PLEASE CHOOSE ONE TO LOVE

Cassandra’s Pov Everything about our third-anniversary dinner was perfect, except for the woman sitting in my chair. The table was set for two with blue plates because Angelo told me in our first year of marriage that he liked blue. I cooked salmon with lemon butter, his favorite, and I lit the candles at seven so the room would smell like warm wax when he walked in. At eight forty the candles were down to stubs and the salmon was cold under its foil. My phone buzzed against the wood. My cousin Jenna sent me a photo with no message, which was her way of being kind. It showed my husband in the lobby of Rossi Tower with his hand on Tiana Wells’s back, both of them laughing at something outside the frame. I turned the phone face down, straightened a fork that was already straight, and lit a new candle. A wife who sets a table for her husband on their third anniversary does not let the room go dark. The front door opened at nine. “Cass.” Angelo came in with snow melting on the shoulders of his black coat and his tie pulled loose. He was thirty-four, and he looked tired the way rich men look tired, as though the world had inconvenienced him personally. He glanced at the table. “You cooked.” “It’s our anniversary.” “I know.” He waited a second too long before he said it. “Tiana had a problem with the press. I couldn’t leave her alone with it.” Tiana stepped out from behind him in a cream coat that cost more than my first car, with her hair over one shoulder and her mascara smudged in exactly the right corner. “Cassandra, I’m so sorry. I told him to come straight home. I told him you would be waiting.” Her eyes went to the table and filled with perfect dismay. “You made all of this, and I’m ruining it.” “You’re not ruining anything,” I said, and I hated how steady my voice was. “There’s plenty.” Angelo helped her out of her coat and hung it on the hook where I usually hang mine. Then he pulled out a chair for her. It was not the chair across from his. It was mine, the one closest to the kitchen, where I sat so I could stand and serve. Tiana sat down in it and smoothed her skirt, and Angelo poured the wine. He gave the first glass to her. I stood in the doorway holding the salmon and waited for someone to notice that I had nowhere to sit. Nobody did. After a moment I set my plate at the far end of the table, beside the candle I had lit twice, and took the chair that belonged to a guest. “You look pale,” Tiana said to me, in a voice full of concern. That was her talent. She was never cruel. “Angelo, doesn’t she look exhausted? You should take her somewhere warm for a week.” “Cass is fine,” Angelo said as he cut into his fish. “She’s always fine.” “Are you still sketching, Cassandra?” Tiana tilted her head. “Angelo told me you used to design fabrics. That’s so sweet.” “I stopped three years ago,” I said. “Rossi Holdings needed someone to run the house while the company was young.” “It’s still young,” Angelo said without looking up. “And Tiana’s team needs me more this quarter. You understand.” I did understand. I understood it every quarter. I ate one bite of salmon and could not taste it. Down the table, Tiana laughed at something he said, a low and easy laugh, and he answered with a smile I used to believe was made only for me. For eleven months I told myself there was nothing I could point to. He never touched her where I could see it, and he never said her name in a way I could repeat to anyone. He simply talked to her the way he used to talk to me, and he talked to me as if I were part of the furniture. “Cass,” he said suddenly. “I almost forgot.” My heart did something stupid. It lifted. After three years of dinners like this one, I still sat up straight whenever my husband remembered me. He reached into his jacket and set a small velvet box on the table. It was dark green with a gold ribbon, and the name of the jeweler on the lid was one I knew. In the first year of our marriage I stood in front of that shop window in the rain, staring at a pearl bracelet while Angelo checked his phone beside me. I told him it was the prettiest thing I had ever seen. He said pearls were for older women. I laughed, and I never mentioned it again. “Open it,” he said. My fingers shook on the ribbon. I would like to say they did not. Inside, on a bed of white silk, lay the pearl bracelet, every bead exactly as I remembered it. “You remembered,” I whispered. “Of course I remembered,” Angelo said. Then he looked past me and held out his hand to Tiana. “Your birthday present is early,” he said. “Try it on.” I did not move. My hands refused to do anything, so the open box stayed in front of me while the candle burned between the three of us. Tiana pressed her fingers to her lips. “Angelo, no. Not tonight. It’s their anniversary.” “It’s only a bracelet.” “It’s hers.” She looked at me with wet, shining eyes. “Cassandra, I swear I didn’t know he picked this. I’ll tell him to take it back.” She sounded sincere, and I almost believed her, because she was so good at being believed. If I put the bracelet on my own wrist, I would be the wife who snatched a gift from a friend on her birthday. If I handed it over, I would be the wife who gave away her own anniversary present. Either way, I would be the reason dinner was ruined. “It’s fine,” I said, and slid the box across the table. “It suits you.” Angelo nodded as if I had passed a test. He fastened the bracelet around Tiana’s wrist himself, slowly and carefully, with the same hands that once memorized how I take my coffee. I watched his thumb press the clasp shut and thought, very calmly, that I had spent three years trying to earn something he gave away in four seconds. I stood and carried my plate to the kitchen. I scraped the salmon into the bin, rinsed the blue plate, dried it, and set it on the high shelf above the stove, where it would not be used again for a long time. Through the doorway I could hear Tiana say she felt terrible, and Angelo tell her that she deserved it. “Cass?” he called. “Where are you going?” “To bed. I have a headache.” “Take something for it.” That was all he said. Behind him, Tiana was admiring her wrist. I was halfway up the stairs when his phone began to buzz on the hallway table, where he always dropped it with his keys. Three years of marriage had trained me not to look at it. But the screen was bright, and a thin grey folder lay beneath it with my full name typed on the tab. Cassandra Moore Rossi. The folder was closed, and the message above it was not. Marcus Hale: Don’t let her sign anything tonight. I’m coming for her myself. I stood very still with one hand on the cold railing. Marcus Hale was Angelo’s oldest rival, the one man in the city my husband refused to name out loud, and I had never met him. So why was he writing about me?