Ask Me Sober

Nobody breathes.

You can hear the ice swan dripping. You can hear the quartet, who have stopped playing, shuffling sheet music. You can hear your own heart, which seems to have moved into your ears.

Gabriel Ashford looks at you for a long moment. Not at your dress, not at the cameras. At your face, like he's reading something written very small.

Then he leans down, close enough that only you can hear. He smells like cold air and cedar.

"Ask me again tomorrow," he says. "Sober. When he's not watching."

He straightens. From his inside pocket he takes a plain white card and holds it out between two fingers. No logo. A name and, in pen, an address on Rowes Wharf.

"Goodnight, Mrs. Ashford."

And he walks out. He doesn't look at his mother. He doesn't look at his brother. He sets down his untouched sparkling water on the tray of a frozen waiter and leaves the way he came, and the doors swing shut behind him.

The room exhales all at once.

You stand there holding the card while three hundred people pretend not to stare. Then Esme has your arm and is steering you toward the coat check, saying, "Okay. Okay, babe. We're leaving. Walk. Just walk."

Behind you, you hear Miles say your name, sharp, the way he says it to waiters.

You keep walking.

The Chestnut Hill house is dark when Esme's car drops you off. You told her you'd be fine. She told you she'd wait at the end of the driveway for thirty minutes, and if you didn't text, she'd come in with a corkscrew.

You go upstairs and take down the suitcase you bought for your honeymoon.

Miles gets home at eleven-twenty. You hear the Tesla in the drive, the front door, his keys thrown on the console table he picked out. He comes up the stairs two at a time.

"What the hell was that?"

He's standing in the bedroom doorway, golden and furious, his bow tie stuffed in his pocket. Even now he's handsome. That was always the trouble. Miles Ashford smiles and people forget what he just said.

He isn't smiling now.

"You humiliated me," he says. "In front of the board. In front of Mother. With him."

You fold a sweater. "I was in the map room, Miles."

A pause. Just one. You watch him decide which version to try.

"It's not what it looked like."

"It looked like you on top of an 1847 harbor chart with your assistant." You fold another sweater. "That case is temperature-controlled. You probably broke the seal."

"Jesus, Ava, you're worried about the map?"

"No," you say. "I'm finished worrying about anything that's yours."

He stares at you. Then something in his face settles, gets almost relieved, and that hurts more than the map room did.

"Fine," he says. "Fine. It was going to happen anyway. Gerard will send you terms. Mother wants it quiet, so it'll be fast. Don't make it ugly."

"You made it ugly."

"Sign what Gerard sends. You'll be taken care of." He loosens his collar. "And stay away from my brother. You have no idea what he is."

"He's the only person tonight who didn't lie to me."

Miles laughs. It's a short, ugly sound. "He's using you. That's all Gabriel has ever done. He wants something, and you just walked across a room and offered it to him."

You zip the suitcase. "Then I guess we'll both find out what it is."

You leave your wedding ring on the dresser, beside his cufflinks. He doesn't try to stop you. That's the last thing you notice as you walk down the stairs: how easy you are for him to let go.

Esme's apartment is two tiny rooms above Quintero's in the South End. The wine bar is closed when you arrive, chairs up on the tables, the smell of old cork and lemon polish. Esme puts you on the couch under three blankets and opens a bottle of something red and expensive she says she was saving for a funeral.

"This counts," she says.

Your phone buzzes all night. Texts from women who haven't spoken to you since the last board luncheon. Are you OK?? Call me!! A link to a gossip account: someone filmed it. Thirty seconds of you crossing the ballroom in green silk, the room going quiet, and Gabriel Ashford leaning down to say something only you could hear. Two hundred thousand views by two a.m.

The comments are worse than the video. The wife really proposed to the BROTHER. That's the disinherited one?? Ma'am that man looks like a war crime in a suit. She's insane. She's a genius.

Esme reads them aloud until you laugh, and then until you cry, and then she just holds you.

Around four you take out the white card and turn it over and over in your fingers.

"Ava. You're not actually going," Esme says from the floor, half asleep.

"He said ask him sober."

"He's an Ashford."

"So was I."

The courier comes at nine.

He buzzes Quintero's door, and Esme goes down in her robe and comes back with a thick envelope with the Ashford Holdings logo in the corner. Gerard Hargrove, General Counsel. You know Gerard. Silver hair, rimless glasses, a soft voice he uses for bad news. He drafted your prenup. He sat at your wedding at Dorothea's left hand.

The settlement is twenty-two pages. You read every word, the way you used to read restoration specs.

Miles keeps the Chestnut Hill house. Miles keeps the cars, the accounts, the Nantucket rental, his shares. You get your personal belongings, a payment that would cover maybe a year of rent in Boston if you're careful, and a line on page nineteen saying the Ashford family thanks you for your service to the Foundation and accepts your resignation as its director.

Your resignation. They didn't even let you quit.

At the bottom, a sticky note in Gerard's neat hand: Mrs. Ashford, Mr. Ashford would appreciate your signature by Monday. Discretion benefits everyone. G.H.

Esme reads it over your shoulder and swears in Spanish, beautifully, for almost a minute.

You don't swear. You stand up, wash your face in Esme's tiny sink, borrow her black coat and her good lipstick, and put the white card in your pocket.

"Where are you going?" she says, though she knows.

"To ask a man a question. Sober."

Rowes Wharf rises out of the harbor in red brick and glass, the great arch open to the water. The doorman knows your name before you say it. That's the first strange thing. The second is the elevator, which needs no key and goes straight to the top.

The doors open into light. Floor-to-ceiling windows, the whole gray harbor spread out like a sheet of steel, a long room almost empty except for a black piano and too many books.

He's standing by the window in a dark sweater, a cup of coffee in one hand. He turns when you step out. In daylight, with his sleeves pushed up and no tie and no audience, he is somehow worse. You'd hoped last night had exaggerated him. It hadn't.

He checks his watch.

"Eleven hours," Gabriel Ashford says. On the long table behind him is a single folder, squared perfectly with the edge. "I had the contract drawn up in four."