The car was waiting.
He slid into the backseat, and the door closed, and the city began to move past the tinted windows, and it was only then, safely away from his wife's joy and the luminous wreckage of her happiness, that he allowed himself to stop performing.
His jaw set. His hand, the one not holding the book, closed slowly into a fist against his thigh.
His wife loved him. And she loved a version of him that was real, those gestures were real, those impulses were not performed, but that man existed alongside another man who had sat in this same backseat nine days ago and calculated the utility of a convenient marriage while his new wife slept against his shoulder with her hand on his thigh.
The Marquez dinner had already happened. Three nights ago. Chelsea beside him in the green dress, her hand finding his under the table whenever the conversation paused, her genuine fascination with Miriam's work transforming what should have been a strategic dinner into something that had left the elderly couple visibly charmed and the deal all but signed.
She had been magnificent. And she had been magnificent because she was herself, and he had brought her there because he knew she would be, and the knowledge that he had used the very thing that made her extraordinary sat in him now like something swallowed that would not go down.
Precious is not the same as necessary,he had told himself nine days ago.
But that was before she had handed him a book about Jesus with tabs in it and asked him to go to Heaven. Before she had almost saidI love youand caught herself and smiled at him from the foyer in his stolen t-shirt and her wool socks and looked at him like he was the entire world, and he had walked out the door carrying her book and her trust and the quiet, corrosive certainty that he deserved neither.
His brother's voice came to him, uninvited.
You understand exactly what you have. And you are going to ruin it anyway, because knowing frightens you more than not knowing ever frightened me.
He looked at the book in his other hand. Worn spine. Colored tabs. The faint impression of her fingerprints on the cover, invisible but present, the way she was present in everything now.
He did not put it in his briefcase.
He did not open it.
He sat in the back of his car with Toronto scrolling past and his wife's love sitting beside him like a living thing, and he did not know what to do with it, and the not-knowing was worse than anything his carefully constructed life had ever asked him to hold.
Chapter Eight
"TODAY YOU'LL BE MEETINGwith the wives of the board members."
"Got it."
"That's for luncheon, and after that, we have a short podcast interview with a local influencer."
"I understand."
