In Silence, I Loved Him First

Chapter Eight: Two Idiots and Their Handlers

"I need you to fire someone for me," Vera said, not looking up from her monitor.

Priya, sprawled across the office couch with a green juice she clearly hated but drank anyway out of some misguided sense of executive optics, didn't even blink. "Who did what this time?"

"The florist for the literacy gala. He's decided, unilaterally, that 'ivory' means 'aggressively beige' and will not be talked out of it."

"That's not a fireable offense, that's a Tuesday."

"He called it 'elevated neutrality.'"

"Oh." Priya set down her juice. "Yeah, he's dead to us."

"I want it handled quietly. No drama."

"You want me to fire a man for using the phrase 'elevated neutrality' quietly. Vera, I have worked for you for six years. I have never once fired anyone quietly. It's not in my toolkit. I fire people the way other people evict raccoons — loudly, with a broom, and a small audience."

"Priya."

"I'm joking. Mostly." She stood, stretching, and wandered toward Vera's desk to peer over her shoulder at the seating chart still open on the screen. "Speaking of aggressive neutrality — how's married life? You've had that specific face again. The one where you're thinking about him and pretending you're thinking about flowers."

"I was thinking about flowers."

"You were thinking about Nathan Cole's face while looking at flowers, which, respectfully, is not the same thing, even if you've somehow convinced yourself it is."

"I don't pay you to analyze my facial expressions."

"You pay me an extremely generous salary to do exactly that, actually, it's clause four of my contract, I specifically negotiated for emotional surveillance rights." Priya perched on the edge of the desk, entirely unbothered by Vera's flat stare. "So. Details. Is he still breaking things?"

"He put a fork in the toaster last week."

"Oh my god."

"It's fine. Nobody died. The toaster, tragically, did not survive."

"You married a man who is actively hostile to household appliances."

"I married a man for very sound business reasons that had nothing to do with his relationship with toasters."

"Sure," Priya said, in the exact same tone Nathan used when he didn't believe a word coming out of anyone's mouth, which was either a coincidence or, Vera thought grimly, a sign that the people closest to her had all independently decided teasing her was a team sport with no off-season. "And I'm sure it's also purely business that you've started keeping his favorite crackers in the pantry. The weird sesame ones. I saw them in the grocery delivery."

"I like sesame crackers."

"You've never once eaten a sesame cracker in the six years I've known you. You call them 'structurally unnecessary.'"

Vera did not have an answer for that one, and had the distinct displeasure of watching Priya notice.

"I knew it," Priya said, delighted, pointing at her like she'd just won a very small, very satisfying court case. "You're gone. You're completely gone for your fake husband."

"Don't you have a florist to terrorize?"

"I absolutely do, and I will treasure this conversation the entire time I'm doing it."

Across town, in a much messier office that smelled faintly of cold coffee and one candle someone had lit specifically to cover the smell of much older cold coffee, Nathan was having a nearly identical conversation from the opposite end of the universe.

"You put a fork in the toaster," Felix said, not for the first time, staring at Nathan over the top of his glasses with the specific weariness of a man who had been managing Nathan's career, and by extension his general survival, for nine years. "A metal fork. In a toaster. That was plugged in."

"I was tired."

"You could have died, Nathan."

"It was a very small spark."

"It set off the smoke alarm for the third time this month. Your wife is going to start thinking you have some kind of vendetta against small appliances."

"She already thinks that."

"Good. She's not wrong." Felix flipped a page in the folder he'd brought, not looking up. "Speaking of your wife — the Hendricks gala on Friday. You told Sophie Marvin you'd go."

"I did."

"You also have the literacy foundation dinner Friday. The one your actual wife has been planning for months. The one you're contractually and, I would argue, morally obligated to attend."

Nathan felt something cold settle in his stomach that had nothing to do with the coffee. "I forgot."

"You forgot your wife's five-year charity gala because Sophie Marvin cried at you."

"It wasn't like that."

"It's exactly like that. It's always exactly like that. I've watched this exact scene happen eleven times in the last two years, Nathan, I could perform it from memory at this point, I could sell tickets." Felix closed the folder, leaning back, arms crossed. "Can I say something as your manager, and also as a person who has genuinely liked you since you were twenty-three and thought sunglasses indoors made you look mysterious instead of just recently divorced from your optometrist?"

"I've never been divorced from an optometrist."

"It was a metaphor. Focus." Felix leaned forward. "You have spent a decade organizing your entire emotional calendar around Sophie Marvin's crises. I watched you skip your own premiere for her once. Your own premiere, Nathan. The one where you were the lead. And in two months of marriage, your actual wife has never once called me in a panic, never once asked me to reschedule anything, never once made you choose between her and your career — and somehow you're about to stand her up for a woman who, and I say this with love, has directly contributed to at least four of the worst weeks of your professional life."

Nathan didn't say anything for a long moment.

"I have to go to Sophie's thing," he said finally, quiet. "I told her I would."

"Then uninvite yourself from the second one instead of just not showing up. Have the spine to tell your wife you're choosing someone else, out loud, to her face, instead of just quietly not being where you said you'd be. That's the actual crime here, Nathan. Not the choosing. The cowardice around it."

Nathan looked at him for a long moment, and hated, quietly, how correct he was.

"When did you get so wise?" he muttered.

"I've always been wise. You've just never been sober enough at 9 a.m. to notice." Felix stood, gathering his folder, heading for the door. "Fix it. Actually fix it, not the version where you send a fruit basket and hope the problem resolves itself. I like her, by the way. Vera. She sent me a case of good scotch after the Grierson thing, just because, no reason, no ask. Sophie's never sent me so much as a thank-you text in nine years of me keeping your name out of three separate lawsuits."

He left. Nathan sat alone in the messy office for a long while, staring at his phone, scrolling to Vera's contact and then not calling it, composing four different texts and deleting all of them, before finally, simply, writing: I'll be there Friday. Both things. I'll figure it out.



She didn't respond for twenty minutes, long enough that he'd started to genuinely panic, and then, finally:

Bring a jacket. The venue's cold and you'll complain about it for an hour if I don't warn you.