TOO LATE TO CALL ME WIFE

Clara smiled for the photographers until her cheeks began to ache.

The flashes went off in white bursts along the entrance of the Old Vic, and a young woman with a clipboard kept calling, "Mr. and Mrs. Ashford, one more, look at each other this time," so they looked at each other. Dominic's hand rested at the small of her back, warm and sure through the silk of her dress. For those few seconds he held her gaze as though no one else in London existed, and Clara, who knew perfectly well that it was for the cameras, felt her pulse jump anyway. That was the humiliating part. After seven years, her body still believed him.

"Beautiful," the young woman said. "You two are the real thing."

Then the cameras turned toward the next arrivals, and his hand left her back so smoothly that she might have imagined it, and he took out his phone.

She had straightened his tie in the car, on the way over. It had been crooked, and he had bent his head to let her fix it, and he had said thank you in a low voice that had made her think, for no good reason, there you are. She held on to that all through the foyer, where people she barely knew kept stopping them. A silver-haired woman in pearls clasped Clara's hands and said that she told her own daughters to look at the Ashfords, seven years married and still gazing at each other like students. A man from some foundation said that Dominic was a lucky fellow. Clara thanked them all. She said the right things in the right voice, and Dominic stood beside her, tall and handsome in his dark suit, nodding at the right moments. To everyone watching, they were the perfect couple. She had once believed it herself.

It was a benefit night for a children's literacy charity, and the play was one she had wanted to see for months. She had mentioned it, lightly, in September. She had mentioned it again in October, and in November she had simply bought the tickets, because she had learned that if she waited for an invitation to appear in her husband's diary it would appear late or not at all. When he had agreed to come, she had been absurdly happy. She had even allowed herself a small plan. After the play, perhaps they could walk along the river instead of going straight home. They had not walked anywhere together in a very long time.

At home, as she was fastening her earrings, he had come to the bedroom door in his dark suit and stopped there. "You look beautiful," he had said, quietly, and he had crossed the room and kissed her temple, and for a moment she had stood quite still, afraid to move in case it ended. He did not say things like that often. When he did, she kept them for weeks.

They were barely in the bar at the interval when a woman's voice said, "Dom."

It was not the name anyone else used for him. Clara turned, and there was Victoria Hale, in a fitted red dress, her dark hair cut sharply at the jaw. Victoria was thirty-three, brilliant, composed and absolutely lovely, and for the last three years she had been the person Dominic relied on more than anyone at Ashford Group. Clara had always liked her. That was what made the next minute so odd. Victoria did not say hello first. She came straight to Dominic, laid a hand on his sleeve and said in a low, apologetic voice, "I am so sorry. I know it is the interval. Could I have five minutes? It will not keep until Monday."

"Of course," Dominic said, at once.

"Clara." Victoria turned to her with a warm, genuine smile. "You look wonderful. I am stealing him, I promise. I will bring him back in one piece."

She reached up as she said it and brushed something from his lapel, a fleck of lint or a thread, with the easy certainty of a hand that knew exactly where such things landed. Dominic did not even glance down. He simply let her do it. Then the two of them walked away across the crowded bar, their heads close together, speaking in the quick, quiet shorthand of people who understood each other perfectly, and Clara stood there with two untouched glasses of champagne and the sudden, absurd sense that she had been standing in the wrong place for years.

The silver-haired woman in pearls drifted over a moment later and patted her arm. Her name was Lady Hartley, and she had known Dominic's mother for thirty years. "Men like Dominic never say it, my dear," she murmured, nodding toward the crowd where he had disappeared. "They simply provide. You must not mind it." Clara thanked her, and found that she could not think of a single thing to answer.

The bell rang for the second act. She finished one of the glasses. She went back to her seat in the fourth row, and the seat beside her stayed empty.

"Is your husband all right?" asked a man behind her, leaning forward as the lights dimmed.

"He is wonderful," Clara said. "Work."

It was what she always said, and it came out so naturally that it frightened her a little. The curtain rose on a kitchen, and a married couple in the middle of a quarrel, and she could not follow a single word. She kept thinking of another theatre, a tiny one above a pub in Islington, on the third night she had known him. She had been twenty-two and nervous, and Dominic, who was not yet anyone important, had leaned close in the dark and whispered the worst jokes in London into her ear until she had to bite her glove to keep from laughing aloud. He had been so attentive that she had not seen a minute of the play. She had walked home beside him that night, and he had told her about the building he wanted to put up one day, a library with a staircase that was also a reading room, and she had told him she could draw it. Neither of them had known it was the beginning of anything.

She tried to remember when he had last made her laugh like that. She could not. It was not that she was unhappy in a way that had a date and a name. It was only that she had counted back through the months and found a long, quiet stretch where she could not find him at all.

He returned as the applause started, slipping into the seat beside her with his phone in his hand and an apologetic look on his face. "I am sorry," he whispered. "It ran on. Did I miss much?"

"Only the second half."

"Clara."

"It was lovely," she said, because that was what a wife said, and because she was suddenly too tired to say anything else.

In the car afterward, he took her hand. It was a small, kind, absent-minded gesture, and she let him. The river slid past beyond the window, black and silver and entirely out of reach, and neither of them mentioned walking beside it.

"What did she need?" Clara asked quietly.

"Something that could not wait until Monday." He said it easily, without looking up from the passing lights. "It is handled."

"What kind of something?"

"A work matter. Nothing you need to worry about." He squeezed her fingers. "I hope you were not bored. I saw you talking to Lady Hartley. I knew you would be fine on your own."

"I was fine."

"I knew you would be," Dominic said, and smiled at her, and she saw that he meant it as praise. "You always are."

His phone buzzed against his knee. He glanced at the screen, and his thumb was already moving. "Victoria," he said, by way of explanation, and let go of her hand to answer.

Clara turned her face toward the glass. In its dark surface she could see the reflection of a woman in a green silk dress with her husband's voice murmuring beside her, low and warm and entirely occupied, and she thought that the trouble was not really Victoria. Victoria had only been standing where the door had been left open. The trouble was simpler and much harder to say. She had spent seven years teaching Dominic that she never minded, and he had learned the lesson perfectly.