After He Chose His Mistress Over Our Dead Baby

It was a Tuesday. That's what kills me now, when I remember it. Just a Tuesday.

I'd left the fish counter at six. My apron was folded in my tote. My hair still smelled like ice and salt water, no matter how many times I'd rinsed my hands. I was walking through Times Square because I liked the noise. Ten years in this city, and the tourists in cheap ponchos still made me feel like the world was bigger than my apartment.

I stopped at a cart for coffee. Two dollars. Black. The man behind the cart handed it to me with a napkin already soaked at the bottom. I remember tipping him a dollar. I remember thinking Mason would be home Friday. I remember touching the silver band on my left hand the way I had touched it every day for a decade, a little reflex, a little prayer.

Then the sky changed.

Every screen. Every single screen. The Coca-Cola one. The Samsung one. The tall skinny one that usually played perfume ads. They all blinked to black at the same second, and then they lit up together with the same image.

A rooftop. String lights. A man in a navy suit turning to face a woman in cream silk.

My first thought was, oh, that suit is nice.

My second thought was, that suit is Mason's.

The crowd around me started to gasp. Someone shrieked, "Oh my God, it's live!" A girl next to me grabbed her boyfriend's arm. Somebody's phone camera swung up.

Mason knelt.

He knelt on one knee on a rooftop that wasn't ours, in a city that could have been anywhere, in front of a woman whose hair had been done that morning by someone who charged more than my rent. The camera pushed in. The ring in his fingers caught the light and threw it out again in a hundred directions, and the billboards were so bright they turned the whole square into daylight.

Rosalia Harvey. That's what the little chyron said at the bottom. Rosalia Harvey said yes.

The coffee was burning through the cup into my palm. I didn't move it. I couldn't feel my hand. I could feel the silver band, though. It felt hot. It felt like it was branding me.

Around me, strangers were cheering. A man in a Yankees cap put two fingers in his mouth and whistled. A woman held her toddler up to see. Somewhere behind me someone was crying, happy little movie-crying, the way people cry when they think love is winning.

I stood in the middle of all of it and I didn't make a sound.

I walked home. I don't remember the walk. I remember unlocking the door of the Tribeca apartment we'd picked out together three years ago, the one he'd said was ours. I remember setting the coffee on the counter. I hadn't drunk any of it. It had gone cold in my hand somewhere on Sixth Avenue.

I sat on the couch. I waited for my phone to ring.

It didn't ring that night. It didn't ring the next day. It didn't ring the day after that.

He walked in on the third night the way he always did. Keys in the bowl. Jacket on the hook. Like nothing.

"Zoey."

I stood up from the couch. My hands were shaking, and I was mad about that. I'd promised myself they wouldn't.

"Mason."

He looked tired. Not sorry. Tired, the way a man looks when a meeting has run long.

"It's business," he said. He said it before I asked. He walked to the kitchen and poured himself a glass of water and drank half of it standing at the sink. "The family needs the Harvey alliance. It's a contract, not a marriage. You know how these people work."

"You knelt."

"It had to look real."

"On every screen in Times Square, Mason."

He set the glass down. He straightened his cufflinks. That little tell of his, the one he thought I'd never noticed.

"I need you to be patient," he said. "When this is over, I'm coming back. You're the one I'm coming back to. That hasn't changed."

He didn't cross the room. He didn't touch me. He didn't say the word sorry.

And I, who had dropped out of school at eighteen for him, who had cut fish for ten years so he could sit in seminar rooms, who had bought two cheap silver rings from a man on a Seattle sidewalk and worn mine every single day since — I nodded.

I nodded, and I sat back down on the couch, and I let him go to bed.

That was the first betrayal. The nod was worse than the billboards.

---

The weeks after were a slow, quiet drowning.

His face was everywhere. Page Six. The Times. A Vogue spread about the Carlson-Harvey merger, Rosalia on his arm in emerald green, her hand resting on his lapel like she'd put it there a thousand times. I called him during a gala once. He silenced it. I saw the little red bar slide across my screen from three blocks away.

I showed up at a Carlson fundraiser at the Pierre in a black dress I'd steamed myself. The girl at the door smiled the way girls at doors smile.

"I'm sorry, ma'am. Your name isn't on the list."

I called him from the sidewalk. He picked up on the fourth ring.

"Zoey." A sigh. Not anger. Something worse. Exasperation. "You're making this harder than it needs to be."

I stood there on Fifth Avenue in shoes that pinched, and I said, "Okay."

I walked back to the subway. I picked up an extra shift the next morning. I told myself if I just held on a little longer, he'd come home the way he promised.

My hands smelled like the ocean. My ring finger burned. And somewhere above me, on a billboard I couldn't see, he was probably smiling for another camera.