Page 20 of The Marriage Blunder

Kenneth’s eyebrows rose just a fraction. “Do you speak Dutch?”

“About as well as you’d expect for someone who learned it from a library book and three months of Duolingo.”

He laughed, and the sound was warmer than the jet interior deserved. “I speak German. They overlap.”

“Less than you’d think,” I said.

“More than you’d admit,” he countered, and for a second, it was just banter, just the old game of who could land a better line.

I leaned back in my seat, closed the laptop, and set it on the table beside me. He watched my hands as I did it, and the observation made me hyper-aware of every subsequent motion: the way I steepled my fingers, the way I tapped my thumb against the palm.

I forced myself to stop, then started again out of sheer necessity.

Kenneth shifted in his seat. It was a minor movement, but it collapsed the space between us by two inches. He held up a hand—large, square, exactly the kind of hand you’d expect on a man who had built his own fortune before marrying into anyone else’s—and gestured at the laptop. “What are you actually looking for?”

I considered telling the truth, which was that I was using the spreadsheet as a shield against the fact that, right now, the only thing I wanted to do was watch him watch me. Instead, I said, “I’m looking for patterns. There’s always a pattern, but sometimes it’s hiding behind something less interesting.”

He nodded as if this made perfect sense. “You always look for patterns?”

“Always,” I admitted, and hated how revealing it sounded.

He uncrossed his leg, recrossed it the other way. The pant fabric pulled taut over his thigh, and I followed the line of it, then looked away before I got caught.

“Tell me the pattern here,” he said.

I hesitated. “Which here?”

“Us,” he said, without blinking. “This.”

There was no safe answer. The pattern was obvious, but admitting it would have meant admitting to a year of anticipation, a thousand small humiliations, every second spent at the periphery of a family I was not really part of except by accident or, now, by technicality.

I said, “I think you know what it is.”

He didn’t look away. “Say it.”

I considered the consequences, decided they were inevitable, and said, “You wanted me, not Carolyn.”

He breathed in, once, slow. “Yes.”

“And you became engaged to her because you thought it was the closest you could get to what you actually wanted.”

He didn’t move, but his knuckles whitened slightly against the armrest. “Yes.”

“Now we’re on a private jet, and you’re staring at me like I’m the answer to a question you never got to ask.”

His mouth did the thing where it wanted to be a smile and also wanted to be a challenge. “And you’re letting me.”

It was not a question, but I answered it anyway. “Yes.”

He didn’t move closer, but he didn’t have to. The jet felt smaller now, the air thicker, the pressurized hush of the engines the only thing keeping the atmosphere from turning inside out.

I looked at his hands. I watched the way he flexed them, like he was working something out of his system. I wanted to touch them, but I didn’t. Not because I was afraid, but because it would have been too much, too soon, and I needed to believe I had a scrap of control left.

He said, “You push your glasses up when you’re nervous.”

I pushed my glasses up, reflexively, and he watched the gesture like it was a performance piece.

“You also do it when you want something.”