Chapter 2
I watched Aaron from across the room for the response I had been engineering for four days, and Aaron was talking to Marcy's husband about something with a road construction project, and he had not looked over yet.
By ten-fifteen I was starting to wonder if he was going to look over at all.
By ten-thirty I had moved to a spot where there was no possible way he could be in the room and not see exactly what I wanted him to see.
He looked over at ten thirty-two.
He looked for approximately four seconds. His expression did not change in the way I had planned for it to change. He finished the sentence he was in the middle of with Marcy's husband. He reached into his pocket. He took out his phone, looked at it for a moment, put it back. Then he crossed the room.
Not fast. Not with the energy of a man about to make a scene.
The way a man crosses a room when he has already been where he is going, in his mind, for several days, and is now simply arriving in person.
He stopped at the table beside where I was standing and he placed his left hand flat on the surface and he slid his wedding ring off his finger and set it on the wood. The sound it made was small. Everybody heard it.
Then he looked at Tyler.
"You can stop standing behind her now," he said.
His voice had the quality of something that has been very cold for a long time. Not ice — ice has drama in it. Something older than ice. The thing under it.
For a moment nobody moved. The television in the corner ran a highlight reel from some game in another state. Someone near the kitchen lowered their cup.
Marcy moved close to me and said, very quietly, "Say something cute. Make him feel stupid."
I tried.
I rolled my eyes the way I had practiced rolling my eyes at him for three years. I forced the laugh that had always worked before, the one that communicated he was the one being unreasonable, that I was simply a woman in a room and he was overreacting to furniture.
"Oh my God, Aaron," I said. "Don't make this embarrassing."
May you like
He looked at me then.
And somehow that was worse than everything else. There was no jealousy on his face. No hurt I could work with. No anger I could redirect. There was only the quiet look that people have when they have already made a decision and are simply letting the room catch up. It was the look of a man who is not fighting for something because he has already determined he is done fighting for it, and the finality of it landed in my chest before I could prepare for the landing.
