Chapter 3 - THE NIGHT THEIR RULES DISAPPEARED
The first real crack in our arrangement came during Christmas.
My aunt invited us to Vermont.
Laurel had intended to visit the workshop, but a snowstorm closed the highway.
We ended up alone in the townhouse.
At midnight, the power failed.
No staff.
No lights.
No internet.
No work.
Just candles, a fireplace, two glasses of wine and a woman wrapped in one of my old sweaters.
She sat cross-legged on the rug.
“Tell me something true.”
“What?”
“Something nobody at your office knows.”
I looked at her.
“No.”
“That wasn’t the game.”
“I wasn’t aware we were playing one.”
“We are now.”
She waited.
Firelight moved across her face.
I do not know why I told her.
Perhaps because darkness makes confession easier.
Perhaps because for months she had been standing outside that locked door without touching the handle.
“My former fiancée wanted children.”
Laurel became still.
“We were engaged when I was twenty-nine. We tried for almost a year.”
I stared into the fire.
“Eventually we saw doctors.”
She said nothing.
“They found a problem. Very low count. Poor motility. The specialist said natural conception would be extraordinarily unlikely.”
“I’m sorry.”
“My fiancée stayed another six months.”
I laughed once without humor.
“Then she told me she couldn’t spend her life mourning children she hadn’t met yet.”
“That was cruel.”
“It was honest.”
“Those aren’t mutually exclusive.”
I looked at her.
Laurel’s eyes were wet.
Not pitying.
Just sad.
“She left,” I continued. “I stopped thinking about children. It was easier.”
“You stopped wanting them?”
I answered too quickly.
“Yes.”
She looked at me for a long time.
Then she said, “That wasn’t what I asked.”
The electricity returned a few minutes later.
Neither of us mentioned the conversation again.
But something changed.
In January, Laurel caught pneumonia.
Nothing severe, the doctor said.
Rest.
Fluids.
Medication.
I canceled three meetings anyway.
“You cannot sit there watching me breathe,” she complained from bed.
“I’m reading.”
“You’ve been on the same page for twenty minutes.”
“I’m a slow reader.”
“You run a multinational company.”
“Different skill.”
She smiled weakly.
Then fell asleep.
I stayed.
In February, she attended an award dinner with me.
Someone asked how we had met.
Laurel told them I had come into her father’s shop wanting an eighteenth-century desk restored.
According to her version, I had criticized the price and she had informed me I was welcome to “take the desk home and apologize to it myself.”
People laughed.
I laughed too.
Everyone at the table stared at me.
Later, in the elevator, Laurel nudged my shoulder.
“You smiled.”
“I smile.”
“No. Sometimes your face becomes less threatening. That’s different.”
I kissed her before I understood what I was doing.
One second, she was teasing me.
The next, my hand was against the elevator wall beside her head and my mouth was on hers.
Laurel froze.
So did I.
I stepped back.
“I’m sorry.”
She stared at me.
“Are you?”
The doors opened.
Neither of us moved.
“Laurel—”
She kissed me back.
Then the doors began closing again.
She pressed the open button, stepped out and said, without turning around, “That didn’t happen.”
I followed her.
“Agreed.”
It happened again three days later.
Then again the following week.
We became experts at pretending our own marriage wasn’t becoming real.
We kept separate bedrooms.
Mostly.
We did not say I love you.
We did not discuss the contract ending.
And five weeks before Laurel placed an ultrasound beside my coffee, a thunderstorm rolled over Boston.
She came into my room at 1:12 in the morning.
Barefoot.
Wearing a white cotton nightshirt.
I was awake.
We looked at each other.
No one pretended.
“No cameras,” she whispered.
“No trustees.”
“No board.”
“No contract requirement.”
“No.”
She swallowed.
“So whatever happens next belongs to us.”
I should have told her then.
I should have told her I had begun dreading the expiration date.
I should have told her I sometimes stood outside her bedroom just to see the light beneath her door.
Instead, I said, “Yes.”
May you like
She kissed me.
And for one night, two people who had negotiated every boundary between them stopped negotiating.
