I looked at Nathan.
“Anything else I should know?”
I meant it as a joke. Or I meant it as a challenge. I’m still not sure which. But nobody laughed.
Mr. Bennett hesitated.
Then Susan spoke.
“I’m going too.”
She said it simply. Quietly. Not cruel, not smug. She just said it, the way you’d tell someone their tag was sticking out.
I looked at her.
She didn’t look away. I’ll give her that.
Nathan immediately shook his head.
“Don’t make this into something it isn’t. Susan was assigned to the project. I didn’t choose her.”
“I didn’t say you chose her.”
“You were going to.”
“I hadn’t said anything yet, Nathan.”
I turned to Mr. Bennett. My voice came out very calm. Calmer than I felt.
“Did Nathan know Susan was going when he accepted?”
Nathan’s face changed.
It was small. A little tightening around the mouth. The look he gets when he’s lost a game and doesn’t want to admit it.
That was my answer.
“Yes,” Mr. Bennett said quietly. “I’m sorry, Natalie. I thought you two had already discussed all of this.”
I wanted to explode.
I wanted to stand up and throw the lemon tart across the room. I wanted to scream, Three weeks? Three weeks, and you let me hear it over chicken from a man who lost his wedding ring in a lake?
Instead, I smiled.
I stood up, smoothed the front of my violet dress, and picked up the empty bread basket.
“Anyone want dessert?”
The room went painfully quiet.
Then Priya said, a little too loudly, “I would love dessert.”
God bless Priya.
For the rest of the evening, I watched Nathan and Susan.
I didn’t want to. I told myself not to. But I couldn’t stop.
Nothing happened that I could actually accuse them of. They didn’t touch. They didn’t whisper. They barely even looked at each other.
But there were little things.
When Nathan got up to get more drinks, Susan said, “He’ll want the bourbon, not the wine,” before he’d even reached the kitchen. And she was right. He came back with a bourbon. One ice cube.
When I served the lemon tart, Nathan took one bite and pushed it away.
Susan laughed.
“Don’t worry, Natalie,” she said. “I’ll make sure he actually eats in Seattle. Nathan forgets when he’s stressed.”
I put down my fork.
“He does?”
In eleven years of marriage, I had never seen Nathan forget to eat. Nathan ate when he was happy, when he was sad, when he was bored. Nathan once ate a whole pizza during a tax audit.
Or at least, that was the Nathan I knew.
Susan’s smile faded slightly. I think she realized, right then, that she’d said something she shouldn’t have.
“All the time,” she said, softer.
“Hey, Devin,” Nathan said, way too loudly, “didn’t you just get a new boat?”
Devin, who very clearly did not have a new boat, looked confused. “I have a kayak.”
“A kayak! That’s great. Tell Bennett about the kayak.”
Nathan quickly changed the subject. Devin talked about his kayak for nine minutes. I know because I watched the clock on the microwave the entire time.
Later, while everyone was getting ready to leave, gathering coats in the hallway, I went to get Priya’s scarf from the bedroom. When I came back, Nathan and Susan were standing near the front door. She was pulling on her gloves.
“At least the apartment situation is finally sorted,” she said to him.
“What apartment situation?” I asked.
They both turned.
Susan looked at Nathan.
That look. That was the thing that got me most, I think. Not what she’d said, but the way she checked with him first. Like he was the one who decided what I got to know.
“Company housing,” he said quickly.
“Oh, right,” Susan added. “We’re in the same building. It’ll make the early mornings easier.”
The same building.
“How nice,” I said.
Another thing Susan knew.
Another thing my husband hadn’t told me.
Bennett shook my hand at the door and held on to it for a second. “Thank you for a wonderful dinner, Natalie. And again, I’m sorry. I put my foot in it.”
“You didn’t do anything wrong,” I said. And I meant it. He was the only person at that table who had told me the truth without being forced to.
Priya hugged me. “The tart was amazing,” she whispered. “Did you make it?”
