Page 36 of The Marriage Blunder

The phone vibrated, once. I ignored it for a full minute before picking it up.

“Be there in thirty.”

No question about why. No negotiation.

I read it twice. Something in my chest that had been braced since morning released, just slightly.

I poured a third finger. This time, I tasted it.

The city, outside, kept moving.

But inside, for the first time all day, I stopped.

I showered, because some rituals have the force of law, and put on tan slacks, a white shirt open at the collar, and slip-on loafers that were engineered to look effortless. I skipped the watch. I didn’t want the evening measured in intervals.

The penthouse ran on a kind of latent energy, always a few degrees away from the precise temperature you wanted. I started the fireplace, watched the blue-orange pulse catch and hold, then set the flame at seventy percent because the algorithm insisted that was the optimal ambience for “entertaining in spaces over 1,400 square feet.”

I asked Adams to prepare dinner for two. “Anything special, sir?” he asked, with a politeness calibrated to neither offend nor ingratiate. I told him to pick a wine that wouldn’t survive the evening, and to make it something memorable.

I opened the retractable balcony doors, even though it was early March and the city air was just a few degrees past dangerous. The cold sucked the warmth from the living room in a matter of minutes, but I liked the way it made the edges of things sharper: the slipstream of cars far below, the red points of brake lights threading through the city, the intermittent shout of a distant horn.

The sound system, which I never bothered to understand fully, responded to the command for “something undemanding” by launching into a playlist that was 70% jazz, 10% Leonard Cohen, and 20% algorithmic confusion. I kept it. I didn’t want to risk silence.

At 7:03, Adams appeared at the threshold. “Mr. Thomas is here.”

“Send him in.”

Adams disappeared. I was on my second glass of wine, tablet propped on my knee, eyes skimming the hourly metrics, but not seeing any of them.

When Jude stepped into the living room, he did so with the wariness of a man who had, at one point or another, been made to account for every possible variable in a room.

He took in the fireplace, the open balcony, the glass in my hand. He looked at my shirt, at my bare wrist, at my face. Then he asked, “What did she do?”

The laugh caught me by surprise. It was not the kind of laugh I would have authorized. It was short, sharp, and more honest than anything else that day. “How do you know she did anything?”

He shrugged, but it was not a dismissal. “You only open the balcony when you’re trying to not feel suffocated.”

I set the tablet aside. “She went public.”

He nodded, waiting for the rest.

I ran him through it: the social media campaign, the reframed narrative, the shareholders. The way the board had lined up, not to support me, but to triangulate which direction the wind was blowing. The emails. The calls. The lunch where the steak had gone untouched.

He listened. He always listened.

When I finished, he picked up my wine glass—still half full—and drained it in one go. He held up the empty glass, turning it just so, and said, “Got more of this? I’m going to need it if we’re dealing with my sister.”

I called for Adams, who materialized with a fresh bottle and poured two glasses in complete silence. I watched the line of the wine catch the light, watched Jude’s eyes follow it, and then watched his fingers as he wrapped them around the stem, careful not to make a sound.

He sat on the couch next to me, close enough that the pressure of his presence altered the magnetic field of the room.

Adams retreated, leaving the tray and the bottle on the side table, then vanished into the kitchen.

The room was quiet except for the music, which had drifted into a sequence of piano chords that would have been corny if I’d chosen it on purpose. I hadn’t, and it was better that way.

Jude sipped the new glass, set it down, then said, “She’s not trying to destroy you outright. She’s running a pressure campaign.”

I almost smiled. “You think?”