Victor's expression didn't change, but something behind it did a faint rearrangement that lasted only a moment before the pleasantness returned. " Well," he said with a generosity so deliberate it was its own kind of insult. " That's a worthy trade." " It keeps us busy," Ethan said. Victor's eyes moved back to Serena with a look that was performatively warm and privately cold. "
It's good to see you with company, Serena." People were beginning to talk. He said it lightly with the ease of someone delivering an arranged blow. People always talk, Serena said. It's what they do when they don't have anything useful to contribute.
Victor smiled. We'll catch up later in the evenings, he said, and steered his group toward another table. Daniel Blackwood lingered for three full seconds, studying Ethan with an expression he couldn't read, and then followed. Ethan sat back down. He looked at Serena.
Serena looked at her water glass. Her posture was perfectly composed. Her hand, which was no longer on his arm, was resting on the table. and he noticed that her knuckles had the very slightest color in them from how briefly she had been holding on. So Ethan said, keeping his voice low, the husband situation.
Yes. How long have I supposedly been married to you? 11 months, she said. Where did we meet? She glanced at him sideways.
I imagine you could come up with something workable. I could, he said, but it helped to know if we're supposed to be the kind of people who tell the story at dinner parties or the kind who prefer not to discuss it. Serena studied him for a moment. Then she said, "Victor Langden has spent the last 8 months telling anyone who will listen that I'm emotionally unstable, professionally overcautious, and personally isolated. He's been working toward a board challenge.
Tonight is full of investors and board members. If he can humiliate me publicly or confirm the story he's been telling, he gains leverage for a vote tomorrow morning." Ethan absorbed this. And the husband's story, and she continued, was something I said at an investor dinner 6 months ago when he made a comment about my personal life in front of 12 people. I implied I had remarried.
It stopped him. But he's been asking questions ever since, trying to find evidence that I fabricated it. She paused. Which I did. Until tonight, Ethan said.
Until approximately 17 minutes ago, she said. Ethan was quiet for a moment. Across the room, Victor had settled at a table with the investors and Daniel Blackwood and was already deep in a conversation that looked comfortable and deliberate. Ethan thought about Maisie asleep at Mrs. Falduto. He thought about his canvas tool bag parked back by the service corridor.
He thought about the fact that he had come here to deliver a table and was now apparently the most critical figure in a corporate power struggle. He picked up his fork, the short rib, he said. You said it was exceptional. Serena blinked. You didn't say that, he said.
Gerald did. But you looked like you might agree. Serena looked at Gerald, who was on her other side, contentedly eating and explaining something about sailing to Diane. Then she looked back at Ethan. It is very good, she said carefully.
All right, Ethan said. I'll need to know the important things. The stuff that'd be obvious if we'd been married almost a year. When's your birthday? What you like to eat?
What you do on Sunday mornings? The big ones. Serena stared at him. " You're going to do this." " I came here to install a table," Ethan said. "
The table's already installed. Might as well eat dinner." Something crossed Serena Blackwood's face. Not quite a smile, more like the preliminary movement that precedes one when the person is not entirely sure smiling is the appropriate response. " February 19th," she said. "
My birthday. Mine's August 3rd," he said. " In case you need it." She picked up her own fork. Outside, beyond the candlelight and the orchestra, and the careful arrangements of the evening, Chicago was cold and dark and entirely indifferent to the unlikely negotiation taking place at a table near the east wall of the Harrington Grand Ballroom.
I'm not particularly comfortable with charity events, Serena said after a moment. You host one every year, Ethan said. Yes, she said. I didn't say I was bad at things I'm not comfortable with. She paused.
Sunday mornings I read. Badly written thrillers usually the ones with the embossed lettering on the cover. I don't tell people that. Now you have to tell people your husband knows, Ethan said. Yes, she said.
I suppose I do. Across the room, Victor Langden looked in their direction, assessed what he saw, and turned away with a particular expression of a man who was already revising a plan. And Ethan Ror, single father, furniture builder, a man who had arrived through the service entrance with a canvas tool bag, and absolutely no intention of spending his Thursday evening like this, quietly ate the best short rib of his life, and tried to remember how married people sat next to each other. He was going to need the practice. The orchestra had shifted into something slower by the time the second course arrived.
a warm celery root soup that Ethan ate without paying much attention to it because he was busy running a quiet inventory of everything Serena had told him in the past 40 minutes and trying to organize it into something that resembled a coherent backstory. It wasn't that he was a good liar. He wasn't particularly Maisie had learned by the age of six that her father's face did something involuntary when he tried to conceal information. A slight tension around the jaw that she had identified and named the thing you do, Dad. But Ethan had also spent 15 years in a trade that required him to hold a plan in his head and execute it under pressure without letting the seams show.
And he understood at a basic level that the most convincing version of anything was the one built on as much truth as possible. So he worked with what was true. He had built a table. She had commissioned something from his workshop close enough. They had met because of furniture.