Chapter Two
The gala planning took over the following week in the particular way these things do, a hundred small decisions that all seemed to land on my desk even though nobody had officially put them there.
Talia Winslow called on Tuesday about seating, which meant an hour of discussing which board member could not, under any circumstances, be placed near which other board member, and whether Christian's parents should be at the head table or at a table that made them feel included without making the seating chart look like a family reunion.
"You have such a good read on all this," Talia said, the way she always says it, like it's a gift I happened to be born with rather than fifteen years of paying attention to a room full of people because someone had to.
"I've been to a lot of these," I said.
"You really have." A small laugh. "God, you must remember the early ones. Before we had an actual venue budget."
I did remember. I remembered a company picnic in year three that Christian and I paid for out of our own account because there wasn't a separate one yet, folding tables again, a cooler of drinks I'd driven to three different stores to find on sale.
I remembered handwriting name tags at our kitchen table because we couldn't afford the software that would print them for us, and Christian falling asleep beside me with a marker still in his hand.
"A little," I said, and let her move on to the next item on her list.
We spent the better part of the call going through logistics that had nothing to do with me except that everyone assumed, correctly, that I would know the answer.
Which caterer had handled last year's board dinner and whether they'd take the account again after a billing dispute I remembered better than anyone currently employed at the company.
Whether the venue's audiovisual setup could handle the video montage Merritt was putting together.
Whether Christian's mother would want a corsage or find it old-fashioned.
"You should really be on the events team," Talia said, half joking, at the end of the call.
"I did that job for about six years, unofficially," I said, and I meant it lightly, but something in my own voice surprised me, a note of something that wasn't quite bitterness but wasn't entirely free of it either.
"I bet you did," Talia said, missing it entirely, already moving to her next call.
That afternoon I drove to the venue for a final walkthrough, something Talia had asked me to handle since she was buried in press logistics for the rest of the week.
The events coordinator, a brisk, competent woman named Selene, walked me through the ballroom layout, pointing out where the head table would sit, where the video screen would hang, where the step-and-repeat banner would go for photographs on the way in.
"And this is where we'll set up the memorabilia table," Selene said, gesturing to a spot near the entrance. "Old photos, some early press clippings, that kind of thing. Merritt sent over a whole box of materials. Do you want to see what she's planning to display?"
I said yes, mostly out of curiosity, and Selene pulled out a folder of printed photographs and articles that would apparently sit under glass for four hundred guests to examine on their way to their seats.
Christian at the folding table. Christian and Damon in front of the first real office.
A framed copy of the very first client contract, Kessler's signature visible at the bottom.
There was nothing of me in any of it, not even the holiday party photo I'd sent Merritt for the booklet.
"Is there anything you'd want added?" Selene asked, noticing my expression, or perhaps just doing her job well enough to read a room. "Sometimes spouses like to include something personal."
I looked through the folder once more, at photographs of a man building something, framed as though he'd built it in a room by himself. I thought about the box in my closet, the one with the balcony photo, the one with me holding a stack of invoices just out of frame of the folding table.
"No," I said finally. "It's fine as it is."
I don't fully know why I said it. Some mixture of pride and exhaustion, maybe, an unwillingness to insert myself into a story that had never made room for me and wasn't going to start now because I'd asked nicely at a venue walkthrough three days before the event.
Selene nodded, unbothered, and moved on to seating logistics, and I spent the rest of the walkthrough answering questions about place settings and audiovisual cues with the same competent, cheerful voice I always use for these things, while some small part of me sat very still and quiet underneath it, taking note.
On the drive home, I passed the building that used to house the rented office above the dry cleaner, still standing, still occupied now by some other struggling business with a hand-lettered sign in the window.
I slowed down without meaning to, the way you slow down near a place that used to matter more than it currently does.
I thought about carrying boxes up that narrow staircase the day we moved the business out of our apartment and into that first real office, both of us laughing the whole way up because the stairwell was too narrow for the desk we were trying to move and we'd had to take the legs off in the parking lot.
I thought about how proud I'd been that day, prouder, in some ways, than I would be years later at the ribbon cutting for the current headquarters, because that first office had felt like something we'd actually built with our own two hands, together, in a way the current building, with its lobby and its landscaping and its name etched into glass, somehow didn't.
I didn't mention the venue walkthrough to Christian that night.
It felt like one more small thing I was managing quietly on his behalf, and for the first time, managing it quietly didn't feel like generosity.
It felt like practice, the same practiced silence I'd been performing for years, and I went to bed that night turning that distinction over without yet knowing what to do with it.
