Page 69 of The Marriage Blunder

I pretended I did not notice any of it.

I was very bad at pretending.

It was a rounding error that finally caught my attention, buried three sheets deep in the client report. It was so small you would only notice if you were the kind of person who compulsively ran the same formula three times to be sure.

I was, so I did.

When I found it, I sat back and made the only sound appropriate for such a discovery—a small, flat “huh,” which in my vocabulary carried the weight of a presidential address.

Only then did I look up, and when I did, I found Kenneth watching me over the edge of his tablet, gaze so direct it was almost chemical.

“You’re staring,” I said, which was both true and the only defensive maneuver I could think of.

“Yes,” he said, with no trace of apology or qualification. Just yes. Like it was a physical law. Then he put his tablet down, reached for his coffee, and drank it in a way that suggested the conversation was now my responsibility.

It was too early in the day for blushing, so instead I redirected all nervous energy into my phone, typing a summary of the error for Kyue, who would reply in one of three increasingly worried emojis, all of which I could see in my head before I’d hit send. The color at the edge of my jaw was, I hoped, not visible from across the table.

It probably was.

After breakfast—by which I mean a third cup of coffee and the banana Kenneth set in front of me with the subtlety of a school nurse—I retreated to the living room to take a call with Syros. There’s a tone I drop into when I talk shop with people who speak numbers.

I paced while I was on the phone, even though I hate pacing and am bad at it, which meant I just wore a six-foot rut between the windows and the far wall.

I gestured at things only I could see, made notes on my palm with a Sharpie I kept in my hoodie pocket, and toggled between three different spreadsheets because multitasking is a disease I have and I refuse to seek treatment.

I didn’t realize Kenneth was watching until I turned to end the call and saw him standing in the doorway, arms folded, the expression on his face almost—almost—soft. He was not the kind of man who did “soft” for the general public. It was a look so unguarded I had to stand still for a second to absorb it.

“What?” I asked, because nothing else came to mind.

“Nothing,” he replied, and picked up a pen from the credenza, as if that had been his only business in the living room. But he didn’t leave. He just uncapped the pen, made a single mark on the top page of his notepad, and glanced at me again.

I stood there for a beat too long, trying to remember if I’d left my fly unzipped or said something deeply embarrassing during the call.

I had not.

But when I returned to the kitchen, the silence felt heavier and, paradoxically, more comfortable. It had the specific weight of something said without words and received without argument.

I could live with that.

At one-thirty, hunger showed up in my bloodstream with all the grace of a warehouse break-in, and I remembered there was a world outside the glass and steel of Kenneth’s penthouse.

I wanted—specifically and with the single-mindedness of a person who grew up eating peanut butter crackers for lunch—a sandwich from Kowalski’s—turkey-and-swiss on rye they had been making for three decades at a counter so narrow two customers could not physically pass each other without a polite negotiation.

I did not ask if Kenneth wanted lunch. I simply closed my laptop, put on my least-wrinkled shirt, and said, “I’m walking to Kowalski’s. I’ll be back in twenty.”

He didn’t argue. He put on a jacket and followed, like he had been waiting for me to suggest it.

I kept my head down and my pace just under a jog, not because I was in a hurry, but because my legs had not yet learned the concept of “leisurely stroll.”

Kenneth matched my pace easily. He walked the way he did everything else—deliberate, unhurried, with a kind of internal metronome that was impervious to outside noise.

Kowalski’s looked exactly as it always had: a small, slightly-too-bright box wedged between a cell phone repair shop and a tailor with a window display of suits that had been in fashion only for a brief, golden period in the early eighties.

Inside, the laminate tables shone with the patina of a thousand wiped-down lunches, and the chalkboard menu above the counter listed specials that had not changed since I was a grad student.

Pete, the counter guy, recognized me on sight and began assembling the sandwich before I reached the register. “The usual?” He asked, his hand already halfway to the plastic bag of shredded lettuce.

“Yes, please.” I remembered halfway through that I was now one half of a lunch expedition. “And another, same as mine.”