Chapter 19
Sam
It was a good summer.
Looking back, the holiday in California was a highlight. We rented a house on the coast. Ethan didn’t much like the sand or the ocean, but Natalie laughed it off and said, let’s do Napa Valley instead. So, we did. We drove around wine farms, stayed in quaint tree houses and luxurious villas overlooking the vineyards. It was like a kind of honeymoon for us. When Ethan was asleep, we would sit outside and have some wine, talking about what we’d do the next day. Our relationship was out in the open now. Skye had initially had some objections and Natalie had to diffuse the tension. I didn’t see why we needed to indulge her, but Natalie didn’t want bad blood with Skye. This was the right decision, of course, and I realized later how much stress it removed from our lives. It helped that Skye liked Natalie. Natalie explained that Skye felt threatened by the three of us. She didn’t want Natalie replacing her as the mother and impacting on the fragile bond she had with Ethan.
I don’t know when things started to turn.
It was subtle at first, small things that didn’t really matter but somehow kept coming back to bother me. I liked that Natalie was natural and authentic, but sometimes I felt she could make a bit more of an effort with her appearance, for instance. As my partner, I wanted to take her to events and to meet people who had a certain standing in society and the world of business. Natalie liked plain clothes and often wore her hair in a simple braid or a ponytail. She never wore dresses or sexy skirts, even though she had terrific legs that would have looked fantastic in a tight leather skirt, for instance.
Whenever I mentioned to her that she might want to dress up more, she’d laugh it off or dismiss my suggestions. I started buying outfits for her for specific events and I thought she looked wonderful. But Natalie was uncomfortable in glamorous dresses and high heels. She didn’t care much for the business either and while she always asked about my day or how it went at work, I sometimes wished that she knew more of the industry, who the key players were.
For instance, when Professor Joel Sawyer contacted me to talk about work, I was excited and flattered. Professor Sawyer was well-known in our industry, he lectured at Harvard and had published several books on project and time management. He wanted to do a small case study about Luma and feature it in an article.
“Wow, Joel Sawyer wants to talk to you!” Dana said, when I told her about the call. “That is impressive!” And it was. But when I told Natalie, she didn’t know who Joel Sawyer was. I told her about his work, and she listened politely. I felt she could’ve made more of an effort to understand the circles I was moving in and think of ways to support me professionally. Dana was always coming up with networking ideas or telling me about interviews she’d read with some of our competitors.
These were small niggles, however.
Mostly, I managed to shrug them off. When she smiled at me in a certain way, I would feel my irritations melt away. Natalie had a calming effect on me, I knew that. I didn’t work as hard. I no longer worked late at night, drawing up spreadsheets and fine-tuning business proposals. I preferred to hang out with her, watching true crime dramas on TV and discussing plans for the weekend. We had started cycling together, one of the few physical activities both of us enjoyed. We spent hours looking online at bike tracks and possible cycling routes. It was fun and we got to explore new towns and surrounding areas as well.
Then, one day, after a meeting, Nic mentioned something about an expo in San Diego he was going to. I suggested we fly together.
“Oh, you’re coming too?” He seemed surprised.
“Of course, I’ve always gone to the In2Tech expo.”
“I just thought… you know… “
Nic was being vague and awkward, which irked me. We had come out of a meeting, and I was waiting for the others to leave before talking to him.
“What’s going on?”
“Nothing!” Nic was clearly embarrassed about the whole thing. “Lately, you’ve been skipping many of these things, you know and In2Tech isn’t one of the major expos, so I just thought…”
He was right. I’d not attended many of the IT events that I usually went to in the past. But that was before Natalie, when I was single and only thought about work.
“The company still needs you, you know,” Dana said to me after the conversation with Nic.
“I think it’s good that you have more of a personal life now, but you can’t take the foot off the pedal completely.”
“What are you talking about?” I thought Dana was out of line.
“What about P&P?”
This was a dangerous topic, and she knew it. We were alone in my office, and she was completely calm, holding my gaze. P&P was a big legal firm based in Austin, Texas and they’d shown some interest in our software program. I’d been talking to the Head of IT, as well as the company CEO but hadn’t been able to agree on a deal.
“They weren’t really interested,” I said, feeling my temper rising. I didn’t like being challenged, especially by my own team. I knew Dana had our best interests at heart, but I didn’t like where she was going with this.
“They signed with Greg,” she said, referring to one of our big competitors.
“That’s enough!”
But she didn’t let it go. “In the old days, you wouldn’t have given up so easily,” she scoffed. “You would have flown over there, wined them and dined them, thrown facts and figures at them until they were so dizzy that only the pen signing the contract could keep them upright!”
It was the first time she said outright to me that she felt I was losing touch.
“And what about the dinner with Jackson this week?”