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.