Chapter 3 The Window
Summer
The bolognese has been down on a low flame for an hour, his favorite, and I drag the spoon through it and taste it off the back and it's perfect.
The pasta and water are prepped for the second he texts that he's on his way.
The garlic bread sits wrapped on the counter, ready for the oven.
I set the table, two plates and two glasses, and light the candles.
I go to set up tomorrow's coffee pot and the coffee tin is empty. Two beans in the bottom rattle around.
Colt
Hey babe, Calloway's redlining the whole term sheet again. Cheyenne and I are gonna grind through it tonight at the office. Don't wait up on dinner. I'll grab something here. Love you.
I read it twice. It isn't complicated; the first time, my eyes go straight to her name and skip everything around it, and I have to go back and read the rest like it's the part that matters.
Cheyenne and I are gonna grind through it.
The sauce is still on the stove. The candles are still burning.
I type a reply and delete it. Type another and delete that too.
Finally, I send Okay and a thumbs-up, because anything more than a thumbs-up would start a conversation I am not willing to have while standing over a pot of his favorite dinner that apparently isn’t happening.
Send.
Read.
Nothing.
I turn off the burner and move the bread into a bag before it goes tough. I cover the sauce. Then I lean across the table and blow out the candles one by one.
Smoke curls off the wicks and mixes with the garlic and wine, and for a second the whole kitchen smells less like the beginning of something than the end.
I stand there looking at the table.
Two plates. Two glasses. Two of everything.
The woman who set it forty minutes ago, the one who thought tonight might still become something, already feels like someone I used to know.
I don’t cry. There’s nothing solid enough to cry over yet.
There’s only a pot of his favorite food going cold beneath a lid.
I run out to the market to get the coffee.
I see them through the window on my way back.
The market bag is still hanging from my hand.
The Butcher Block is where Colt took me for our first anniversary that felt real. He wanted somewhere nicer than my parents’ diner, and his mother kept saying we really must try it.
He ordered oysters Rockefeller. Got spinach stuck in his teeth. Looked across the table at me with that stupid green smile and said, “You’re the most beautiful girl I’ve ever seen.”
“You have spinach in your teeth,” I told him.
He shrugs. "Still."
That is The Butcher Block.
Ours.
The restaurant with a story in it.
Now Colt is sitting at a table near the window with a candle burning between him and Cheyenne. Two glasses of red wine, both half-empty.
She’s leaning toward him, elbows on the table, chin resting in her hand, giving him her full attention.
He’s leaning in too.
Same angle. Same distance.
Like she set a mirror across from herself and he hasn’t noticed he’s become the reflection.
And he’s laughing.
Actually laughing. Not the short breath he gives me when he’s looking at his phone and I say something he thinks is probably funny.
The one that breaks across his face, creases the corners of his eyes, and turns him back into the boy who walked into the diner with mud on his knees and rang the bell above the door like he’d invented it.
I stop in the middle of the sidewalk.
People move around me. Someone mutters, “Excuse me.”
I can’t move.
I stand there in the current of King Street at dinnertime and watch my husband be happy.
That’s what makes the ground drop out from under me.
Not the wine. Not the candle. Not even Cheyenne reaching across the table to squeeze his hand before drawing hers back again, quick and soft and practiced.
It’s him.
He looks loose. Open. Lit from the inside.
For months, I’ve gotten the other version. The man who scrolls through dinner with his eyes fixed somewhere behind my head. The man whose shoulders never come down. The man who enters every room already halfway gone.
He saves that man for me.
This one is for her.
My husband is sitting across a candle in our restaurant, giving another woman the best version of himself. The version I married. The version I’ve missed so much I lit candles on a weeknight, as though I could call him back with garlic and wine and a table set for two.
And he is spending that version of himself on her.
I could go home.
The thought comes easily. Walk away. Say nothing. Add tonight to the pile with everything else. Reheat the sauce. Pretend I never saw them.
But some part of me, the part Vivienne has spent years trying to teach me to fold up and hide, finally says no.
Not tonight.
I am not going to stand in the dark and watch my husband through a window, then go home and eat alone like a woman who agreed to disappear.
So I walk inside.
The hostess looks up.
“I’m joining someone. My husband is already seated.”
I don’t wait for her to lead me.
Cheyenne sees me first.
I watch the change happen, and it might be the most educational two seconds of my marriage.