“No.”
“I knew it. I love you for that.”
Susan said goodbye without hugging me this time. She just nodded, and something in her face looked almost sorry.
I waited until the last guest walked out and closed the door behind them.
I listened to their cars start. I listened to them pull out of the driveway, one by one.
Then I turned to Nathan.
“Three weeks?”
“Natalie…”
“You knew for three weeks that you were leaving. You knew Susan was going with you. She’s apparently going to live in the same building as you, and somehow she knows your habits better than I do.”
“Nothing is happening between me and Susan.”
“Then why does she know more about your life than your wife does?”
He pressed his fingers into his forehead.
“Because I knew you’d react exactly like this.”
I laughed. It came out high and strange.
“Like what? Like a wife who just found out her husband is moving to another city with a beautiful woman from work?”
“I’m not moving in with Susan.”
“Oh, good. She’s just going to be living down the hall.”
“It’s company housing! The company picked the building! There are probably forty people in that building!”
“And how many of them know you forget to eat when you’re stressed?”
Nathan opened his mouth to answer.
His phone lit up on the table.
It was lying face-up next to the empty wine bottles, and in the dim light of the dining room, the screen glowed like a little spotlight.
Susan.
I looked at him.
“Perfect timing.”
“Natalie, don’t…”
But the message preview was already glowing on the screen.
I didn’t even have to pick it up. I just looked down.
I read the first line.
Bennett approved the six-month extension. Are you seriously still telling Natalie it’s only three?
I read it again. Then I looked up at Nathan.
“What?! Why didn’t you tell me this too?!”
His face went pale. Not a little pale. White, like someone had pulled a plug.
“It’s not six months yet.”
I picked up his phone before he could reach it and held it up so he could see the screen.
“She literally says six-month extension.”
“It’s an option.”
“An option you apparently applied for.”
He rubbed both hands over his face. When he took them away, he looked ten years older.
“I asked Bennett whether the assignment could be extended if things went well.”
“When?”
“A couple weeks ago.”
“So when you sat there five minutes ago—” I pointed at the dining room table, at his chair, at the plate of chicken he barely touched— “telling me three months, maybe four, you knew you were trying to stay for six?”
“I didn’t know it had been approved.”
“That is not an answer.”
“Natalie, I wasn’t hiding some affair.”
“Stop saying that like it’s the only possible thing you could do wrong.”
He fell silent.
We stood there in the dining room, the candle still burning on the table, the dirty plates everywhere. I could smell the rosemary and the lemon and the cheap vanilla candle I’d lit to cover up the fact that we never cleaned the hallway.
That was the first moment I realized Susan might not actually be the biggest problem.
I put his phone back down on the table, face down this time.
I pointed toward it.
“Why do you want six months?”
“It’s a good opportunity.”
“You already had the opportunity at three months.”
Nathan looked away.
There was more.
I knew him well enough to see it. After eleven years, you learn the shape of your husband’s silences. There’s the silence when he’s tired. The silence when he’s angry and doesn’t want to say something mean. And there’s this one. The one where he’s standing at the edge of something and deciding whether to jump.
“What aren’t you telling me?”
“Nothing’s decided.”
“What isn’t decided?”
He walked into the kitchen and began gathering plates as if dishes had suddenly become urgent.
Nathan does not do the dishes. Not without being asked twice. Not without sighing.
I followed him.
“Nathan.”
He set two plates in the sink. Then a third. He turned on the water and held his hand under it, waiting for it to get warm, even though he never waits for it to get warm.
“Bennett mentioned the company might keep a small team in Seattle if the project works.”
“Might?”
“Yes.”
“And?”
He scrubbed at a plate that was already clean.
“And he said I’d probably be considered to lead it.”
For a second, I couldn’t make sense of the words. They just sat there in the air between us, like a language I almost spoke.
“Lead it temporarily?”
Nathan didn’t answer.
I felt something inside me go cold. Like someone had opened a window in the middle of winter.
