CHAPTER FOURTEEN
LAUREL
I bought my own ticket to the Ellison Tower launch three days before the event, using a ticketing link I found through Redmond Development's public event page, exactly the sort of thing anyone could have done if they'd known to look.
It cost more than I expected, and I paid it without hesitation, because the point had stopped being about the money the moment I decided to make it.
I didn't tell Pierce I'd bought it. He knew I was coming, in the general, unresolved sense our last conversation had left things, but I wanted the specifics to be entirely mine, unmanaged, uninfluenced by whatever version of the evening he might have tried to construct if he'd known the exact details of how I planned to arrive.
I told Marisol at work the day I bought it, mostly because I needed to say the plan out loud to someone before it fully solidified into something I couldn't back out of.
"You're just going to show up? No warning?"
"He's had months of warning, Marisol. Every excuse, every half-truth, every chance in the world to just tell me the truth about that gala. I'm done giving him advance notice about my own choices."
"Good for you. Genuinely. I just want you prepared for whatever his face does when he sees you." Marisol studied me for a moment, something thoughtful in her expression. "You nervous?"
"Terrified. Also more certain than I've felt about anything in months. Both things, somehow, at the same time."
"That sounds about right for a decision worth making.
" She squeezed my shoulder and went back to the appointment schedule, and I spent the rest of my shift turning the plan over in my head, checking and rechecking my own resolve the way you check a lock you've already locked, needing the reassurance more than the actual confirmation.
The night before the gala, I opened my closet and looked, for a long time, at the row of careful, subdued clothing I'd accumulated over the past several months, the beige cardigan, the low sensible heels, the muted dresses picked specifically to disappear into rooms rather than stand out in them.
I took each piece out, one at a time, and laid them across the bed, and felt, looking at the collection laid out like evidence, a sharp, clarifying disgust at what I'd been quietly building toward without ever fully admitting it to myself.
I put them all back, pushed to the far end of the closet, and reached instead for the deep green dress, still hanging where it had lived for years, worn soft with age and love, the one Pierce had once insisted mattered more than anything a rack full of expensive alternatives could offer.
I held it up against myself in the mirror, and something in my chest settled, finally, into a shape that felt entirely like my own.
Reyna called while I was doing my hair, checking in the way she'd promised she would.
"You wearing the green dress?"
"I'm wearing the green dress."
"Good girl." I could hear her smiling through the phone. "How are you feeling?"
"Terrified. Certain. Both at once, somehow." I set the phone on speaker and kept working through my hair, watching myself in the mirror. "I keep waiting for the part where I lose my nerve and text him to ask if it's actually okay that I'm coming."
"You're not going to lose your nerve. You've spent months losing your nerve. Tonight's the night you stop."
"What if he's humiliated? What if I walk in and it's obvious I wasn't supposed to be there, and everyone can tell, and it just proves whatever he's apparently been so worried about this whole time?"
"Then that's information, Laurel. Important information, about him, not about you.
" Reyna's voice had gone firm and certain, the way it always did when she meant something completely.
"You are not the problem tonight. You've never been the problem.
Go find that out for yourself, in a room full of people, instead of taking his word for it secondhand through a bunch of excuses. "
I thanked her, and hung up, and finished getting ready with her words settled firmly in my chest, a ballast against the nerves still fluttering underneath everything else.
I wore my hair the way I actually liked it, loose and simple, no elaborate styling borrowed from photographs of women I'd spent too many nights studying.
I wore the gold hoop earrings I'd had since college, not the tasteful diamond studs Pierce had once suggested might read as more polished.
I did my own makeup, quick and practiced, nothing dramatic, exactly the face I wore most days without a second thought.
Standing in front of the mirror, fully dressed, I looked at myself for a long moment and felt something I hadn't felt in longer than I wanted to admit.
Not confidence, exactly, though there was some of that.
Recognition. The specific, grounding recognition of seeing yourself clearly after months of trying to see yourself through somebody else's careful, anxious editing.
I am not asking permission to stand next to my own husband, I thought, and the sentence settled into my chest with the weight of something I intended to actually live by, starting tonight.
I drove myself to the venue, a converted riverside warehouse the press releases had been calling "the most significant commercial launch Charlotte has seen in a decade," and handed my ticket to a young woman at the check-in table who scanned it without any flicker of surprise or hesitation, my name apparently perfectly ordinary among the hundreds of confirmed guests already inside.
