Help My Fiancé Bought a Fish That's in Love

The bag was still dripping when Nolan set it on the counter. "I found him in the holding tank at the old pier," he said, shrugging off his jacket. "Guy there said he's a golden carp. Rare color. Ten bucks." I was standing at the stove with a wooden spoon in my hand, and I remember thinking that ten dollars was the most Nolan thing I'd ever heard. He had a marina in his name, a penthouse with a view of the bay, and he still couldn't resist a bargain. "Ten dollars," I repeated. "He wiggled at me." Nolan grinned. "I felt something." That was how he made decisions. He'd built an entire company on the feeling that a dock needed new ownership, that a restaurant was undervalued, that a whole neighborhood was about to turn. His board hated it. His accountant had quit twice. But he was right more often than he was wrong, and nobody at Ashford Marine Holdings could argue with the numbers. I set the spoon down. "We don't have a tank." "We have a bowl." "We don't have a bowl, Nolan." He looked around the kitchen like a bowl might materialize. He was thirty-four, six feet one, with the kind of face that made caterers over-serve him at galas, and he had absolutely no idea how a household functioned. I'd been living with him for two years, and I still had to remind him which cabinet held the glasses. "Use the salad bowl," he said finally. "The salad bowl is for salad." "The fish doesn't know that." I filled the salad bowl with water from the tap and let it sit on the counter. Nolan poured the fish in. The little golden shape swirled once, twice, and then it stopped, and it looked at me. Not at Nolan. At me. I've spent long enough reading numbers to know when something doesn't fit. Anyone who's ever been lied to at close range develops an ear for it. The carp hung in the water, facing me, and its mouth opened and closed in a slow rhythm, like breath, like speech. Nolan was already at the fridge. "Do you want Thai or the Italian place?" "Thai," I said, because I wasn't going to say anything else while a fish stared at me. He ordered. I stayed at the counter with my hand flat on the tile, watching the carp swim a slow circle and come back to the same spot. Every time it turned, it faced me again. I told myself it was the light. I told myself I was tired, that I'd spent nine hours in a conference room over a zoning dispute with the city, that I needed food and sleep and less time inside my own head. The fish opened its mouth. I watched it and I heard the words anyway, not in my ears but somewhere behind them, as clear as if someone were speaking right next to me. I know what you did. I knocked the spoon off the counter. Nolan came back from the fridge with two bottles of beer and found me on my knees, picking up the spoon. "You okay?" "Fine." "You look pale." "I said I'm fine." He handed me a beer and leaned on the counter beside me, close enough that our shoulders touched. He smelled like salt and whatever expensive soap he'd been using since I met him. For a second I let myself lean into him, because that was what I did. Two years of leaning, two years of pretending the beginning never happened. Then I looked at the bowl, and the carp was still watching. "Anyway," Nolan said, "I need you at the dinner Thursday. The Winslow thing." The Winslow thing was a private foundation dinner at the Bay Ridge Club, which meant a long table, too much wine, and a board chair named Marguerite Winslow who had never once looked at me like I belonged there. Nolan's mother. She ran the foundation that held the family's charitable money, and she chaired the meetings that decided which Ashford projects got public money and which got quietly buried. "I'll be there," I said. "Wear the gray dress." "The gray dress is fine." "You always say that and then you wear it and you look"—he paused, hunting for the word—"expensive." It was a compliment. He meant it as a compliment. I married the compliment to the man and swallowed both. The fish swam one more circle. Its mouth moved. I didn't look at it again for the rest of the night. The first time I lied about the fish was three days later, when Nolan found me at the counter at six in the morning, still in my robe, with a notebook open beside the bowl. "What's that?" "Grocery list." He squinted at it. I turned the page over before he could see what was actually there: a column of dates, three initials, and a number I'd been carrying around for three years. He kissed the top of my head and went to make coffee. I watched the carp in the salad bowl, and the carp watched me, and the morning light came in off the bay like it had no idea what kind of house it was shining into.