Dump My Slow-Mo Husband – Chapter 1 – Everything Legal

I should tell you about my father’s 60th birthday dinner, but I should tell you about it the way it actually was rather than the way I have occasionally been tempted to tell it, which is as the beginning of a great love story with all the appropriate dramatic lighting applied in retrospect.

The truth is more specific and more absurd and, I think, more honest about the particular world I grew up in, which is the world of people who have had enough money for long enough that they have stopped noticing it and started treating it as weather – just the ambient condition of existence, neither remarkable nor worth mentioning.

My father, Richard Chen, turned sixty on a Thursday in November, and he celebrated the way he celebrated everything, which was correctly. The restaurant was Ambrose – not the kind of restaurant that needs to explain itself, the kind that has been excellent for forty years and expects you to understand why without being told. The lighting was the specific golden dim of a room that understands its purpose. The guest list was thirty-eight people selected from the overlapping circles of my father’s business life, social life, and the long, accumulated friendships of a man who had been in the same city doing the same work with the same integrity for thirty years, which meant people trusted him and liked him and showed up when he invited them to dinner.

I had attended versions of this evening my entire life.

The choreography was familiar: cocktail hour, the seating arrangement my mother had organized with the precision of someone who understood that where you put people determined what the evening became, three courses, toasts. My father would say something genuinely warm and slightly self-deprecating. His oldest friends would respond in kind. The evening would end at eleven with embraces and car keys and the specific, satisfied warmth of an occasion that had done exactly what it was supposed to do.

I knew my part in it.

I was twenty years old, the only child of Richard and Mei Chen, educated at the kind of school where the campus had its own name and the alumni newsletter had its own design team, currently in my second year of art history at university, home for the occasion. I was the daughter: present, charming, gracious to the older guests, genuinely warm rather than performed-warm because I liked people and always had, self-contained enough not to require managing.

I had worn a dress that my mother and I had agreed on over video call the previous week – navy, appropriate, good enough to signal that I had taken the occasion seriously without being so interesting that I pulled focus from the evening’s actual subject. I wore the pearl earrings that had been my grandmother’s. I arrived on time.

I sat at the table and I ate the first course and I talked to Gerald Davies on my right about a documentary we had both recently watched, because Gerald Davies was the kind of man who watched serious documentaries and liked to discuss them, and I was the kind of person who could discuss almost anything with genuine interest because genuine interest was simply how I was built.

Eric was across the table and three seats down.

I want to tell you this plainly because the plainness is the only way to tell it honestly: I had been aware of Eric Davies in some form or another since I was approximately twelve years old, which is when the awareness of certain people announces itself in your body before your brain has developed the vocabulary to name what it is. He had been at the Davies family events I attended with my parents throughout my childhood – an older boy, serious, already carrying himself with the specific, contained quality that would become his defining characteristic. He had treated me, when he treated me at all, with the polite, slightly distracted kindness of someone considerably older attending to someone considerably younger, which is to say: not unkindly, but without any particular focus.

I was twelve and then fourteen and then sixteen and he was twenty-one and twenty-three and twenty-five, and the gap between us was always large enough and the occasions infrequent enough that we existed in the same social world without existing in each other’s specifically. He knew I was Richard Chen’s daughter. He knew my name. He would ask, when our families were together, about my school or my courses with the pleasant, economical attention of a man covering the expected social ground.

He did not see me.

I want to be clear about that, because understanding what happened next requires understanding this: Eric Davies, across that table and through all the years before it, had never actually looked at me. Had looked in my direction, certainly. Had performed the appropriate recognitions. Had been, in the observable social sense, perfectly fine.

But the looking that meant something – attention that arrives when one person has identified another person as a person rather than a category – that had never occurred.

I knew this.

I had known it since I was old enough to understand the difference between being seen and being categorized, which was somewhere around sixteen, and the knowing had coexisted, without much apparent contradiction, with the feeling that persisted regardless of whether it was returned.

I am not telling you this to establish that I was pathetic. I am telling you this because it is true, and because the truth of it explains the next four years better than any other single fact.

I had been in love with Eric Davies since I was twelve years old.

Not in the breathless, operatic way of romantic fiction. In the quiet, persistent, structural way of a feeling that has integrated itself into your architecture – that is simply there when you check, like the load-bearing walls of a house, doing its work without requiring your constant attention.

So: the dinner.

My father gave a speech.

He was good at speeches – the specific, unshowy eloquence of a man who had thought carefully about what he wanted to say and had said it without ornament. He talked about building something, about the specific satisfaction of work that matters and relationships that last, about his wife, who he looked at while he talked about her with the specific, thirty-year-worn expression of a man who knows what he has and knows that he knows it, which is rarer than it should be.

And then he said the thing.

He was on his third glass of wine, which was not drunk for my father but was warm, and the warmth had made him expansive in the way of a man who is fundamentally happy and is in a room full of people who deserve to know it.

“The problem,” he said, “is that I have spent forty years building something I don’t quite know what to do with. My wife tells me it is time to stop. I believe she is right. Countries, she says. We have a list.” Laughter, warm and recognizing. “But I look at what we’ve built and I don’t know who I give it to. My daughter – “ he looked at me with the specific, publicly-deployed affection of a father who is proud and wants his guests to know it “- is twenty years old and studying art history, which is an excellent thing to study and is not, as yet, the management of a premium landscaping operation.”

More laughter.

Gerald Davies, on my right, raised his glass.

“I have a suggestion,” Gerald said.

