Page 10 of Iridescent
By now, I must be office gossip. Poor Mrs. Navarro, calling again, trying to locate her own husband through people paid to ration access to him.
I don’t begrudge them that. Not when I seem to possess a gift for returning to places that taught me better the first time.
Days ago, I did something unwise. I brought lunch to his office expecting him to smile as he once did, back when Aureon was still an unknown outfit operating out of a cramped office with unreliable heating, a skeleton staff, and barely enough square footage to contain his ambition. Back then, I used to show up when he forgot his body wasn’t an inconvenient machine attached to his brain, and he would look at me as if I conjured daylight into the room.
Now Aureon Capital is a monolith, its name fixed to buildings and billboards, its reach spanning continents; entire departments are dedicated to managing his image, and layers of assistants stand between me and the man I married until reaching him feels like a privilege I haven’t earned.
I stood in the lobby with a paper bag from the Greek place he used to love, feeling hopeful in a way I knew would cost me before his assistant came down alone.
“Mr. Navarro is tied up at the moment, Mrs. Navarro.”
As if my husband were a parcel delayed in transit.
She offered to take the food up to him. I refused, because some small, stubborn part of me still believed he’d come down himself if he knew I was there.
He didn’t.
Twenty minutes later, my phone rang.
“Yara.” His voice came through low and distracted, stripped of the warmth I had carried into that building with me. “You can’t keep doing this.”
My fingers tightened around the bag. “Bringing you lunch?”
“Showing up without warning.” A pause. Papers rustled faintly on the other end. Someone spoke, muffled and feminine, before Xavier covered the receiver. When he returned, he sounded even farther away. “I’m busy. You know that.”
Of course I knew.
Everyone knew.
“I thought you hadn’t eaten,” I said, hating how small the words sounded.
His silence was worse than anger.
Then he sighed, and God, that sigh. That measured exhale men use when they’ve decided a woman’s hurt is another demand on an already impossible day.
It broke my heart into a thousand pieces, and I was too depleted to pick up a single one.
“I appreciate it,” he said. “But please don’t do anything like this again. Not right now.”
I walked out with my cheeks burning and my head bowed, every furtive glance adding kindling to the shame consuming me.
At least there were no cameras in Aureon’s lobby. Small mercy, considering they always seemed to find me on clinic steps, outside pharmacies, beneath awnings while I waited for cars with my sunglasses on and my heart in my throat.
Calling his office tonight shouldn’t have felt like another public undressing.
But it did.
What was I supposed to do? Sit here with cold food and colder hands while my husband vanished behind the obscene machinery of his own importance?
I am his wife.
I shouldn’t have to beg reception for proof that he still exists outside of work. I shouldn’t have to chase him through a company with his name on the door just to find out where he is on our anniversary.
Then again, the answer has been obvious for months.
If I trace the fracture back with any honesty, it began around the start of our IUI protocol.
I knew he was exhausted by everything the process demanded of us. God knows I wasn’t the only one being gutted by it.
