9. Gavin
GAVIN
The photo makes it look like Rebecca lives with me. That’s impressive, since she has a flat in Mayfair with a doorman who calls her madam and a kitchen she’s never cooked in.
In the picture she’s coming down the townhouse steps in the dark with her coat over one arm, lit by the streetlamp like the cover of a paperback somebody’s aunt would buy at an airport.
That night two of our new pilots walked out beside her, arguing about who got stuck with the Christmas schedule.
Somebody cropped them off, and now she’s alone on my front steps under a headline you can read from across the hangar office.
CALLAHAN’S TRUE PARTNER MOVES IN.
It’s the magazine’s phrase from the gala. Apparently somebody liked it enough to keep it.
“Fix it,” I tell the London communications director.
“I want facts.” I tick them off, and he types.
“Ms. Kendall has her own home in Mayfair. She works in the office at the townhouse some nights, when the hangar office is locked up, and there are always other people from the team there. She doesn’t live with me.
We don’t share hotel suites when we travel.
And take the words true partner out of everything we send a reporter from now until I’m dead. ”
Rebecca’s by the window with the pilot roster, marking it up in red. She hasn’t said a word since I opened the article, and she doesn’t now.
I pick up my phone and open my messages with Allison. The last thing in the thread is my message from the night of our anniversary, asking if I could call, and I’ve scrolled back to it more this past week than I’d admit to anyone in this building.
If I send her the link, this may be the first she hears of it. If I don’t, I’m deciding for her what she gets to know, and that’s the thing she walked out of our penthouse over. Both choices are bad, and I pick the one where she hears it from me.
You may see a story today about Rebecca and me. It isn’t true. She doesn’t live with me and nothing is going on. I’ve asked for a correction everywhere it ran.
It delivers. No answer comes, and I keep staring at it anyway until a dull ache starts up behind my eyes. I call and get her voicemail, and I say, “It’s me,” which is useless, because her phone already told her that.
“The story’s false. Call me if you want the details, or if you want to yell. Either one.” What I actually want to ask is what those tests were for, but I’ve asked twice already, so I hang up without asking.
Rebecca puts the roster down on the table. “That photo’s from our first week here. Somebody sat on it.”
“Find out who.”
She looks at me for a second. “You think I gave it to them.”
“Did you?”
“No.”
Rebecca has lied to clients across a table, and so have I. I’ve never caught her lying to me, and I believe her.
“Then find out who did,” I say.
The correction comes back before lunch, and it’s airtight.
Rebecca forwards me the email it went out in.
It went to every reporter on our list, in the same hour as a glossy photo of our first London jet on the runway at sunset.
Nobody on earth was going to scroll past that plane to read about my marriage.
I don’t check where the correction landed.
That night the crew schedule for the opening has to be finished, and the heat in the hangar office quits at six, so Rebecca comes back to the townhouse office with me.
A guard sits outside the coded door. For a while it’s pilot interviews and who’s flying which plane in November, and she’s sharp and right about two problems nobody else caught.
That’s why she’s still my chief operating officer.
Rebecca closes the file and leaves her hands flat on top of it. “The article was crude.”
“We’re done talking about it.”
“Are we?” She sits back. “Allison moved out the week you left. She’s living over a greenhouse. She wouldn’t even spend your anniversary with you.”
“I was in another country.”
“Because of her.”
“No. Because of me.”
Rebecca’s mouth tightens.
“You chose London,” she says, “and she chose to punish you for it.”
“Be careful.”
“I’ve been careful for years, Gavin.”
She doesn’t touch me or lean in, and I almost wish she would, because that would be simpler to answer. She just looks at the coded door instead of at me.
“The press sees what everybody at the company sees,” she says. “We built this company together. We work. You and I have always worked.”
“We stopped being engaged because working was all we knew how to do.”
“We were young.”
“We were wrong for each other.”
I knew it before she did, the night she won an argument about an aircraft lease and then asked which Saturday I could give her for the wedding, and I realized I had no idea what made her happy outside a deal. Then I met Allison, who wanted a whole life with me after the meeting ended.
Rebecca’s eyes come back to mine. “And if Allison files for divorce?”
“What about it?”
“Then we could stop pretending this was only ever professional.”
There it is. She’s wanted this for years, and she’s waiting to see if I’ll turn to her once my wife stops looking. Heat climbs up my neck, half anger and half shame, because I’ve known it a long time and let her keep waiting.
“No,” I say.
“You didn’t even think about it.”
“I didn’t need to. My wife moved out, Rebecca. She didn’t divorce me.”
“I said after.”
“There’s no after where this happens.” I make myself say the rest plainly, because she deserves that much. “Even if Allison divorces me, you’re not the woman I want.”
Rebecca looks hurt, openly, and I’ve known her long enough to know how rare that is. I’m sorry I did that to her, but I’m not sorry I said it.
She stands and picks up the file. “The schedule still needs your approval.”
“Someone else can bring it to me tomorrow.”
“Are you taking me off London?”
That stops me. Half the clients we’ve signed signed with her across the table, and they have her number, not mine. If I pull her out now, the opening could fall apart, and the crews who moved their families here for this job would be the ones who pay for it.
“I’m telling you to leave my house,” I say. “Tonight.”
“It’s the office.”
“It’s inside my house.”
She takes her coat off the back of the chair. “And tomorrow?”
“Tomorrow you’re my COO, and you report the same way you always have. This conversation doesn’t happen again.”
She gives me one short nod and goes. When her car pulls away, I call the head of London security and tell him nobody works in the townhouse office alone anymore, and there are no exceptions for anybody’s title.
“Including Ms. Kendall?”
“Especially Ms. Kendall.”
Keeping her is the only sensible call. Firing her could sink the opening, and I can manage her the way I manage a plane with a bad warning light, by watching it closely.
There’s no reason to drag Allison into it either.
It’s handled, and a phone call about Rebecca from London would be one more problem I’d be asking my wife to carry when she’s barely speaking to me.
I believe every word of that. My palms are damp anyway, and I wipe them on my trousers on the way up the stairs.
Upstairs, the bedroom’s cold, and her side of the bed is as smooth as it was the day I moved in. I lie down on my side with my ring still on and open our messages again. My text from this morning sits at the bottom with nothing after it.
I type the next one myself, with nobody from communications near the phone and nobody at the door.
I’m still your husband.
I send it. The word Read shows up under it before I can put the phone down, and I lie there in the dark and watch the screen until it goes black in my hand.