PART 7:

He kept his voice easy. They’re not always aware of it. Sometimes they are. Either way, the result is the same. She looked at where Marcus had gone across the room already back in easy conversation with someone else, smiling, unheld by anything. He’s not a monster, she said quietly. That’s the part that made it hard to see clearly. He’s not.

There’s no crime in it. It’s just it still cost you, Ethan said. Yes, she said. It cost me. They stood with that for a moment, and then Lily appeared from somewhere with a plate of something and a bright, non-negotiable energy that broke the gravity, which was clearly what she was for in this family. Dinner was announced, and the room organized itself toward the tables, and Ethan held the back of Victoria’s chair without thinking about it, and then caught himself thinking about it after, which was its own kind of information.

They were seated with Lily, Jake, a couple from Jake’s side who were funny and easy to talk to, and a cousin of Victoria’s named Seth, who was 24 and in his second year of law school and had strong opinions about New York pizza that Ethan found himself genuinely debating across the table. Victoria beside him ate her food and contributed to the conversation in the measured way she did most things.

But somewhere around the second course, he noticed that she’d relaxed. Not all the way. Not fully. Not with her mother at a table across the room and Marcus somewhere in her peripheral vision, but enough. The tension in her jaw had eased. She laughed at something Jake said, a real laugh.

The short, genuine one he’d heard in the kitchen a month ago. He found himself watching her laugh and looking away. Under the table, quietly, she put her hand on his forearm. Just rested it there for a moment, not looking at him, like she was checking that he was still real. He put his hand over hers briefly, and then they both went back to the dinner like it hadn’t happened.

The speeches came after dessert. Jake’s best man was funny in the practiced way of someone who had worked on the speech for weeks and wanted you to know it. Lily’s maid of honor was genuinely funny. Which was better? Then Lily herself said something brief and true about finding the person who made the ordinary parts of life feel like the right ones? And Victoria beside Ethan went completely quiet.

He glanced at her. She was watching her sister at the microphone with an expression he didn’t have words for. Not sad exactly, more like someone standing at a window looking at something they can’t quite reach. “Hey,” he said very quietly. She blinked, looked at him. “You okay?” A pause. Then honestly, I want that.

what she described. I’ve just been afraid for a long time that I broke something in myself that makes it possible. He held her gaze. The applause was starting around them for the speech. Under it, quietly, he said, “You didn’t break anything.” “You don’t know that either. I know what I’ve seen in 4 months,” he said. “You’re not broken.

You’re careful. There’s a difference.” She looked at him for a long moment, and the noise of the party moved around them like water around something fixed. You’re surprisingly good at this, she said. At what? Saying the right thing without making it feel like a line. It’s not a line, he said. And because it wasn’t, and because she needed to believe it, he held her gaze until she did.

Mom, they found a table near the windows during the dancing. Victoria had taken off one heel and was holding it in her hand, which was perhaps the most relaxed he’d ever seen her. They’d made it through two hours of the party, through Marcus, through Catherine, through speeches and dinner, and a receiving line of relatives who all had something to say about something, and there was an exhaustion on them both that felt strangely like satisfaction.

“Tell me about Dana,” Victoria said. He looked over at her. We talked about her. “You told me what happened. That’s not the same as telling me about her.” He thought about it. She was spontaneous. She made decisions faster than anyone I’ve ever known. Like she was afraid that thinking too long would cost her something.

She was funny and she was restless and she was not. It turned out built for the kind of life I was building. He paused. I think I knew that before she did. I just didn’t want to. Why not? Because we’d already made a life, an apartment and a baby and a future on paper. And I thought I thought if I just kept building, she’d settle in. He turned the words over.

That was naive. It’s not naive to want someone to stay. No, he said. The naive part was thinking that wanting it hard enough would make it true. He looked at his hands on the table. After she left, I swore I wouldn’t build anything with anyone again until I was sure, dead certain. And the problem with deciding to be dead certain is that you never are, so you just stop building.

Victoria was quiet. A slow song had started on the dance floor, and couples moved into each other’s arms in the way that made ballrooms feel smaller and more private than they were. Marcus was the first person I trusted after the last one, she said. And that one had just left without explanation.

Not dramatically, just stopped calling. So when Marcus showed up and was so thoroughly present, so attentive, it felt like correction, like I’d been given back something I’d lost. She watched the dancers. It was months before I understood that the attention was management, not love. How did you figure it out? I caught myself checking his face before I said things, not to gauge his reaction, to preemptively decide whether what I was about to say was going to cost me something.

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