us laughed and gave Pierce a thumbs up.
Inside, the mixer was exactly what he'd promised, small and unpretentious, mostly younger developers and their partners standing around with drinks, talking shop in a way that didn't feel exclusionary because half the room seemed genuinely curious about each other's projects instead of just waiting for their turn to talk.
Pierce kept a hand at the small of my back the whole first hour, introducing me by name to everyone he actually respected, and more than once I caught him watching me mid-conversation with an expression that made me feel, briefly, like the only interesting person in the room.
"This is Laurel," he told a younger developer named Theo, a guy who'd apparently just closed his first deal on a strip mall renovation not unlike Wilkinson Street's original bones. "My wife. She fixes broken dogs for a living, which honestly might be harder than what either of us does."
"It's mostly cats, lately," I said. "Dogs are easier. Cats hold grudges."
Theo laughed, and the conversation rolled easily from there, into his own first-deal horror stories, a botched inspection and a contractor who'd disappeared with half his deposit, and I found myself genuinely enjoying it, the specific pleasure of watching Pierce in his element without any of the careful management I'd started noticing at bigger events over the past year.
Here, at least, he still seemed entirely himself.
"How'd you two actually meet?" Theo's wife, a soft-spoken woman named Priscilla who worked in hospital administration, asked at one point, leaning in with genuine curiosity rather than the polite performance of interest I'd gotten used to at fancier events.
"Pierce always dodges the question at these things, which makes me think it's a good story. "
"It's a great story," I said, before Pierce could answer for me.
"He was having the worst night of his professional life at a bar called Ruthie's, feeling sorry for himself over a whiskey he could barely afford, and I told him forty minutes of four investors saying no probably meant they weren't actually sure. "
"And she was right," Pierce said, an arm settling around my shoulders, warm and easy. "About that, and pretty much everything else since."
"That's so much better than my husband's version," Priscilla said, laughing. "He tells people we met at a conference, which is technically true but makes it sound so boring compared to that."
"Ruthie's still there, actually," I said. "We go back sometimes. Order the same thing every time, more or less."
"That's genuinely sweet." Priscilla glanced at Theo with an expression that suggested she was filing the idea away for future use, and the conversation moved on to easier things, contractors and permit offices and the particular indignities of dealing with the city's inspection schedule, and I let myself relax fully into it, the story of Ruthie's still sitting warm in my chest the way it always did whenever I got to tell it out loud.
Later, a woman named Carol, married to one of the Alliance's older board members, sidled up to me near the bar with the friendly, appraising look of someone deciding whether you were worth talking to for the rest of the night.
"That's a great dress," she said. "Where'd you get it?"
"Honestly, I've had it for years. It's nothing special."
"It looks great on you. Simple's underrated. Everyone's so dressed up these days it's hard to tell who actually has taste and who's just wearing what their stylist picked."
I laughed, and started to say something about not having a stylist, that the dress had come from a department store sale rack three years ago and I'd almost returned it, when I felt Pierce's hand tighten slightly at my waist, a small pressure I might not have noticed if I hadn't already been half attuned to reading him after nine years of practice.
"Laurel's got great instincts," he said, cutting in smoothly, before I'd finished my own sentence. "Always has. She was the one who told me the Wilkinson Street buildings were worth saving before I'd convinced a single investor of it."
Carol made an appreciative noise and the conversation shifted, easily, toward Wilkinson Street's history, and it wasn't until later, replaying it in the car, that I noticed the small edit Pierce had made in real time, redirecting away from department store sale rack and toward a story that made me sound like an asset to his business instead of a woman who bought her clothes on clearance.
It was such a small thing. I almost didn't clock it at all.
We stayed another hour, and most of it was genuinely good, dancing badly to a song neither of us knew the words to, Pierce's hand warm at the back of my neck, his mouth close to my ear telling me something about Theo's contractor horror story that made me laugh loud enough that a few heads turned.
Driving home, windows down again, the city lights strung out ahead of us, I felt lighter than I had in weeks, the gala and its ambiguous pronoun forgotten somewhere in the good, easy warmth of the evening.
"That was fun," I said, reaching over to rest my hand on his knee. "We should do more of these."
"Yeah," Pierce said, eyes on the road, one beat too long before he answered. "Maybe."
