Chapter 2: Ellison & Cho

She didn't confront him that week. She told herself it was strategy — that she needed more than a name and a time stamp, that she wanted to understand the shape of the thing before she detonated it — but the truth, which she admitted to no one, not even herself until much later, was that she wasn't ready to hear the answer. As long as she hadn't asked, David got to keep being the man she married. The question, once spoken, would change him permanently, the way opening a box changes what's inside it whether you wanted to look or not. So she went to work instead, which was its own kind of joke, because "work" for Maren had shrunk over the past six years into something she barely recognized as the career she'd trained for. She still had her license. She still, technically, had a desk at Ellison & Cho — the firm David's college roommate Nate Cho had built and which David had helped finance, the firm where Maren had been, on paper, a founding partner before Emma was born and the hours had gotten impossible and someone had needed to be the one who left early, and it had been her, always her, because David's salary curve was steeper and steepness, they'd agreed reasonably, at the time, was the thing you followed. She hadn't drawn anything of her own in over a year. She did reviews now, sat in on client meetings to be "the design eye," signed off on things other people had actually built. She went in on Thursday and found Nate in the break room, stirring sugar into coffee with the focused unhappiness of a man doing a task he resented. "You look like you haven't slept," he said, not unkindly. "I haven't." "Kids?" "Something like that." He studied her a beat too long — Nate had always been better at reading rooms than he let on — and then let it go, because that was the deal between them, had been for years: he didn't ask about her marriage, she didn't ask why his own had ended. "We've got the Brightwater pitch Monday," he said instead. "Community center, mixed-use, the lot on Delancey. I want you in the room." "In the room, or *in the room*?" He looked at her properly then. "I want your actual eyes on this, Maren. Not your rubber stamp. It's been a while since you gave me your actual eyes on anything." It landed harder than he probably meant it to. She thought of the phone in the garage, still there, still wrapped in its shirt, a live wire she was choosing daily not to touch, and something in her chest went tight and strange, half grief and half — absurdly, inconveniently — hope, because *give me your actual eyes* was the first thing anyone had said to her in longer than she could count that assumed she still had something worth looking with. "Send me the brief," she said. "I'll have notes by Friday." She spent that night at the kitchen table with the Brightwater file open, the kids asleep, David out — golf with clients, he'd said, a foursome that ran long — and she felt something loosen in her that had been clenched so long she'd stopped registering it as clenched. She sketched. Not seriously, not for the pitch, just her hand moving because her hand remembered how, blocking out a covered walkway between the two wings of the building, the kind of connective tissue she'd always been good at, the parts other architects treated as afterthought and she'd always understood were the whole point — how people actually moved through a place, not how it photographed. She was still at the table when she heard the garage door go up at 11:50, later than golf usually ran, and she closed the laptop before he came in, not from guilt but from something else, something she didn't have a name for yet — an unwillingness to let this part of the evening touch him at all, to keep this one thing hers. "Hey," he said, coming in still in his golf clothes, breath faintly of scotch. "You're up late." "Work thing," she said. "Big pitch Monday." "That's great, babe." He said it warmly, and meant it, she thought — that was the terrible, complicating truth about David, that his fondness for her was not manufactured, it coexisted, somehow, alongside whatever else was going on, in some compartment that didn't seem to communicate with the others. "You should do more of that. You're good at it." "I know I'm good at it," she said, sharper than she meant to, and watched something flicker across his face, surprise at the edge in her voice, and she almost — almost — said it then, right there in the kitchen with his golf shoes still on: *who's Steph.* Instead she said, "I'm going to bed," and went up alone, and lay in the dark doing the math she'd been avoiding all week — nine days since the last message she'd seen, which meant nothing, which could mean it was over or could mean he'd simply started being more careful, and she realized with a kind of vertigo that she no longer trusted her own read of her husband's face, his voice, his ordinary golden ordinary tenderness, not even a little, and that not trusting it was its own kind of loss, separate from and maybe worse than whatever he'd actually done. Downstairs, faintly, she heard him lock the back door, the small domestic sound of a man closing up a house he still believed was entirely his to close. She thought about Brightwater, about the covered walkway, about the shape her hand had found without her quite directing it, and fell asleep, finally, somewhere past one, dreaming not about David at all but about a drafting table she used to have in a studio apartment with bad radiator heat, a decade before any of this, when the only thing she was building was her own life, and it had felt, back then, entirely like enough.

Before you start reading

You must be 18 or older

Comments (0)