Work.

As if the company had appeared fully formed in James’s hands rather than built from my capital, my projections, my family connections, and the contracts I negotiated while he learned how to sound authoritative in conference rooms.

“Busy,” I said. “Good busy.”

I lifted my wineglass, prepared to add something polite.

Then Ashley leaned toward James and whispered into his ear.

Her lips nearly brushed his skin.

James lowered his head to listen.

The corner of his mouth curved.

A private smile.

Not a polite one. Not accidental. Not innocent.

The kind of smile that told me, with one clean blade of truth, that there were rooms inside my husband I had never been invited to enter.

I turned my attention to the menu.

My eyes refused to obey.

Ashley sat beside him, her body angled in so closely that her bare shoulder almost rested against his sleeve. Each time she laughed, her hand landed on his arm. Each time she shifted, her knee brushed his under the table. Once, when the waiter poured water, Ashley reached past her own glass and took James’s instead.

He did not correct her.

He watched her mouth touch the rim and smiled faintly, as though this too belonged to some long-established ritual.

“James,” she said when the steaks arrived, voice turning soft and childish, “cut mine for me. You always do it better.”

A few people laughed awkwardly.

James shook his head, smiling like a man trying to resist something charming.

“Ash, you’re still impossible.”

But he picked up his knife.

He cut her steak into neat pieces while mine sat untouched before me.

I placed my fork down.

The clink of silver against porcelain sounded louder than it should have.

James flinched and looked at me.

For one second, unease crossed his face. Then Ashley said something about their old trip to Paris, and he turned back to her as if my discomfort were a notification he could swipe away.

“Remember when we got lost near Montmartre?” Ashley said, pressing her fingers against his sleeve. “You told that cab driver you spoke French.”

James burst out laughing.

“I did speak French.”

“You ordered us three bowls of onion soup and somehow a children’s bicycle.”

The table laughed.

I did not.

I had heard about Paris before, but only in fragments. They had gone years before James and I married, long before Ashley left for London, back when James and I were still building something uncertain and he assured me Ashley was just part of an old friend group. A childhood friend. A family friend. Almost like a sister.

No sister looked at a married man the way Ashley looked at James.

No brother smiled at her the way he smiled back.

For two hours, I sat through it.

Ashley stealing food from James’s plate.

Ashley sliding her half-eaten dessert toward him and saying, “I’m full,” then watching him finish it with the familiarity of habit.

Ashley talking about how difficult London had been, how lonely the years abroad were, how no one understood her the way James did.

James listening with sympathy so open and tender it felt indecent.

“There were days I wanted to give up,” she said, her lashes lowered. “No one knew how hard it was.”