The ballroom, when I stepped into it, was exactly as grand as the renderings had promised, soaring ceilings, a wall of glass overlooking the river, string lights and a full orchestra setup instead of the usual jazz trio, easily three hundred people already circulating with champagne and canapés, a low roar of conversation and laughter filling the space like a living thing.
I stood near the entrance a moment, taking it in, and felt my heartbeat pick up slightly, not from fear exactly, but from the specific adrenaline of a decision fully committed to, with no way left to take it back even if I wanted to.
I found Pierce almost immediately, across the room near a small cluster of investors, deep in conversation, his hand gesturing toward something on a rendering displayed on a large screen behind him.
He looked good, confident and easy in his element the way he always did at these things, the same charisma that had first caught my attention at Ruthie's bar nine years earlier still fully intact, dressed up now in a tailored tuxedo instead of a frayed cuff and a whiskey he could barely afford.
I watched him for a moment before he noticed me, savoring the last few seconds of anonymity, and then, as if some instinct had alerted him, he glanced up, scanning the crowd the way people do when they sense they're being watched, and found me across the room.
His face fell.
It was brief, gone almost as fast as it appeared, replaced within a second by a careful, practiced smile aimed at the investors still talking around him.
But I saw it, unmistakably, the specific drop in his expression before he'd had time to compose himself, surprise curdling instantly into something that looked, plainly and undeniably, like alarm.
I didn't look away. I held his gaze across the room for a long moment, long enough that he had to be the one to break it first, turning back to his conversation with a visible effort, and I felt something in my chest go very still and very clear, the last soft edge of hope I'd apparently still been carrying, that maybe this would go differently than the pattern of the last several months suggested, finally giving way to something harder and more settled.
I took a glass of champagne from a passing server and moved further into the room, chin up, shoulders back, exactly myself, and told myself, with a conviction I hadn't fully expected to feel this early in the evening, that whatever happened next, I was not going to be the one who flinched first.
A server offered a tray of hors d'oeuvres, small, elegant things I couldn't immediately identify, and I took one anyway, and stood for a moment near the edge of the crowd, watching the room the way I imagined a stranger might, three hundred people in expensive clothing, a full orchestra tuning up near the far wall, everything about the evening designed to announce its own significance.
I thought about the diner four blocks from here, sticky booths and a jukebox older than either of us, and felt a small, private smile tug at my mouth despite everything else sitting heavy in my chest. Whatever Pierce had built, however grand the room had become, some part of him had started here too, at a bar not much fancier than that diner, with nothing but a whiskey and a stubborn hope that things might eventually work out.
I finished the hors d'oeuvre, set my empty glass on a passing tray, and made my way further into the crowd, determined to enjoy at least some part of an evening I'd fought this hard to attend.
A cluster of women near the dessert table caught my eye, laughing at something, and I recognized one of them as a name I'd heard Pierce mention once or twice, a fellow developer's wife who apparently sat on some regional planning board.
I introduced myself, and the conversation that followed was easy and unremarkable in exactly the way I'd needed it to be, small talk about the venue, a shared complaint about the parking situation downtown, nothing that required me to perform any version of myself other than the one I'd walked in wearing.
"You're Pierce Redmond's wife," one of them said eventually, not unkindly, just confirming a fact. "I don't think we've actually met before, have we? Feels like I would've remembered."
"You wouldn't have. This is actually my first time at one of these in a while."
"Well, I'm glad you came tonight. Ellison's a huge deal.
You must be proud." She said it plainly, no undertone of surprise or subtle appraisal, and I felt, standing there among strangers who had no context for anything happening beneath the surface of my evening, a small, grounding confirmation that I hadn't imagined my own right to be standing in that room at all.
"I am," I said, and meant it, thinking of Ruthie's, and the whiskey, and nine years of watching a man build something out of nothing. "Very proud."
The woman smiled, satisfied with the answer, and the conversation drifted toward other things, a shared complaint about the parking garage, a question about where I'd gotten my earrings, ordinary small talk that asked nothing of me beyond being present and reasonably pleasant, which I managed without any effort at all.
It struck me, standing there, how simple this was supposed to be, how simple it had always actually been, before months of manufactured anxiety had convinced me otherwise.
Nobody in this cluster of strangers cared where I'd gone to school or what my job title sounded like on paper.
They cared whether I was kind, whether I laughed at the right moments, whether I made the conversation better instead of worse.
By every one of those measures, I was doing just fine.