Chapter Four: The Gala
Eighteen years after the refrigerator hum and the cold coffee and the October morning, Sarah arrived at a charity gala at a hotel in downtown Seattle in a dress she had bought on sale and heels she immediately regretted. Access Forward had grown into one of the more prominent disability advocacy organizations in the Pacific Northwest, and the annual fundraiser had grown with it — crystal chandeliers, round tables with white linens, a program that included a keynote speaker Sarah was quietly proud to have recruited.
She was talking to a board member near the bar when she saw him.
Marcus Aldridge, at fifty-two, looked like someone had taken the man she had married and pressed him into a smoother, more corporate version of himself. He was better dressed than he’d ever been. He had the particular ease of someone whose life had, by his own assessment, worked out well. He was across the room, laughing at something, and then he turned and saw her, and the laugh didn’t quite die — it recalibrated, adjusted, became something more careful.
He crossed the room with the confidence of a man who had never once, in eighteen years, had reason to feel he’d made the wrong choice.
“Sarah.” He said it warmly, as though they were old friends who’d simply drifted apart. “You look well. I didn’t know you’d be here.”
“I work here,” she said. “I’ve worked here for sixteen years.”
“Right.” He nodded, processing this. “And — your son. Adrian.” He said the name carefully, the way people say words they haven’t used in a long time. “How is he? Did he end up — ” a small pause — “doing all right? Given everything?”
The question landed exactly how he had intended it, she suspected. A built-in escape, the vague diminishment of given everything, the careful suggestion that all right was perhaps the best that could have been hoped for.
She met his eyes and kept her voice completely level. “He’s alive. And he’s doing very well.”
Marcus smiled — a little uncertain now, something off in his reading of her tone. He opened his mouth to say something else.
The doors at the far end of the room opened.
