The conversation at the table moved fast and entirely without her. The Lakefront project. A competitor firm underbidding on the waterfront proposal. A conference in Miami next month. The woman with the blond chignon - her name was apparently Reese - had opinions about everything, delivered with the quick, unself-conscious authority of someone who'd never once waited to be invited to speak. She had a laugh that filled a room. She talked about her own bid for a museum expansion in D.C. with the easy confidence of someone who expected to win.
Ivy sat at the corner of her own dinner table and watched her.
She's not prettier than me, Ivy thought, and then felt immediately small for thinking it.
But it wasn't about pretty. It was something else. Reese moved through the world with a total absence of apology, a kind of territorial ease in her own existence. She didn't glance at anyone before she spoke. She didn't edit herself. She reached across the table for the prosciutto without asking if anyone else wanted it first.
Ivy lifted her wine glass and took a careful sip.
When did I start asking permission to reach for things at my own table?
She didn't answer herself. She refilled everyone's glasses and listened to a forty-minute conversation she had nothing to contribute to, and told herself the ache in her chest was just tiredness.
The last guest left at eleven fifteen.
Ivy stood at the sink, rinsing glasses, stacking plates. The kitchen smelled like wine and garlic and something faintly sweet from the crème brûlée she'd quietly eaten alone, standing at the counter, while everyone's backs were turned.
She heard Adrian come in behind her.
"Good group," he said. He pulled out a kitchen stool and sat. "Reese is going to be useful on the Lakefront proposal. She's worked with the zoning board before."
"That's good." Ivy set a wine glass carefully in the rack. Then another.
"You were quiet tonight."
"I didn't know anything about the Lakefront proposal."
"Right." A pause. "Sorry about the short notice. It just made sense logistically."
She picked up her hair dryer from the counter - she'd left it there that morning, and somewhere during the two-hour cooking stretch she'd developed the habit of leaving it accessible for evenings like this, evenings when he came home tense and tired and she'd discovered that twenty minutes of her sitting behind him, working the dryer through his hair, was the one ritual that reliably loosened something in him.
She gestured to the stool. He turned it so she could stand behind him.
She turned on the dryer. The noise was good. It meant she could think for a few seconds without having to organize her face.
She worked the brush through the back of his hair, slow and even. He exhaled.
She turned the dryer off.
"I want us to think about having a baby," she said.
His shoulders didn't tighten. That was somehow worse - that her words landed without any kind of physical reaction at all.
"We've talked about this," he said.
"We haven't, actually. Not really." She kept her voice steady. "We've talked around it. You've said 'not yet' for three years. I want to actually talk about it."
A beat.
"The firm is in the middle of the biggest pitch we've had in four years. If we land the Lakefront project, the next eighteen months are going to be intense. It's not a good time to-"
"It's our anniversary," she said quietly. "Today."
He went still.
She saw him do the calculation. She watched him arrive at the answer and then watch the understanding move through him - the date, the table, the candles that were already put away when he got home, the dinner she'd cooked and then converted into something for six people in under half an hour.
"Ivy." He turned on the stool. His voice had shifted to something softer, and she hated it a little, because the softness felt like management. "I'm sorry. I lost track of the week. I can make it up to you - whatever you want, just tell me, or better yet, pick something and just put it on the card. Don't hold back."
She looked at him.
"Put it on the card," she repeated.
"I mean it. Anything."
She pressed her lips together for a moment. "I don't want something from the card, Adrian."
"Then what do you want?"
I want you to have remembered, she thought. I want you to have come home at seven. I want the dinner to have been for us instead of for your colleagues. I want to feel like I am a person you actually see.
"It's fine," she said. "It's just a date on the calendar."
He relaxed, slightly - and that small relaxation, that visible relief that she'd chosen to let him off the hook again, was the most tired she'd felt all night.
"You should find something to do during the days," he said, and his voice had fully transitioned now into the practical register he used for logistics. "A course, or some kind of part-time thing. You've got a real eye for design - you could probably find something in interior work, or art consulting. It would give you something to focus on."
"Your mother made it clear she didn't want me working."
A brief silence.
"Mother has opinions about a lot of things."
"She has a specific opinion about the Hartley name appearing in contexts she considers undignified. She told me so directly." Ivy kept her voice neutral. "I didn't want to create problems."
"I'll talk to her."
"You've said that before."
He didn't answer that.
"The baby question," she said. "Can we at least put a real timeline on it? Not 'not yet.' An actual date. Something I can hold onto."
"After the Lakefront pitch." He stood. "If we land it and the design phase kicks off well, we can revisit. But realistically - eighteen months. Two years at the outside."
She nodded. She didn't say you said eighteen months three years ago. She didn't say I am thirty-one years old and I have been patient for longer than you know. She didn't say any of it.
"There's a contract in my office I need to finish reading," he said. "Don't wait up."
She heard his study door close.