Helen accepted the flowers and the handshake with a graciousness that lasted approximately 90 minutes before the questions started.
Not questions about my career. Questions about my family’s finances. About my mother’s absence. How old I had been. Whether my father had remarried. Whether the household had been stable. About whether I planned to leave the Navy after the wedding.
The word she used was job. Not career. Not service. Job.
“And you’ll keep working in that government job after the wedding?”
She smiled when she said it. The smile never wavered. But the word job did the work that career would have refused to do. It reduced 14 years of purpose into something you could set down and walk away from if you were being reasonable.
Frank did not register it. I registered everything.
Helen’s home in Greenwich was immaculate. Old-money restraint. Good art. Furniture that had been chosen to communicate a specific kind of authority without announcing it.
The rooms were ordered the way Helen herself was ordered: precisely, deliberately, with no tolerance for anything that did not fit the arrangement she had designed.