Our first date was a little Italian restaurant with mismatched chairs and a wine list written on a chalkboard. He asked about my routes, listened to stories from airport terminals, and said he admired people who could stay composed when travel plans fell apart. I liked that he did not treat my work as glamorous or trivial. When I told him I had once helped a frightened passenger through a panic attack during severe turbulence, he looked genuinely impressed. At the time, I mistook his admiration for a lasting understanding of who I was.
We married eighteen months later in the backyard of my parents' house. My father, Edward Bennett, walked me across the grass under strings of white lights and whispered that I could still change my mind if the champagne wasn't good enough. He was a quiet man who had worked for thirty-five years maintaining aircraft on the ground, which made my choice of career both a source of pride and a subject of constant mechanical advice. My mother, Helen, laughed at his joke and dabbed her eyes with a tissue. Ryan promised to love me without trying to make me smaller, and I believed he meant it.
For a long time, he did seem to mean it. We lived in a modest apartment and saved toward a house, took cheap vacations when my standby travel benefits allowed, and celebrated the first major contract awarded to Carter Ridge Construction with takeout barbecue eaten on the floor because our dining table had not arrived. Ryan remembered the names of my friends, listened to stories about passengers, and called my parents on birthdays without being reminded. He used to meet me at the airport after overnight trips with coffee and a clean sweatshirt in the passenger seat.
Then the company grew. His contracts became larger, the house became more expensive, and his calendar began to claim every hour that wasn't already being claimed by someone else. At first I was proud of him. My father's hands had spent a lifetime fixing things other people overlooked, and I knew that building a business was its own kind of difficult craft. I accepted the late calls, the unpredictable weekends, and the occasional dinner eaten alone because I believed we were building something together.
What I did not understand was how gradually the meaning of together could change. Ryan began introducing me as his wife rather than by my name, as if marriage were the accomplishment that mattered more than anything I did myself. He joked that I flew around handing out pretzels while he kept our lights on, though my salary and savings had helped us make the original down payment on our house. When I objected, he accused me of being unable to take a joke. When I asked him to stop, he told me I had grown sensitive.