Hassan, who stood outside sorting invoices, heard his name and looked in. “I haven’t seen any releases for tonight,” he said. “I’ve told you that already.”
Reid’s cheeks reddened. “Tonight wasn’t going to be a formal recording.”
“Two videographers were booked,” Priya said from the corridor.
The room fell quiet. Reid turned toward her, startled that she had spoken. Priya’s jaw set. “I booked them. You told me to. They’re waiting to be paid.”
“I didn’t ask you to join the argument.”
“You’re discussing whether I made a mistake. I want to be clear whose instructions I followed.”
Megan gave Priya a small nod. She wasn’t performing kindness; she was acknowledging an employee’s right to state what had happened.
Reid exhaled. “Fine. I got carried away. I believed something good could come out of the evening. If you all need me to say it, I should have asked before I organized it.”
Lauren recognized that apology, too. It described his intention in glowing terms while reducing other people’s experiences to an unfortunate communication problem.
“What were you going to ask me onstage?” she said.
He hesitated, then reached into his jacket for a folded sheet. It contained a list of questions in his handwriting. Lauren read the first: When did you realize you were living a life chosen by someone else? The second: What did returning to your first love teach you about courage? The third: Will you take the next step with me tonight?
Lauren held the page so Owen could see. “You were going to ask me to leave my husband in front of strangers.”
“I thought you already had.”
“No. I told you I was unhappy. I told you I wanted to see whether there was still something between us. I told you I was afraid to say that at home. Every one of those choices is mine. But I never said I was leaving Owen to become your public example.”
Owen stared at the questions. What struck him was not that Reid had wanted Lauren. He had known that. It was the neatness with which another man had reduced years of shared living to a line about somebody else’s choices. Owen and Lauren had married in a park with folding chairs borrowed from a church. They had eaten cold sandwiches on the floor while moving into their first apartment. They had once stayed up all night searching for a lost dog. They had also disappointed each other, failed to speak, and let weeks pass without tenderness. None of it fit on Reid’s page.
“If you were trying to find a way out,” Owen asked Lauren, “why didn’t you tell me before you told him?”
Lauren looked at the carpet. “Because you would have asked me what I wanted. And I didn’t know. He always had an answer ready.”
