I gave my speech in the stained wrap.
I’d written it on index cards, and the cards were in my clutch, dry. I didn’t need them. I’d read them forty times since Friday.
I thanked the board. I thanked the people in finance who’d covered for me at every prenatal appointment. I talked about my mother, and the night she made partner, and how she told me afterward that the hardest part wasn’t getting the job. It was walking into the room the next morning like you belonged there.
“I’m wearing her wrap tonight,” I said. “It’s had a rough evening.”
People laughed, kindly. Some of them had seen. Most hadn’t. The ones who had looked at the floor.
I did not mention Derek once.
When I came down, Tasha was waiting at the bottom of the steps with a stack of white bar napkins.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I should have said something.”
“You didn’t laugh,” I said. “That was something.”
She dabbed at the wrap. It didn’t help. We both knew it wouldn’t.
By the time I looked for Derek, he was gone. So was Paige, but not with him. Glen told me later she’d taken an Uber alone and left her champagne flute on the bar, still full.
My phone buzzed for the rest of the night. Congratulations from people I’d hired. A heart from Raymond’s wife. And Derek.
“You set me up.”
“You let me look like an idiot in front of my whole team.”
“Why didn’t you TELL me?”
I wrote back once. “I tried. You weren’t home Friday. You told me to stay in the back Saturday.”
He didn’t answer that.
He was at the kitchen table when I got home after midnight, still in his suit, the collar open.
“You could have warned me,” he said. “One text. One.”
“You poured a glass of wine on your pregnant wife,” I said. “Warning you wouldn’t have changed that. It would only have changed who you did it in front of.”
He opened his mouth and closed it.
“Paige,” I said.
“It’s not what you think.”
“I saw your hand.”
He looked at the stain on the wrap for a long time. Then he said, “That was your mom’s.”
“Yes.”
“I didn’t know.”
“You never asked,” I said, and went to bed.
I slept in the guest room. The baby kicked until three.
Sunday, it seemed like the whole company knew.
Someone had filmed the speech on a phone. Not the wine, thank God, just me at the podium with a dark stain down one shoulder. It was in the company group chat by breakfast. By lunch it had a nickname: “the red wrap speech.”
Derek’s mother called at noon.
“Nora, honey, I’m sure it was an accident. Derek says you bumped his arm.”
“Did he say who he was standing with?”
Silence. Then: “He said you’d be dramatic about it.”
“Ask him which hand his glass was in,” I said. “Then ask him where the other one was.”
She hung up. She didn’t call again until the baby was born.
At four, Raymond texted. “Derek has asked to see me tomorrow. Alone. I said no. Tell me how you want this handled.”
I wrote back, “I don’t want to handle it. That’s the point. Please give it to HR and the board, and keep me out of it.”
“Understood. Proud of you, by the way.”
I put the phone face down and slept for eleven hours.