That afternoon I picked up the promotional materials Merritt had dropped off, a glossy little booklet meant to go on each table at the gala, the story of Voss Analytics from founding to fifteenth anniversary told in photographs and a few paragraphs of copy.
I read it standing in the kitchen with my coat still on.
It was well written. Talia's people were good at their jobs.
It told the story cleanly: a man with an idea, a near-collapse in year two, a first major client that turned everything around, steady growth from there to now.
There was a quote from Christian about believing in the vision even when nobody else did.
There was a line about the sacrifices required to build something from nothing.
There was no mention of me at all. Not by name. There was a photo from the holiday party, the same one I'd sent Merritt, with a caption that read Christian and his wife, Isla, celebrating an early milestone. Celebrating. As though I had been a guest at my own life.
I put the booklet down on the counter and didn't pick it up again for the rest of the day.
I made myself busy with other things, the caterer's final headcount, a call with the florist about centerpieces, the particular kind of busyness that has always been available to me whenever I need somewhere to put a feeling I haven't decided how to hold yet.
That evening a younger woman from the events team, one I didn't know well, came by the house to drop off a garment bag with Christian's suit for Saturday, already altered and pressed.
She lingered a moment in the doorway, curious in the way young people are curious about anything that looks like history.
"Can I ask you something?" she said. "What was it actually like back then? Everyone talks about the folding table thing, but what were you doing while all that was happening?"
It was an innocent question. She meant nothing by it beyond genuine interest, and I liked her for asking it directly instead of assuming.
"I was doing a lot of things," I said, and I meant to say more, meant to tell her about the invoices and the phone calls and the year I didn't take a single day that could be called a vacation, and instead I heard myself say, "Mostly just supporting Christian.
It was a team effort, but he was the one taking the real risks. "
She smiled, satisfied, and left with the garment bag folded over her arm, and I stood in the doorway a moment longer than I needed to, turning over the words I had just used without entirely meaning to. Supporting. He was the one taking the real risks.
I had said it so easily. I had been saying some version of it for so many years that it came out before I could stop it, an answer I'd rehearsed so many times it no longer felt like a lie, even though standing there in the doorway, I wasn't sure anymore that it was the truth.
I thought, standing there, about the design program I'd been accepted into the same year the company nearly failed.
I hadn't thought about it in months, sometimes longer, but it surfaced now, unbidden, the way things do when you've spent all day handling other people's histories and haven't left any room to handle your own.
I pushed the thought aside and went back inside to finish preparing dinner.
Later, in bed, Christian ran through his opening remarks one more time, phone propped against a water glass so he could read them back to himself in a low voice while I read beside him.
"Fifteen years ago," he murmured, "I sat at a folding table with four thousand dollars in an operating account and a belief that if I worked hard enough, none of the rest of it would matter."
I thought about the four thousand dollars. I thought about where the next installment after that had come from, three months later, when the operating account was empty again and the belief alone hadn't been enough.
"That's good," I told him, because it was, as a piece of writing. "People will like that."
"You think so?"
"I do."
"Should I add something about you?" he asked, glancing over at me, and for a moment I thought, foolishly, that he was actually asking what I would want said, rather than asking whether the line he already had in mind would suffice.
"Talia thinks I should thank you by name somewhere.
Something about the wife who stood by me. "
"Whatever feels right," I said, because I didn't yet have the language to tell him that stood by me was exactly the problem, a phrase that made me sound like scenery rather than scaffolding.
Earlier that same day, Maribel had finally decided on the navy dress, after three separate video calls where I'd modeled both options in my own closet at her request, holding my phone at increasingly awkward angles so she could judge the fabric under different lighting.
"You have such wonderful taste, Isla," she'd said, for perhaps the hundredth time in fifteen years.
"I don't know what I'd do without you for these things. "
"It's easy, honestly," I'd told her, and it was, in its way, an easy, pleasant kind of labor that had simply accumulated, over the years, into something larger than any single instance of it suggested.
I liked Maribel. I liked helping her. It was only when I stacked the dress calls next to the caterer calls next to the seating chart next to the birthday reminders that the accumulated weight of it became visible at all, and even then, mostly invisible to everyone but me.
He turned off the lamp, and in the dark he found my hand under the blanket, an old habit from years when we slept differently, closer, still learning each other's schedules instead of managing around them.
"I couldn't have done any of it without you," he said, half asleep already, the words soft and automatic. "You know that, right?"
"I know," I said.
I lay awake after his breathing changed, turning that sentence over the way I'd turned over supporting and the real risks, trying to work out whether he meant it the way I needed him to mean it, or whether it was just another line he'd learned to say, true in the way a compliment is true, without ever being examined closely enough to mean anything at all.