Chapter Seven
Saturday came and went, and I want to say it went well, and in most of the ways that mattered to the room, it did.
I'd spent the afternoon before the gala getting ready alongside Christian, both of us moving through the familiar choreography of a big event, him practicing lines from his speech in the mirror while I did my makeup, both of us occasionally catching each other's eye and laughing at some shared joke about how nervous he always got before these things despite having given the same kind of speech a dozen times before.
It was, in its way, one of the last easy afternoons we would have for a while, though neither of us knew that yet, both of us simply enjoying the small, ordinary intimacy of getting ready together for a night that mattered.
"How do I look?" Christian asked, straightening his tie for the third time.
"Like a man who built a company from nothing," I said, teasing, and he laughed, and kissed me, careful not to smudge my lipstick, and for a moment everything between us felt exactly as easy as it always had.
A photographer from a local business journal was set up near the entrance when we arrived, and at one point during the cocktail hour someone mentioned, in passing, that they'd hoped to get a shot of the two of us outside the old building where Christian's company had started.
Nobody had actually arranged it, the idea apparently lost somewhere between someone's good intention and the reality of the evening's tight schedule, and I remember feeling a small, familiar pang of something I couldn't name at the time, watching Christian wave off the suggestion easily, unbothered, already moving toward the next conversation.
The event was polished. Talia's team had outdone themselves with the venue, string lights and enough flowers that the ballroom smelled faintly of gardenia the whole evening, and Christian's speech worked the way Talia and Damon had promised it would.
He told the folding table story with real warmth, and the room laughed in the right places and went quiet in the right places, and when he said the line about me, Isla, my wife, who has supported me every step of the way, the room applauded warmly and I smiled from my seat at the front table, the way you smile when four hundred people are looking at you and the alternative is making a scene at your own husband's celebration.
Corinne, one of the older investors, found me near the bar afterward, champagne in hand, warm and a little tipsy in the pleasant way people get at these things. "You must be so proud," she said. "Fifteen years. I remember when this was four people in a room the size of my kitchen."
"It's been quite a journey," I said, the practiced line coming out smooth and automatic.
"He talks about those early years like he was fighting the whole battle solo," Corinne said, not unkindly, more thoughtful than critical. "I always wondered about that. You were around back then too, weren't you? I remember you at some of the early shareholder meetings."
"I was around," I said.
"What was that actually like, for you? I mean, watching someone you love go through something like that?"
It was a real question, asked with real curiosity, and for a moment I considered actually answering it, telling her about the invoices and the inheritance and the year of the same three meals on rotation.
Instead I gave her the same smooth, well-worn answer I'd been giving for years.
"It was hard, but we got through it together.
That's mostly what a marriage is, isn't it? Getting through things together."
"That's a lovely way to put it," Corinne said, and moved on to find her husband, and I stood there for a moment with my own champagne going flat, turning over how easily the deflection had come, how many times I must have practiced it without ever noticing I was rehearsing.
Merritt found me a little later, glowing from the success of the video montage, several people having complimented her on it throughout the evening. "Did you like it?" she asked. "The video?"
"It was beautiful," I said, and meant it, even though it had also been the thing that made me put the box of photographs back in the closet three days earlier.
"I wanted to include more of you," Merritt said, unexpectedly. "I asked Christian if there was more footage from the early years, and he said he wasn't sure, that most of what existed was probably just business stuff. I wish I'd had more to work with."
"There's more than you'd think," I said, before I could stop myself. "I just didn't send it."
Merritt looked at me curiously, sensing something underneath the sentence, but the moment was interrupted by someone calling her away to help with a logistics question, and the conversation ended there, unfinished, the way so many conversations about my actual history seemed to end that year, right at the edge of something real.
I sat through the rest of the evening, all nine minutes of his speech covering his own history and the four seconds that belonged to me, and I told myself it didn't matter, that this was simply the nature of these events, that Christian loved me and the rest was just theater for a room that didn't need to know the real math of our marriage.
I mostly believed it, that night. I danced with him afterward, and he held me close and told me the whole thing had gone even better than he'd hoped, and I let myself feel proud, because I was proud, of him and of the fifteen years it had taken to get here.
