Chapter 24
Chapter Twenty-Four
Donovan's fortieth birthday arrived on the calendar like a deadline neither of us had quite let ourselves think about directly, even though we'd both been counting, separately, in the careful, silent way people count things they're afraid to say out loud. The months we’d spent together had been both so slow in the way we grew to yearn for the other’s presence, but so fast in how it was upon us before either of us had admitted what we felt.
The gala planning consumed the household for weeks, an enormous celebration that would, to every guest walking through the door, look like a milestone birthday for a powerful man and his devoted wife.
To the only two people who actually understood what the date meant, it was the precise moment our contract would finish doing what it had been written to do, the exact hour his grandfather's condition would be satisfied and the entire careful architecture of our marriage would have officially served its purpose.
I caught Donovan staring at the invitation proofs one evening with an expression I couldn't quite name, somewhere between satisfaction and something heavier underneath it, and when I asked what he was thinking, he gave me an answer that felt too careful, too smoothed over, like a door closing gently rather than slamming.
"Just logistics," he said, and turned back to the seating chart, and I let it go because pushing would have meant admitting how closely I'd started watching him for exactly this kind of evasion.
I mentioned it to Priscilla at the studio, in the vague, deflecting way you talk about something you're not ready to examine directly, and she looked up from her sketchbook with the particular bluntness of someone young enough to still say the obvious thing out loud.
"Sounds like you're both already grieving something you haven't lost yet," she said, and went back to her drawing like she hadn't just handed me the exact sentence I'd been avoiding for weeks.
I'd started noticing, by then, the particular weight that had settled into the space between us over the past months, the way our rehearsed gestures had stopped requiring rehearsal, the way his hand at my back felt less like staging and more like habit he genuinely didn't want to break.
None of that changed what the calendar said.
His birthday was the date written into our contract, the beginning of the end by every legal definition either of us had agreed to, and no amount of unspoken warmth between us could quietly amend a document we'd both signed with our eyes open.
I told myself I was ready for that ending. I'd been telling myself that for weeks, the same careful, repeated lie I'd once told myself about Charles, and some small, honest part of me had already started to suspect it wasn't going to hold up any better the second time.