"Maybe?"
"I mean, yeah, definitely, when we can." He glanced over, caught something in my expression, and reached down to squeeze my hand where it sat on his knee. "Sorry. Long day. I'm just tired."
I let it go, because it had been a long day, and because the evening itself had been so good that one flat word in a dark car felt like a small thing to hold onto.
We got home and fell into bed together, and later, tangled up with him in the dark, his mouth against my collarbone and his hands sure and familiar everywhere they touched, I forgot about the pronoun and the dress story and the one beat of hesitation entirely, the way small worries tend to disappear in the middle of an otherwise good night.
It was only the next morning, making coffee alone while Pierce showered, that I found myself thinking about it again, turning it over without meaning to.
Maybe wasn't a no. Maybe wasn't even really an answer.
It was just a word men said when they didn't want to commit to something and didn't want to explain why, and I'd heard him say plenty of firm, certain things over the years, promises he'd kept without fail, plans he'd followed through on exactly as described.
Maybe was new. I couldn't remember him using it on me before, not about anything that mattered.
I told myself I was building something out of nothing again, the way I had over the gala invitation, the way I apparently seemed determined to do lately with every small gap in a sentence.
But the thought stayed with me longer than it should have, sitting quiet at the back of my mind through the drive to the clinic, through Biscuit's follow-up appointment, through the whole ordinary stretch of a Wednesday, refusing to fully dissolve the way it should have by now if it really had been nothing at all.
At lunch, sitting in my car in the clinic parking lot eating a sandwich I'd forgotten to bring in, I found myself thinking about the version of the story I'd told Priscilla the night before, the whiskey and the forty minutes and Ruthie's, and how easily it had come out of me, still the truest and best thing about us as far as I was concerned.
I wondered, not for the first time, whether Pierce told that story as often as he used to, whether it still sat as close to the surface for him as it did for me, or whether somewhere in the last few years it had quietly slid further back, behind newer, more polished stories about tower financing and board seats, waiting for someone to ask the right question before it resurfaced at all.
I finished my sandwich, checked my phone for the time, and went back inside to prep for the afternoon's appointments, and didn't think about it again until much later that night, when Pierce came home late from a meeting and mentioned, almost in passing, that he'd finally gotten around to updating his professional bio for the company website, the one the marketing team had been asking about for months.
"What'd you change?" I asked, only half paying attention, scrolling through my own phone at the kitchen table.
"Streamlined it. Made it sound more like an actual company and less like a guy telling his life story to strangers.
" He said it lightly, reaching past me for a glass, and I didn't think much of it at the time, filing it away as one more small, sensible business decision in a marriage full of them, the sort of thing that only later, looking back, would earn a second look at all.
"Can I read it?" I asked.
"Sure, once it's live. Marketing's still tweaking the header image.
" He kissed the top of my head on his way past, easy and affectionate, and I let the topic drop, going back to my phone, a text from Reyna about weekend plans that felt considerably more urgent in the moment than a company bio I'd probably never read closely anyway.
Later that night, brushing my teeth, I found myself thinking about the version of Pierce who used to tell that story to anyone who'd listen, at parties, at dinners, to my own parents the very first time he met them, the whiskey and the forty minutes worn smooth from repetition, a story he clearly loved telling because it reminded him, I think, of exactly how far he'd come.
I wondered, spitting toothpaste into the sink, whether streamlining it meant cutting that story out entirely, or just trimming the edges, and decided, climbing into bed beside him a few minutes later, that it probably didn't matter either way.
A bio was just a bio. The actual story still belonged to us, regardless of what a company website said about it.
Pierce was already half asleep by the time I slid under the covers, and I curled into his side out of habit, his arm coming around me automatically even in his half-conscious state, a reflex built from nine years of falling asleep the same way most nights.
I lay there a while listening to his breathing slow, and thought about my father's shop, the small hand-painted sign that had hung outside it for forty years, GASTON SMALL ENGINE REPAIR, nothing streamlined about it at all, and how proud he still seemed every time he walked underneath it.
I wondered whether Pierce would still feel that kind of plain, unfiltered pride about his own name on a building in twenty years, or whether the version of the story he kept editing down would eventually edit down the pride itself, one careful revision at a time.
I didn't think about it again for weeks.