"Eli, I've been on my feet all day. Can you go without me?"
I went without her. I sat at Nadia's dinner table and told everyone Petra wasn't feeling well. Drove home at 10:00 to find the lights off and Petra in bed, phone face down on the nightstand.
I didn't say anything about it that night. But two weeks later, when she came home from Damon's on a Saturday and I was finishing up some work at my desk, I turned in my chair and said carefully, "I want to talk about the amount of time you're spending over there."
She tilted her head. "What about it?"
I feel like we've lost our weekends. Between Friday nights and Saturdays, you're gone most of the weekend. Most weekends.
Damon's going through a hard time, she said. His business partner left the company. He needs a friend right now.
I understand that. What I'm saying is that I feel like I'm losing track of you.
She looked at me with something that wasn't quite patience and wasn't quite irritation. Something in between. Eli, he's my friend. We've talked about this.
We haven't actually. Not really.
I'm not doing anything wrong.
I didn't say you were.
It sounds like you think I am.
And there it was. The pivot from my concern to her defense. I didn't know how to push back on that without sounding like I was accusing her of something.
So, I backed off. Said I wasn't accusing her of anything, just expressing how I felt.
She said she'd try to check in more. She didn't check in more.
January of the following year, I got a call from my director at Meridian, a man named Ford Gallagher, who'd been with the firm for 22 years and knew the business like he knew his own breathing.
There's an opportunity in Singapore, Ford said. Meridian is expanding our Asia-Pacific operations.
We're looking for someone to head the new regional analysis team based out of the Singapore office, three-year commitment with a review option after that.
I'd been on Ford's radar for this kind of move for a while. He knew my work. He knew I was ready for that level.
What's the compensation package look like? I asked.
He told me. It was the kind of number that reorganized your understanding of what was possible.
I'll need a few days, I said.
You've got a week.
I went home that night and told Petra over dinner. She was quiet while I explained the offer, the role, the location, the package.
When I finished, she put her fork down. Singapore, she said. Singapore.
Eli, I can't move to Singapore. My entire career is here. My clients, my firm, everything I've built is in Seattle.
I know. I'm not saying we have to decide anything tonight. I just wanted you to know about it.
She nodded slowly. Are you seriously considering it?
It's the most significant opportunity that's ever come to me. So, yes, I'm seriously considering it.
She was quiet for the rest of dinner. Later that night, she told me she thought we should stay in Seattle, that she felt like our life here was something worth protecting, that she didn't want to uproot everything for a three-year experiment on the other side of the world.
I called Ford the next morning and told him I was passing.
"You sure?" he said.
Family comes first, I said.
He said he understood. Said the door wouldn't close completely. If circumstances changed, I should reach out.
I thought I'd made a sacrifice for my marriage. I didn't yet understand that the sacrifice wouldn't be acknowledged or reciprocated.
I didn't yet understand that I'd turned down the most important professional offer of my life for a woman who was spending our weekends with her ex-husband and framing my discomfort about it as a character flaw.
The thing about working in financial analysis is that you eventually stop being surprised by how long people can maintain a fiction that isn't working.
Companies do it, markets do it, marriages do it. By spring, our conversations had gotten shorter.
Not hostile, just abbreviated, like we'd both learned which topics were safe and stayed inside those borders.
We ate dinner together four or five nights a week. We were physically present. We asked how each other's days went, but there was something underneath the surface of our routine that had the quality of managed distance rather than actual closeness.
I remember sitting across from her at a restaurant we liked on Capitol Hill, a small Italian place on Pine Street where we'd had our first real date, and realizing that I was performing ease.
I was performing the relaxed dinner with my wife thing. And when I looked at her, I thought, "Is she doing the same thing?"
I didn't ask. I ordered another glass of Barolo and talked about something safe.
The conversation that ended everything happened on a Sunday morning in April.
Petra had been at Damon's the previous day, a Saturday that I'd mentally earmarked for us.
We'd vaguely discussed going to the Olympic Sculpture Park in the morning, then maybe driving out to Snoqualmie Falls in the afternoon. She'd mentioned it on Thursday.
By Saturday morning, she'd texted to say Damon needed help picking furniture for his new living room, and she'd try to be back by 3:00.
She got home at 7:15. I was reading. I didn't say anything when she walked in.
I heard her moving around the kitchen, heard the refrigerator open and close, heard her come and stand in the doorway of the living room.