Her smile vanishes. Her chin lifts from her hand. Her arm retreats to her side of the table, where it should have been all night. Her spine straightens. Her face settles into something smooth and professional.
She does all of it before Colt notices me.
Fast. Complete.
Like a woman pulling a fire door shut.
By the time he follows her gaze, there is nothing in front of him but a colleague sitting politely in a chair.
She is so good at hiding it that the hiding becomes its own confession.
And I am the only person at the table who understands what I just saw.
Colt turns.
His face changes in stages, and I know I will remember the order for the rest of my life.
Surprise.
Then pleasure, real and immediate. The look he gives me when I walk into the kitchen. For half a second, it hurts worse than the candle because it means that part of him is still there.
Then the room catches up with him.
The table. The wine. The woman across from him.
His wife standing beside them.
He rises. “Summer.”
The text he sent me an hour ago tries to exist in the room with us.
Still at the office. Grinding through it. Eat without me.
It doesn’t survive the candle.
“Hi.” My voice comes out bright and warm, the one I could perform in my sleep. “I got lost in my book and looked up and the whole afternoon was gone. I started craving their risotto. I had no idea you were here.”
“Yeah, we just…” His eyes flick toward Cheyenne. “Calloway stuff. Strategy session.”
He kisses my cheek.
Not my mouth.
“You should join us.”
Join them.
In our restaurant.
At a table set for two, with two chairs, two glasses of wine, and a lit candle between them.
A working dinner, apparently.
“I’d love to.” I look around. “Can someone bring me a chair?”
The waiter is already moving.
He’s probably been watching this longer than I have.
He brings a third chair, a third place setting, and another wineglass. Then he pours from their bottle without asking, because he has worked Charleston dining rooms long enough to know exactly what kind of evening just walked through the door.
I want to tip him for the rest of his life.
I sit with Cheyenne across from me and Colt on my left.
“Cheyenne.” I give her my widest, safest smile. “It’s so good to see you outside the office. Colt talks about you constantly.”
The pause before she answers is brief enough to deny and long enough for me to hear.
“He talks about you more, I promise.”
“I doubt it.” I keep smiling. “He didn’t mention dinner. Was this last minute?”
“Calloway called this afternoon,” Colt says before she can answer. Too quickly. “We needed to nail down the term sheet before Monday.”
He grips his water glass, turns it a quarter turn, then lets it go.
He doesn’t quite look at me.
Whatever ease he had through the window is gone. Now he looks like a man trying to remember exactly what he told his wife and whether it can coexist with what she is looking at.
It can’t.
He knows it.
Worse, he knows I can see him figuring that out.
“Mm.” I take a drink. “So this is a working dinner.”
“Yes.”
“At The Butcher Block.”
“Cheyenne suggested it.”
There it is.
Her suggestion.
And then the rest begin to follow.
Cheyenne suggested the restaurant. Cheyenne picked the table. Cheyenne ordered the wine.
He places every decision on her side of the table like a man emptying his pockets to prove he has nothing to hide.
It isn’t even the lie that cuts deepest.
It’s how easily the defense comes to him. How little it costs. As though he has rehearsed it privately a hundred times and is only now being forced to say it aloud.
“Well.” I set down my glass. “I’ll order the risotto and let you two finish. What were you discussing when I came in?”
“Risk allocation,” Cheyenne says.
“Calloway’s portfolio,” Colt says at the same time.
The silence after is long enough to become its own paragraph.
“Both,” Cheyenne says, recovering smoothly for the two of them. “The conversation got a little wide-ranging.”
“I’ll bet.”
I order the risotto.
Then I become charming.
I ask Cheyenne about her sister, her hometown, the arc of her career. Every question is warm, sincere, and chosen with care.
There is very little in this world more unsettling to a woman sitting where she is than a wife who refuses to become ugly for her.
Cheyenne answers beautifully.
We are both extraordinary at this.
Under the table, Colt’s hand settles on my thigh.
Not tenderly. Not really.
More like a flag pressed into ground he is no longer sure belongs to him.
I take his wrist, lift his hand, and drop it back on his own leg.
I never look at him.
It is the loudest thing I say all night.
Eventually, Cheyenne stands.
“It was great seeing you, Summer.”
She sounds warm and effortless, like she has all the room in the world to be gracious.
Maybe she does.
She is the only person at the table who didn’t lose anything tonight.
I don’t wait for the check.
I don’t wait for Colt.