Ethan took his seat across from Emily. He set his hands flat on the table and looked at her with that particular smile—the one she had come to understand, over the course of two years of marriage, was not warmth but performance. A smile that said: I am the kind of man who smiles. It was different from the smile he had worn when she first met him, when his startup was hemorrhaging cash and his confidence was the only currency he had left in abundance, when he used to call her from the office at midnight because he was scared and needed to hear her voice, when he had looked at her across a table exactly like this one—though in a far less impressive setting, a diner booth with sticky vinyl seats—and said, with a sincerity that she had believed completely, that he could not do any of this without her.
That smile was gone. It had gone somewhere around the time the first round of serious funding came through, and by the time the second round closed, she could barely remember what it had looked like.
“Let’s not drag this out,” he said, and slid the documents across the polished wood toward her. A manila folder, neatly labeled, everything in order. Ethan was always orderly when it came to his interests. “We both know this marriage is over.”
Emily looked at the folder. She did not reach for it.
“Over,” she repeated, softly, not as a question or a challenge, simply as though she were tasting the word and finding it accurate.
“Don’t play the victim,” he said, and there was an impatience in his voice that he made no effort to conceal. “You were a waitress when I met you. I gave you a better life. A much better life.”
He leaned back, crossing one leg over the other, adjusting his cufflink with a practiced flick of his wrist. The gesture was so automatic, so polished, that it seemed to Emily like a kind of punctuation—a period placed after a sentence he considered closed.
“But you never fit in. That was always the problem with you.” His voice had taken on the tone of a reasonable man stating observable facts, the way you might describe the weather. “You don’t know how to dress for events. You don’t know how to speak to investors. You still get nervous at dinners, for God’s sake. You have this way of sitting that looks—” he paused, choosing, “—provincial. And people notice. My people notice.”