Ethan’s lawyer followed, a thin man in a gray suit who carried an expensive briefcase and wore the expression of someone who had facilitated enough of these meetings to feel nothing in particular about this one.
Ethan took his seat across from Emily. He set his hands flat on the table and looked at her with that particular smile—the one she had come to understand, over the course of two years of marriage, was not warmth but performance. A smile that said: I am the kind of man who smiles. It was different from the smile he had worn when she first met him, when his startup was hemorrhaging cash and his confidence was the only currency he had left in abundance, when he used to call her from the office at midnight because he was scared and needed to hear her voice, when he had looked at her across a table exactly like this one—though in a far less impressive setting, a diner booth with sticky vinyl seats—and said, with a sincerity that she had believed completely, that he could not do any of this without her.