Chapter 3: The Man With the Phone
Her name was Diane.
I learned that when she took my hand and said, "I'm Diane Calloway.
I've been Lucas's division director for three years.
And somehow we've never met."
"He keeps work and home very separate," I said.
Diane looked at me for a moment.
Then she looked at Lucas.
"Apparently."
Lucas stepped forward.
His voice had recovered some of its usual smoothness.
"Diane, I can explain — this was just a miscommunication.
She wasn't feeling well earlier, and I didn't want her to feel obligated—"
"I cooked everything on this table," I said.
"The chicken, the potatoes, the salad, the cake.
I started at nine this morning.
One of the twins was strapped to my chest for most of it."
Nobody spoke.
The man with the phone — he was somewhere in his forties, dark jacket, hadn't touched his wine — set the phone face-down on the table.
Slowly.
Like he'd seen enough.
"Lucas," Diane said, "why don't you get your wife a chair."
It wasn't a question.
Lucas's jaw moved.
He pulled out the empty chair at the head of the table — his chair — and stood behind it.
I sat down.
One twin in my lap, the other in the baby carrier still strapped to my chest from earlier in the day.
I hadn't even had time to take it off.
Diane sat back down across from me.
"What are their names?"
"Mia and Jonah."
She leaned forward slightly to look at Jonah, who was awake and blinking at the candlelight.
"Hello, Jonah," she said quietly.
Then she looked up at me.
"How are you actually doing?
Not the polite answer."
I almost laughed.
"I'm exhausted.
My back has been aching since this morning.
I haven't slept more than two hours in a row since they were born."
"And you still made all of this."
"I thought it would help him."
Diane didn't respond to that.
She picked up her fork and took a bite of the roasted chicken.
She chewed slowly.
Set the fork down.
"This is exceptional," she said.
"I mean that."
Lucas was still standing.
He hadn't found another chair.
He was the only person at his own dinner table who wasn't seated.
The man with the phone — I still didn't know his name — cleared his throat.
"Lucas, sit down," he said.
"You're making everyone uncomfortable."
Lucas pulled a chair from against the wall and sat at the far end of the table.
The dinner continued.
Diane asked me questions — where I was from, what I'd done before the twins, whether I had family nearby.
I answered.
The other guests joined in gradually.
Someone complimented the cake before they'd even tried it, just from looking at it.
Lucas said almost nothing for the next forty minutes.
At one point he tried.
"She's always been a great cook.
That's one of the things I—"
"Lucas." Diane's voice was pleasant.
Completely pleasant.
"I'd like to hear more about the cake.
She was telling me about the recipe."
He stopped.
After dessert, while the other guests were gathering their coats, the man with the phone came and stood near me.
He'd introduced himself during dinner — his name was Richard, and he was apparently not a colleague at all.
He was a journalist.
He covered workplace culture for a national publication.
Diane had invited him specifically because the company was being profiled next month.
"I won't use anything without your permission," he said quietly.
"But I want you to know — I've been covering stories like this for fifteen years." He paused.
"What happened tonight is not small."
I looked at Lucas across the room, shaking Diane's hand, smiling his careful smile.
"I know," I said.
Richard handed me his card.
I put it in the pocket of my loose dress — the dress Lucas had looked at with such embarrassment two hours ago — and I didn't say anything else.
Diane was the last to leave.
She put on her coat at the door, then turned back to me.
"I'll be in the office Monday," she said.
"Lucas has a nine o'clock with me." She held my gaze for just a moment.
"I hope you get some rest this weekend."
The door closed.
Lucas turned around.
The smile was completely gone.
"Do you have any idea," he said, very quietly, "what you just did?"
I shifted Mia higher on my hip.
"I had dinner," I said.
"At my own table."
He stared at me.
Then his phone buzzed on the counter.
He glanced at it.
His face changed.
It was a message from a number I didn't recognize.
He turned the screen away before I could read it.
"I need to make a call," he said.
He walked into the kitchen and closed the door.
I stood in the dining room with both twins, surrounded by the dishes I had cooked and the glasses I had polished, and I listened to the low murmur of his voice through the door.
He was talking to someone.
Fast.
May you like
Urgent.
And whatever he was saying, he did not want me to hear it.
