Page 21 of The Marriage Blunder

I laughed. “That’s two data points. Hardly statistically significant.”

“I only need two,” he said.

I was aware, suddenly, of how much I was sweating under my shirt. The recycled air of the cabin had gone dry in my throat. I looked at him, really looked, and saw that he was not so much unhurried as deliberately holding back.

I got up and went to the bathroom because I needed something to do, a moment to compose myself without Kenneth’s watchful eyes.

The lavatory on a private jet is not the place you go to have an epiphany. It’s barely the place you go to have a bowel movement.

I shut the door and flipped the lock, even though there was no one else on the plane except Kenneth, the stewardess, and the pilot, who would both presumably rather go down in a burning ball of fire than deal with whatever was happening in the passenger cabin.

I turned on the water. It was cold enough to sting. I ran my hands under it, then cupped some and splashed it over my face, which didn’t so much clear my head as it did reinforce the fact that my head was, at this point, beyond the reach of ordinary interventions.

I looked at myself in the mirror.

Glasses: smudged. Shirt: collar uneven, a single thread poking out from a seam near the shoulder. My wedding ring—still there, still visible, still catching the light every time I moved my hand. It felt heavier than before, like it had absorbed the mass of every possible outcome and decided to keep it for itself.

My reflection was not improved by the lighting. Nothing in the jet was. But the truth of it was, I looked exactly like myself. Even here. Even now. Even after what had happened in Las Vegas, and in the club, and in the suite, and in the bed.

I was married to Kenneth James, who was, at this moment, sitting in the main cabin of a private jet, probably considering how best to address the optics of his engagement to my sister being torpedoed by a 3 a.m. detour through the Little Chapel of Perpetual Regret.

I was not fine, but I was functional, which was the next best thing.

I toweled off, fixed the worst of the collar, and wiped my glasses on the hem of my shirt. I checked the ring again.

Still there.

Back in the cabin, Kenneth had not moved. He was reading something on his phone, but I could tell from the angle of his head that he’d heard me approach.

He looked up, eyes taking in the details. “You okay?”

“Never better,” I said, and sat back down.

On the tray table in front of me was a cup of coffee, perfectly black, no sugar, no cream, just the way I took it. The cup was real china, which meant someone had put effort into selecting it, into making the gesture.

He had ordered two, but his own sat untouched. I watched the steam rise off the surface, watched the way it curled up and dissipated in the pressurized air.

He watched me watch it.

“You didn’t have to,” I said, because it was the thing to say.

He shrugged. “I wanted to.”

I sipped the coffee, and he finally picked up his own cup and drank. For a moment, it felt almost normal, like we were two colleagues traveling on business. The fact that I was shirtless under my suit and that my undershirt was still somewhere in a hotel room in Nevada was beside the point.

Kenneth set down his coffee, leaned back, and looked out the window. “You know, I never wanted to live in New York,” he said. “It was always a place I thought I’d visit and then leave behind.”

I raised an eyebrow. “What changed?”

“You.”

The word was dropped so quietly that, for a second, I thought I’d misheard. I waited for him to clarify, to offer an out, to walk it back. He did not. He just kept looking out at the cloud cover, a patient man expecting an answer.

I said, “I hated it at first, too. The noise, the pace, the impossibility of quiet.”

He turned back to me. “But you stayed.”

“I didn’t have anywhere else to be,” I said, and as soon as I said it, I knew how true it was.