The trouble started Tuesday, three days later, and it started small enough that I didn't see it coming until it had already arrived.
I'd asked Christian, Monday night, whether he could handle calling his mother about a birthday gift for his father, since the dentist reminder and a dozen other small tasks that week had already eaten most of my available hours, and he'd said he would.
Tuesday evening, over dinner, I asked if he'd made the call.
"I forgot," he said. "It's been a brutal week. Can you just handle it? You're so much better at that stuff anyway."
Something in me, small and unfamiliar, resisted before I could stop it.
"I'd rather not, actually," I said. "I have a hair appointment tomorrow I already had to fight to keep, and I've spent the whole week managing things for the gala cleanup. I think this one's yours."
Christian set his fork down, and I watched his expression change, not anger yet, more like confusion, a man encountering an obstacle in terrain he'd always found perfectly smooth. "It's one phone call, Isla. You've never had a problem making these things work before."
"I've always made them work before," I said. "That doesn't mean it costs nothing."
"I'm not asking you to donate a kidney. I'm asking you to move a hair appointment by three hours, or make one phone call to my own mother, who you talk to more than I do anyway."
"I know exactly what you're asking," I said, and there was an edge under the words now, sharper than either request justified on its own, sharper than either of us, I think, expected.
"I'm asking why it's automatic that my three hours move and yours never do.
Why is it automatic that I'm the one who calls your mother, who manages your father's birthday, who remembers the dentist, who handles the caterer, who does all of it, every week, without either of us ever once discussing whether that's actually fair? "
"This is what this is about? Fairness? Isla, I work sixty hours a week so neither of us has to think about money. I don't think 'fair' is the right word for whatever this conversation is trying to become."
"I'm not talking about money," I said. "I'm talking about time. My time. You've never once asked whether I had enough of it left over for myself, because it's never occurred to you that there might not be any."
"You have plenty of time. You don't have a job."
The sentence hurt more than I think he meant it to, and I watched something cross his face, a flicker of awareness that he'd said something he might regret, before stubbornness closed back over it.
"Because I'm the one who has four hundred people depending on this company functioning," he said, and I could hear, even as he said it, that he meant it as a fact rather than an attack, the plain truth of his position that should have settled the matter the way it always had before.
"You get to decide which errands matter to you on a given day.
I don't have that luxury. I gave that up years ago so we could have any of this. "
"You gave that up," I repeated, very quietly. "What exactly do you think I gave up?"
"I don't know, Isla, what," he said, and I felt something rising in him too, frustration compounding on frustration, the accumulated weight of a hard week finding the nearest available outlet.
"A hair appointment? Some flexibility on your calendar?
You've never once had to sit with a set of numbers that didn't work and wonder if you were about to lose everything.
You've never had four employees' families depending on a decision you made.
You've never sacrificed anything, Isla."
The kitchen went very quiet.
I heard the sentence the way you hear a glass break in another room, before you fully understand what happened, a half second of just the sound and then the slower arrival of its meaning.
I stood very still by the counter, and something in my face must have gone smooth in a way that frightened him, because his own expression shifted, the anger draining out of it fast, replaced by something closer to alarm.
"Is that really what you think?" I said finally.
He could have said no in that moment. I watched him consider it, actually watched the possibility cross his face, and then I watched him decide, still angry, still certain in the particular way you're certain right before you discover you were wrong, to double down instead.
"I think you've had it a lot easier than I have," he said. "I think that's just true."
"Say it again," I said. "The thing you said before that."
"Isla."
"Say it again, Christian. I want to hear you say it a second time so I know it wasn't just something that slipped out."
He hesitated, and for a moment I thought he might actually refuse, might have the sense to see the cliff edge we'd both walked up to.
Instead, stubborn in the specific way exhausted, cornered people get stubborn, he said it again, quieter this time but no less certain.
"You've never sacrificed anything for this marriage the way I have.
I don't think that's an insult. I think it's just the truth. "
"Okay," I said. Just that. One word, so quiet it was almost gentle, and then I picked up my keys from the counter and walked out of the kitchen, and a moment later he heard the front door open and close, and I imagine he stood there alone with the sentence still hanging in the air, not yet understanding that he had just said something he would spend a very long time trying to take back.