“I need to make some connections tonight. Important people will be here. The kind of people who can save what I’ve built.
You understand?”
I understood. I always understood. Understanding had become my primary function somewhere around year seven of our marriage, when I had stopped trying to stand beside him at events like this and started accepting my assigned positions in margins and corners and shadowed alcoves.
The invisible wife. The woman who existed in tax documents and holiday cards and the background of photographs, but rarely in the actual moments that mattered. I had not always been this woman.
