The Wife Whose Sacrifices He Forgot

Chapter One

The coffee maker in our kitchen has four settings, and Christian has never learned a single one of them.

I found that funny once. Fifteen years ago I would have laughed about it over breakfast, teased him about a man who could read a balance sheet in his sleep but couldn't program a Cuisinart.

Now I just press the button before he comes downstairs, so the cup is waiting on the counter when he walks in already looking at his phone.

It isn't just the coffee. It's the whole rhythm of our mornings, worn smooth by fifteen years of repetition until neither of us has to think about it anymore.

I'm up first, always have been, some old habit from the years when the office phone forwarded to whichever of us woke earliest. I check the weather so I can remind him whether he needs a coat.

I glance at his calendar, which syncs to mine by default, an arrangement neither of us ever discussed so much as drifted into, and I flag anything that's going to require a decision before noon.

By the time Christian comes downstairs, showered and half dressed, most of the small frictions of his day have already been smoothed out of his path without his ever having to notice they existed.

"You're a lifesaver," he said this morning, the same way he says it most mornings, already reaching for his keys on the hook by the door.

He kissed the top of my head. He does that instead of my mouth when he's in a hurry, like I'm a child he's dropping at school. I used to mind. I stopped minding around year eight, which might be the real problem, if I'm honest with myself, though nobody was asking me to be.

"You have the Kessler call at ten," I said, not looking up from my laptop. "And Rhodes wants to confirm dinner for Thursday. I told him I'd check with you and get back to him."

"Thursday works." He was already at the door, phone in one hand, coffee in the other, moving through the kitchen with the particular economy of a man who has learned to get dressed, eat, and plan his day in roughly ninety seconds.

"Oh, and my mother mentioned something about a dentist appointment she wants me to remind her about. Can you just handle that? I'll forget."

"I'll text her."

"You're the only person who keeps my whole life straight, you know that?"

He meant it as a compliment. I took it as one, mostly, the way I take most things Christian says these days, filing them under the general heading of things that are true but incomplete.

He paused at the door, the way he sometimes does when some fragment of the man he used to be surfaces briefly through the busyness. "Hey. What are you doing today?"

"I have a few things," I said. "The caterer's confirming numbers for Saturday. I told your mother I'd help her pick a dress for the gala. Nothing exciting."

"You should do something for yourself too," he said, and I could tell he meant it, the way he means most of the generically kind things he says to me now, offered without any real information behind them, no idea what "something for myself" might actually look like, only a vague sense that he ought to say it.

"Take a bath. Read a book. Whatever makes you happy. "

"I will," I said, and I might have, on a different kind of day, except that by the time he left, half of what makes me happy had already been folded so thoroughly into the machinery of keeping his life running that I couldn't always locate the line between the two anymore.

The house was quiet after he left. It's a big house, the kind you buy after your husband's company goes from struggling to impossible-not-to-notice, five bedrooms for two people and the occasional weekend visit from his parents.

I remember the day we closed on it, seven years ago now, Christian carrying me over the threshold like something out of an old movie, both of us laughing so hard he nearly dropped me on the marble in the entryway.

I remember thinking, standing in that echoing, half-empty house with boxes still in the moving truck outside, that we had actually made it, whatever making it meant, that the two of us had built something together that neither of us could have built alone.

I still believe that, some days. I believed it that morning, sitting at the island with my coffee, going through the list of things that needed doing before Saturday, feeling something close to contentment even as I made my way through a checklist that was entirely made up of other people's needs.

I made a second cup of coffee and got to work.

The caterer needed a final headcount by Wednesday.

Christian's mother needed help deciding between a navy dress and a green one, a decision she'd been agonizing over for a week and would ultimately hand to me, the way she hands most decisions to me now, trusting my taste more than her own after fifteen years of watching me manage every event this family has ever hosted.

The board wanted final approval on the seating chart, which meant another pass at separating two directors who hadn't spoken since a dispute over regional expansion three years earlier.

None of it was hard. None of it was even particularly unpleasant. It was simply endless, the way water is endless, filling every available container without ever announcing itself as a burden.

The company's fifteenth anniversary. Christian had been talking about it for months, in the distracted way he talks about anything work-related when he's home, half his attention still in the office even when his body is sitting across the dinner table from me.

The board wanted something significant. A gala, coverage in the regional business press, maybe a piece in one of the national trade publications if Talia could land it.

Christian Voss, self-made success story, fifteen years from a folding table in a rented office to four hundred employees and a building with his name over the door.

I'd heard that phrase, self-made, more times in the last month than I could count.

I'd stopped hearing it as strange a long time ago.

It's just what people call him. It's what he calls himself, at this point, though I don't think he'd put it that way if you asked him directly.

He'd say something about hard work and timing and taking the right risks at the right moment.

He wouldn't lie. He'd just leave things out, the way you leave out furniture you've stopped seeing because it's been in the same corner for a decade.

Around eleven, Nadine called, mostly to complain about a client and partly, I suspected, to check on me the way she does most weeks, an old habit from college that neither of us has ever quite let go of.

"How's gala week?" she asked.

"Endless," I said. "I've become fluent in seating charts and centerpiece budgets. Ask me anything."

"Are you going to actually enjoy it, or are you going to spend the whole night making sure everyone else does?"

"The second one," I admitted. "Someone has to."

"Does it have to be you, though?"

It was a fair question, and one I didn't have a good answer for, so I changed the subject instead, the way I usually do when Nadine gets too close to something I haven't decided how to feel about yet.

My phone buzzed a little after noon. A text from Merritt Sloan, one of the junior associates helping put together materials for Saturday, someone I'd met exactly twice at company events and who had apparently decided I was a good source for color.

Hi Isla! Putting together a little "then and now" slide for the gala and I'd love a photo of you two from the early days if you have one? Christian said to ask you, he said you're the family historian lol

Family historian. I looked at that phrase for longer than it deserved.

I do have photos. A box of them, actually, in the closet in what used to be an office and is now mostly storage, because at some point in the last decade I stopped needing an office of my own for a business I no longer had a hand in.

I found the box that afternoon, sat on the floor of the closet with it in my lap, and went through pictures of a version of us that Merritt Sloan would find charming precisely because she has no idea what any of it cost.

There's one of Christian at the folding table Merritt would love.

He's got his sleeves rolled up, hair a mess, laughing at something out of frame.

I remember what was out of frame. It was me, holding a stack of invoices I'd stayed up until two in the morning organizing so the accountant wouldn't have to bill us for the hours it would have taken him to do it himself, because we didn't have the money to pay him for those hours.

There's another one, further down in the box, that I'd almost forgotten existed: the two of us on the tiny balcony of our first apartment, the one above the dry cleaner, sharing a bottle of wine that had probably cost eight dollars, both of us laughing at something I can no longer remember, looking impossibly young and impossibly unafraid.

I remember that year as one of the happiest of my life, which still surprises me sometimes, given how little money we had and how much we were both terrified, almost constantly, that the whole thing would collapse before it ever became anything.

I sent Merritt a different photo. One of the two of us at a company holiday party, both of us dressed up, both of us smiling for the camera the way you smile when you know it's going in a newsletter. Easier. Cleaner. Nothing in it that anyone would need me to explain.

That evening Christian got home a little earlier than usual, energized in the particular way he gets before a big event, already narrating pieces of the speech he was drafting for Saturday.

He found me in the kitchen finishing dinner, and he came up behind me at the stove, wrapped his arms around my waist, and rested his chin on my shoulder in a way that still, after fifteen years, made something in my chest go soft.

"Smells good," he murmured. "What is it?"