Part Two: Sofia
She was wearing the red suit — the one she wore to the meetings she considered important, which were the meetings that involved other people’s assessment of her, which was most of them. She wore it the way she wore most things: as a considered statement, nothing accidental, every element in deliberate coordination with every other element. Her perfume preceded her into the room by a fraction of a second — heavy, expensive, the kind of scent that announces arrival.
“Don’t forget,” she said. “Wedding planner. Today.”
No good morning. No inquiry about how he had slept, which had been badly, which she could not have known because the silk sheets showed no evidence of it. He watched her move to the mirror and assess her reflection with the same thoroughness she had applied to the room — her face as another surface to be correctly managed, any deviation from the intended presentation to be addressed before departure.
He had tried to postpone the wedding planner meeting. The business negotiation he was in the middle of — a complicated acquisition that required his daily presence and that had a closing deadline that was not flexible — had made the previous three weeks a sustained exercise in managing multiple urgent things, and the wedding plans, which Sofia treated as the most urgent thing, could not, from her perspective, wait. The venue had to be confirmed. The caterer had to be decided. The flowers — there was apparently a particular flower, sourced from a particular place, that was only available in certain seasons and required booking well in advance — had to be ordered.
He had offered to have his assistant coordinate. Sofia had looked at him with the expression she produced when he said something she found genuinely incomprehensible.
“It’s our wedding, Daniel.”
“I know what it is.”
“Then act like it.”
He had agreed to attend the meeting. He was going to attend the meeting. He was lying in bed on the morning of the meeting and thinking about all of this when the knock came.
