The dining room looked like a sterile, aggressively staged photograph torn from a catalog for people who possessed wealth but entirely lacked warmth. Heavy, polished silver caught and fractured the amber light bleeding from the hearth. Tall, immaculate crystal wine glasses stood like crystal soldiers, completely untouched. At the absolute head of the long mahogany table sat my husband. Aaron looked infuriatingly relaxed, projecting the aura of a minor king in his impeccably tailored navy blazer. He was swirling a glass of Pinot Noir, smiling a brilliant, practiced smile as he listened to his junior partner, Paul, drone on about a corporate litigation case that meant less than nothing to me.
Aaron looked successful. He looked utterly satisfied with the kingdom he had built. He looked absolutely nothing like the tender, earnest man who had held my face three years ago and promised, with unshed tears in his eyes, that I would never again have to prove my worth to anyone.
He didn’t even bother to lift his chin when I placed the heavy, cut-glass bowl of relish beside his plate.
Judith leaned forward, her eyes narrowing as she subjected the turkey to a forensic examination. She let out a loud, theatrical sigh that ruffled the candle flames. “You rushed the process,” she declared, spearing a slice of the breast meat with her heavy silver fork and holding it up to the light as if inspecting it for poison. “I explicitly told you to baste it every twenty minutes. This dried-out catastrophe is precisely what happens when you refuse to follow simple instructions.”
“I followed your instructions to the letter, Judith,” I replied, my voice thinning out, stretched tight across the drum of my exhaustion. “Every twenty minutes. I set a timer.”
“Well, then your execution was flawed,” she waved her hand dismissively, not bothering to look at my face. “Fetch the pan gravy. Perhaps drowning it can salvage this embarrassment.”
I turned my heavy gaze toward my husband, desperately panning for a single ounce of the empathy I had long ago stopped expecting to find. “Aaron,” I whispered, the word catching in my dry throat. “I need to sit down. My back is spasming, and the baby has been kicking non-stop. I feel dizzy.”
His practiced, charming smile dissolved instantly into a mask of cold irritation. “Rebecca, please,” he muttered, keeping his voice low so as not to shatter his own illusion. “Paul is right in the middle of a crucial story. Do not interrupt the flow of the evening.”
“I am not trying to interrupt anything,” I said, swallowing down the thick, metallic taste of rising panic. “I just need a moment to take the weight off my feet.”
He waved a dismissive hand in the air, his eyes securely locked on his wine glass. “Just go grab the gravy. You know how this pregnancy makes you overreact to every little ache. Paul understands. Hormones, right, Paul?”
Paul let out a high, awkward bark of a laugh, his face flushing deeply as he nodded along, playing the role of the complicit audience. “Yeah, man. Totally normal. My sister was the same way.”
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