Chapter 2
The elevator arrived.
The moment the elevator doors opened, I came face to face with a woman.
It was Everlee Nolan. She wore a black tailored dress, a Tiffany & Co. brooch on her lapel, and carried two coffees: a long black and a pour-over.
The long black was hers.
The pour-over was Brantley's.
I knew, because for the past five years, I'd always been the one to brew his pour-over.
Everlee saw me, paused for a moment, and then quickly put on a smile. "Emma? Did you bring something for Brantley?"
Her gaze dropped to my empty hands, and her smile became more saccharine.
I didn't say anything and stepped into the elevator.
Everlee called after me, her voice syrupy sweet, "Emma, Brantley's been busy with cases lately. Try not to disturb him so often."
The elevator doors slid shut.
I stared at my reflection in the stainless-steel doors. My eyes were red-rimmed, but not a single tear fell.
It had been six months. I couldn't cry anymore.
*****
When I married Brantley five years ago, he had nothing.
His law firm had started, and he rented the cheapest floor in an office building, right next to a coffee shop. The air was always thick with the smell of cheap artificial flavoring.
Back then, he couldn't land any big cases. He kept the firm afloat by handling divorce cases and traffic accident claims. He couldn't even afford to hire an assistant.
So, I was his assistant, accountant, receptionist, and document printer.
At the same time, I was a finance grad student, halfway through my thesis, with my advisor hounding me about it eight hundred times.
My mom yelled at me over the phone, "Are you out of your mind? You're giving up a real job to work for someone for free?"
I said, "Mom, you don't get it."
She really didn't.
She didn't get what it was like when a man sat in his office, late at night, staring at a losing verdict in silence, and I handed him a cup of water. When his fingers brushed mine, my heart skipped a beat.
She didn't understand that night when he landed his first big case, chugging half a bottle of beer up on the rooftop, then suddenly turning to me and saying, "Emma, when I turn this place into something big, I'll marry you."
He made it happen.
In three years, Dorsey & Associates went from a cramped rental space to the top floor of a Downtown Financial District skyscraper.
And he married me.
The wedding bill was 96,000 dollars, half of his entire savings back then.
The wedding was small, but he handwrote his vows. The last line was, "From now on, I'll protect you, always."
I kept that piece of paper with his vows slipped between the pages of my journal, all the way until the beginning of this year.
Eventually, I burned it to ashes.
Our son, Jamie Dorsey, was born in our first year of marriage.
I quit my job and became a stay-at-home mom.
Brantley said, "Once Jamie's a little older, you can go back to work."
I said, "Okay."
When Jamie turned one, Brantley said, "Wait a little longer."
When Jamie turned two, he stopped mentioning it altogether.
By the time Jamie was three, I could count on one hand how many times Brantley actually came home for dinner.
I got used to getting Jamie to sleep on my own, showing up solo at parent-teacher meetings, and hailing a cab in the middle of the night to take Jamie to the hospital when he had a fever, all by myself.
By the second year, Brantley's mother, Rayna Dorsey, stopped looking me in the eye.
She thought I wasn't good enough for her son. "She's a grad student from some backwater, never finished her degree, and doesn't have a real job."
She never said it when Brantley was around. But she'd say it with Everlee right there.
Everlee was Brantley's childhood friend.
They shared a desk in high school, went to the same college, and her family had money. After graduation, she moved to Westhaven.
For those three years when Brantley was struggling, she didn't bother to call him.
But as soon as he made it big, she came back.
On her first day back, she became a partner at Dorsey & Associates.
She said it was "for old times' sake."
I didn't want to dig into what kind of "old times" she was talking about. But Everlee made sure I couldn't ignore it.