A Better Man by Leah McLaren Page A

her—skin, hair, the upper-lip divot where latte foam gathers—looks any different to him than the day they met. She is the same and yet utterly changed. As she teases Gray about some social transgression or other (hair thrown back, glossy lips parted to reveal the tiny gap between her two front teeth, laughter free-flowing and effervescent), Nick acknowledges how rarely he sees this version of his wife—the one whom he used to know, but who now seems off limits to him. The wife reserved for friends and strangers at cocktail parties.
    “I’d better get back,” Gray says finally, giving his bull head a swing toward the corner of the room, where a young womanwith a glossy brown side braid cranes her swan neck at the menu. Nick pegs her at no older than twenty-five. “Working dinner with my articling student. Poor kid’s been putting in eighty-hour weeks since June. Thought she deserved some overpriced beefaroni, or whatever it is the kids are eating these days.”
    “How generous of you,” says Nick. Maya nudges him under the table.
    Gray doesn’t bother to protest, just gives a shrug of mild defeat and, before loping back to his table, says with a look Nick finds altogether too knowing, “We can’t all be happily married, can we?”
    They wait until Gray is at least eight paces away before discussing him.
    “I know we’re supposed to feel sorry for him, but I’m not sure I do anymore,” she says, twirling a piece of hair between her fingers.
    “Don’t you think he’s lonely and, I dunno, filled with a tragic sense of emptiness?”
    “Why?” Maya laughs. “Because he’s rich, successful and totally unencumbered? That sounds to me exactly what most men aspire to.”
    Nick shifts in his chair. “Not men as lucky as me,” he manages to say after an awkward pause.
    Maya, who’s been watching Gray, snaps her head back and stares at him. “Wow, you’re really laying it on thick tonight, aren’t you?” She says this a little more combatively than she seems to have intended. And for a terrible moment, Nick thinks,
She knows.
But then her expression blooms into a smile and she reaches languidly for her glass. He finds himself admiring, forthe thousandth time, the way her arm furls out from the elbow like a ballerina’s. She nods her head toward Gray, who appears to be edutaining his date by deconstructing the wine list, bottle by bottle. “Looks like I’m not the only one getting the full charm offensive tonight.”
    Nick is keen to shift the focus. “Do you think it’s actually an Internet date? Do grown-ups really go on those?”
    Maya shakes her head. “Nah, guys like that can’t date outside their job description, let alone their firm. Trust me, I know the type.”
    Nick leans back, watching his wife watching Gray. “
Do
you now?” he says with mock surprise, his tone concealing a flutter of something at once prickly and pleasurable. He is thinking of the old her, the one who glided out the door to the office every day in a series of smooth wool skirt suits. A woman who watches—and is watched by—countless men he doesn’t know and will never meet.
    They’re only halfway through their platter of high-end cat sick, and Maya is toying with her glass, the edges of her expression softly blurred with wine. He suddenly knows neither of them will eat another bite. She looks up at him through her hair, which has gone sweetly mussy, and suppresses a laugh. Nick thinks,
If this is the fake me, is that the real her?
He flags down the waiter and asks for the bill.

CHAPTER 8
    Maya wakes up the next morning with a pain in her face and a buzz in her head. A half-dried puddle of spit has gathered in the crease of her pillow, gluing her hair to her cheek and leaving her lips dry and sore, like the sandy edges of a bayou sinkhole. It’s not the hangover that hits her first but the dread. The sense that whatever damage was done the night before may well be irreparable now. She has a strong suspicion that