Separate Desks

Charlotte's marriage had a floor plan, and it was eight feet wide.

That was the stretch of carpet between her desk and Matt's in the home office. She'd measured it once on a slow Friday afternoon and then felt stupid about it for the rest of the weekend. She was forty-two years old, and grown women did not measure their marriages with a tape measure.

At eight-thirty on a Tuesday morning, she lined up her color-coded sticky notes along the edge of her monitor. Pink was for calls, yellow was for deadlines, and green was for things that could wait until they turned yellow. Blue was for Matt, and there hadn't been a blue one on the monitor in a year. She had three reports due by noon, a Zoom call at two, and dinner prep at five-thirty. Nothing on the list was unexpected, which was the whole point of a list.

She sipped her black coffee and set the mug back on its coaster, exactly where it had been.

Across the room, Matt scrolled through his email with one hand and reached for his own mug with the other. He was forty-eight, and his salt-and-pepper hair was still thick, which he had done nothing to deserve. He wore a light blue shirt open at the collar. His desk was the usual mess of loose papers, a half-empty water bottle, and a phone lying face-down beside the keyboard.

"Want toast?" Charlotte asked.

"Already ate," Matt said.

The exchange lasted four seconds, and neither of them looked up.

The separate desks had been her idea. Two years ago, Matt's firm had started letting him work from home three days a week, and Charlotte had suggested opposite walls. "We'll get more done if we're not distracting each other," she'd said. He had agreed so fast that it should have told her something.

Now they shared the office the way strangers shared a dentist's waiting room. They kept to their own chairs and talked about dinner and the electric bill. Nobody told jokes.

Five years ago, they'd still been having sex. It wasn't the frantic fucking of their twenties, but it was warm and it was regular. Three years ago, it had dropped to once a month, and then to once every six weeks. Now Charlotte couldn't remember the last time Matt had touched her like he meant it. Was it Easter? Was it the Easter before that?

She honestly didn't know, and that was worse than either answer.

Her mug was a hand-thrown thing from their tenth anniversary trip to Maine. They'd spent five days at a bed and breakfast eating lobster rolls and pretending, and Matt had bought her a necklace she never wore. They had come home with tans, a fridge magnet, and the same quiet they'd packed.

Matt cleared his throat. "Big meeting with the execs today," he told his screen. "Might run late."

"That's fine," Charlotte said. "I'll save you a plate."

"Thanks."

And that was that. Charlotte crossed the first item off her legal pad. One down.

***

Matt's phone buzzed at nine-fifteen.

He glanced at the screen, and his face changed. It wasn't much of a change, but Charlotte had fifteen years of practice reading that face. Something tightened around his mouth, and something brightened around his eyes.

He swiveled his chair away from her before he answered. "Hey," he said, in a voice lower than his usual one. "What's up?"

The voice on the other end was loud enough to carry across eight feet of carpet. It was a woman's voice, quick and clipped, and it did not sound like someone asking for a favor.

"…my laptop's totally dead… presentation at three… I need your setup, Matt…"

"Yeah," Matt said. "Sure. No, that works."

"…already in the Uber…"

"Okay. See you soon."

He set the phone down carefully, like it might go off again. For a long moment he didn't look at Charlotte, and when he finally did, he was wearing the expression he saved for difficult clients.

"So," he said. "Kany's laptop died, and she has a presentation for her internship credit at three. She needs a real setup. Would you mind working at the kitchen table? Just for today."

Kany. Charlotte's jaw went tight before she could stop it.

Kany Smith was the summer intern at Matt's firm. She was twenty, a college senior with one internship credit left before graduation, and she had started showing up in Matt's dinner stories the week she started in June, seven weeks ago. At first she was "the new intern," and then she was "Kany," and then it was Kany said this and Kany found that and you should have seen Kany in the client meeting. Last night, he had mentioned her three times before dessert.

"Of course," Charlotte said. "If it's urgent."

"It's urgent," Matt said. "She's already on her way."

Of course she was.

Charlotte stacked her laptop on top of her legal pad and gathered her pens. She unplugged her charger and coiled the cord. Her hands were steady, but something hot and petty was climbing up her throat, and it took her a second to name it because she hadn't felt it since college.

She was jealous. She was actually, stupidly jealous of a twenty-year-old with a dead laptop.

It was ridiculous. Matt was forty-eight, married, and so allergic to drama that he apologized to telemarketers. In fifteen years he had never so much as looked at another woman, at least not where Charlotte could see.

Except his voice changed when he said that name. Except his phone lit up on the nightstand at eleven at night, and he always turned it face-down.

She carried her things down the hall to the kitchen. It was a nice kitchen, with a round four-seater table, a fruit bowl in the middle, and a window over the sink that looked out at the neighbor's fence. She set her laptop on a placemat and lined her legal pad up with the edge of the table. She put her mug down just so.

