Chapter 6 - The Rooms We Gave Away
The next morning, my manager, Sloane Mercer, asked me to come to her office before nine. She closed the door but did not offer me a chair until I had sat down on my own.
“How much sleep did you get?” she asked.
“An hour.”
She placed a folder on the desk. “This is not disciplinary.”
My body had prepared for the opposite, so relief moved through me as pain.
“Celia Vance withdrew the pledge,” Sloane said. “Northstar is pausing all new partnerships until they complete a review.”
I looked at the folder. “Because of Derek.”
“Because of what happened in the ballroom.”
“I know the distinction.”
“Do you?”
I looked up.
Sloane folded her hands. “You did not cause his conduct. You did, however, have a personal relationship with the person who caused the disruption, and you placed him at the head table after he requested the change.”
“I didn’t approve that seating.”
“I know. We’re tracing how it happened.”
The words sat between us, practical and devastating. I had spent months trying to keep Derek from making my discomfort look unreasonable. Now my work required me to explain why I had allowed him close enough to affect it.
“What happens to me?” I asked.
“You continue working while we review the incident. Security will accompany you during large events for a while. HR will contact you about support and documentation.”
“Do you think I should resign?”
Sloane’s expression hardened. “No. I think you should stop offering to pay for someone else’s choices.”
I went home at lunch. Derek’s car was parked outside the apartment, though he had not answered any of my messages. When I opened the door, he was sitting on the floor beside the couch, surrounded by boxes.
“You changed the locks,” he said.
“I didn’t.”
“Your key didn’t work this morning.”
“The building manager changed them after the gala.”
He held up his hands. “I’m moving out.”
The sentence should have felt like a rescue. Instead, it made the apartment seem suddenly enormous.
“Good,” I said.
He looked wounded. “That’s all you have?”
“What would you like me to say?”
“That this is a tragedy.”
“It isn’t.”
“You’re really committed to punishing me.”
I walked to the bedroom and began placing his shirts into a box. He followed me, carrying a framed photograph of the two of us at the lake.
“You know everyone thinks you set me up,” he said.
“Who is everyone?”
“People who were there.”
“People who watched you interrupt a donor presentation after I asked you not to?”
“People who understand performance.”
“You performed. I responded.”
He set the photograph on the dresser. “You’re rewriting the night because you’re embarrassed.”
“I’m describing it.”
“You said you wanted me to be myself.”
“I wanted you to be considerate.”
“That word again.”
I folded one of his sweaters. “Take your things and go.”
He stared at me as though I had broken character.
“There’s still a way to fix this,” he said. “You could tell Brightwell it was a misunderstanding. We could do an interview together. Explain the joke.”
“No.”
“You could help me salvage the project.”
“No.”
“You don’t even know what the project is.”
“I know enough.”
He laughed, but there was no humor in it. “You think you’re taking the high road. You’re just abandoning me when things get hard.”
“Things got hard because you made them hard.”
He took the photograph and placed it in the box.
For the rest of the afternoon, he moved through the apartment collecting pieces of the life I had thought we were building. The chipped blue mug. The green reading lamp. The raincoat he kept by the door. Each object carried an ordinary memory, and every memory seemed to argue that the person who had done this could not be the same person who had once brought me dumplings outside my office.
At five, Nia arrived with takeout. She stopped when she saw the boxes.
“He’s leaving?”
“He says he is.”
“How do you feel?”
“Like I’m waiting for a catch.”
There was a catch. It came that evening in a group message from Jonah, Priya, and Elise. They had made separate plans for Elise’s wedding weekend and had not told me because they did not want Derek there. My parents had booked a different hotel for the family. Nia admitted that she had stopped inviting him to work dinners months earlier. Calvin had declined two rides with us because he had seen Derek filming from the back seat.
I read the messages twice.
“They were protecting themselves,” Nia said.
“They were protecting me.”
“Both can be true.”
I sat on the floor beside the boxes. “How long have I been asking people to tolerate him?”
Nia did not answer immediately. “Long enough that they began making plans without you.”
The grief that followed was not only for Derek. It was for the rooms I had surrendered while insisting that he belonged in all of them. I had called it loyalty when it was fear of what would happen if I stopped translating him.
Derek carried out the last box at eight thirty. At the door, he turned back.
“You’ll regret this,” he said.
“Maybe.”
“You’re going to miss me.”
“I may miss who I thought you were.”
His face changed, and for a second I saw anger without its costume.
May you like
After he left, I locked the door and leaned against it. My phone buzzed. A photograph appeared from an unknown number: the empty stage at Brightwell, taken from the back of the ballroom. Beneath it was one sentence.
Still think the audience belongs to you?