From down the hall came the sounds of Matt clearing space on a desk. It wasn't his desk. It was hers.

***

The doorbell rang once, and then the front door opened before anyone could answer it.

Charlotte had a clear line of sight from the kitchen table to the entryway, so she got the full show. Kany Smith stepped into the house like she'd been coming over for years.

She was five-foot-four and built like someone who ran for fun. Her cropped white tank top showed a strip of flat stomach and the bottom curve of her perky tits. Her athletic shorts were cut high enough to qualify as a rumor. Her dark hair was up in a messy ponytail, and a canvas backpack bounced against her hip.

Her eyes were green. They found Matt, and she gave him a slow smile.

"Hey," she said. "Thank you so much for the save. My laptop's totally fucked, and this presentation is, like, half my grade."

Matt came out of the hall wiping his palms on his pants. Charlotte hadn't seen him do that since their first date.

"No problem," he said, half an octave higher than usual. "Happy to help."

Charlotte stood up from the table with her mug in her hand. She should introduce herself. She should be the adult in the room, so she opened her mouth to do it.

Kany walked straight past the kitchen door without turning her head.

"Your setup is seriously legit," she told Matt on her way down the hall. "It's way better than the crap in the campus lab. Do you mind if I use both monitors? Dual screen would be fucking perfect."

"Sure," Matt said. "Whatever you need. There's an extra HDMI cable in the drawer."

From the kitchen doorway, Charlotte watched Kany drop her backpack on Charlotte's desk hard enough to wobble the monitor. Kany swept Charlotte's sticky notes into a pile to make room for her own tangle of cords. Then she sat down in Charlotte's chair, crossed her legs, and spun once.

Matt hovered in the office doorway with one hand on the frame. His shoulders were loose, and his weight was up on the balls of his feet. Charlotte remembered that stance. He used to stand like that when he was trying to impress her.

Kany glanced up and caught Charlotte watching. It wasn't a greeting. It was the look a person gives a lamp.

Then she went back to her screen.

For one wild second, Charlotte pictured marching into the office and throwing that backpack out the window. She pictured those green eyes going wide.

She didn't do it, because she'd spent fifteen years being the reasonable one. She sat back down at the kitchen table and opened her laptop with hands that only shook a little.

Matt stepped into the office, and the door swung most of the way shut behind him. It didn't close all the way. Closed would have been a statement, and mostly closed was just a hint.

From down the hall came voices, Kany's bright and quick, Matt's low. Then came a laugh, and the laugh was Matt's.

Charlotte knew that laugh. He used to give it to her when one of her jokes actually landed. How long had it been since she'd earned one? A year? Two?

She set her mug down too hard, and cold coffee slopped onto the table. She blotted it with a napkin and then opened a spreadsheet and typed a number into the wrong cell.

***

Kany left at six, after a presentation that had gone "amazing, like, literally amazing." Matt walked her out to her Uber and came back inside humming.

Charlotte made chicken piccata because it was Tuesday, and on Tuesdays she made chicken piccata. Matt sat across from her at the same kitchen table that had been her office all day. Her legal pad was still stacked by the fruit bowl.

"So it went well?" Charlotte asked.

"It went great," Matt said. He cut his chicken into neat squares while he talked, which he only did when he was happy. "Dana sat in on the Zoom, and you could tell she was impressed. Kany's got this way of walking into a room like she already owns it, you know? You can't teach that."

"I noticed," Charlotte said.

He didn't hear the tone, or he pretended not to. "Dana wants her on the Henderson pitch with me," he said. "She's twenty, and she's on Henderson. That's unheard of."

"That's great," Charlotte said. "For her."

"It's great for me, too. She's sharp, Char. She's, like…" He waved his fork in a circle. "She's a lot."

"She didn't say hello to me," Charlotte said.

Matt looked up from his plate. "What?"

"She walked past the kitchen twice and didn't say hello. I was standing right there."

"She was stressed," Matt said. "She had a presentation." He went back to his chicken. "Don't make it a thing."

Charlotte didn't make it a thing. She cleared the plates and loaded the dishwasher, and Matt went upstairs to shower.

In bed that night, she lay on her side and watched him type on his phone. The screen lit his face blue. He was smiling at it.

"Matt?" she said.

He turned the phone face-down on the nightstand. "Yeah?"

She slid her hand across the sheet to his hip. She hadn't done that in months, and her heart was pounding like she was about to shoplift.

Matt patted her hand twice, the way you'd pat a dog that had brought you the wrong ball.

"I'm beat," he said. "Big day tomorrow."

He rolled over. Charlotte took her hand back and stared at the ceiling.

The phone on his nightstand buzzed once in the dark.