He was smiling. Gerald Davies had the specific, warm humor of a man who had been friends with my father for twenty-five years and had developed the fluency of someone who can joke in the register that will land exactly correctly with exactly this audience.

“My son,” Gerald said, “is twenty-nine and competent and, as of last month, no longer in a situation that requires his full attention elsewhere.” This was a reference, I understood, to the end of a professional arrangement that had been discussed in adult conversations I had been adjacent to. “He has always been interested in the direction of the combined enterprise.”

My father looked at Gerald.

There was a beat – the specific, slightly theatrical beat of two men who have been in business together long enough to read each other’s tone.

“Everything must be legal,” my father said. “Jane is my only child.”

This was supposed to be a joke.

The table laughed.

I laughed.

I did not look at Eric.

I had learned, by twenty, not to look at Eric in the moments when looking at him would be revealing, which was most moments, and I applied this discipline now with the practiced ease of someone who has been applying it for eight years.

But I felt him.

That is the only way I know how to describe it – the specific, low-level awareness of a person’s location in a room that operates below consciousness, that I had been carrying as background signal for years. He was across the table and three seats down and he had heard what his father said and what my father said and the joke that both of them were making.

I ate a piece of bread.

The conversation moved on – other toasts, other laughter, the particular warm noise of a room full of people who are well-fed and genuinely fond of each other. My father sat down. My mother touched his arm. The main course arrived.

I talked to Gerald about the documentary.

I did not look at Eric for the rest of the dinner.

The two weeks after that dinner are the two weeks that produced the rest of this story, and I want to tell you about them with the specific, honest attention they deserve because they reveal something important about the world I live in, which is a world where money and family and business and social arrangement have been intertwined for long enough that the line between them has become largely theoretical.

My mother called me the following morning.

She was not alarmed. She was not rushing. She had the specific, carefully calibrated tone of someone who is conveying information that she is monitoring her daughter’s response to.

“Your father spoke with Gerald,” she said.

“Okay,” I said.

“They’d like to discuss the arrangement further.”

“What kind of arrangement?”

A pause.

“The marriage arrangement.”

I was in my kitchen at university making coffee. I held the mug very still.

“It was a joke,” I said.

“It started as a joke,” my mother said. “Your father is genuinely thinking about the succession. The company is his life’s work, Jane. He needs to know it will be managed by someone he trusts.”

“He could hire someone.”

“He could. He doesn’t want to.”

I said nothing.

“Gerald’s been talking to Eric,” my mother said. “Eric is- “ she paused “- open to it.”

Open to it.

Eric Davies was open to marrying me.

I turned this sentence over several times.

“What does open to it mean?”

“It means he doesn’t object,” she said. “Which, for Eric, I understand is approximately as enthusiastic as he gets about most things.”

I thought about Eric Davies not objecting to marrying me.

“And what does Dad want?” I asked.

“He wants to know what you want,” she said. “This is your life, Jane. Nobody is forcing anything.”

Nobody is forcing anything is a sentence that in wealthy families with significant business interests in play translates roughly as: we are not going to force you, but we want you to understand the full weight of what a refusal would mean for the people you love, and we trust that you are wise enough to weigh this appropriately.

I was twenty years old.

I was also, underneath the twenty-year-old who understood exactly how this sentence functioned, a person who had been carrying a feeling for eight years and had just been told the feeling might be legally sanctioned.

“Let me think about it,” I said.

I called Haley three minutes later.

“I need to tell you something,” I said.

“What happened?”

“My father wants me to marry Eric Davies.”

The silence on the other end of the phone was the silence of someone who has received unexpected information and is processing it at speed.

“Eric,” she said. “Davies.”

“Yes.”

“Tall. Blonde. Grey eyes. You’ve had a thing for him since you were twelve.”

“I wouldn’t say – “

“Jane.”

“Since I was about twelve, yes.”

Another silence.

“And what did you say?”

“I said I’d think about it.”

“Are you going to say yes?”

I looked out the window of my kitchen at the street below. A woman was walking a dog. A delivery driver was arguing with a parking meter. The ordinary Tuesday morning traffic of a city that had no idea about the decision I was standing in.

“He doesn’t know me,” I said.

“That’s not what I asked.”

“He’s never looked at me like-  he doesn’t – I’m not sure he even thinks of me as a person specifically, as opposed to a person-shaped presence in his family’s social world.”

“Jane.”

“That’s a reasonable concern.”

“It is,” she said. “Are you going to say yes anyway?”

I thought about Eric Davies not objecting.

“Probably,” I said.

“Okay,” she said. “I’m going to support you completely. I’m also going to tell you right now that you are going to need to talk to him. Actually talk to him. Like a human who has feelings toward another human. At some point.”

“Yes,” I said.

“Promise me.”

“I promise,” I said.

I did not keep this promise for four years, which is something I am prepared to own.

The meeting with the lawyers was twenty days after the dinner.

My father had moved quickly, which was typical of him – he was a man who, once he had decided a thing, did not see the value in delay, and he had apparently decided the thing before the dessert course had cleared. The lawyers were from the firm that handled both families’ business interests, and the meeting was in a boardroom with the particular, neutral corporate aesthetic of a space designed for decisions rather than feelings.

My mother was there. Gerald was there. There were lawyers from both sides. There were documents.

And Eric was there.

He was in a dark suit – not the grey one from the dinner but something darker, more formal, the suit of a man who has identified the register of an occasion and dressed accordingly. He was already seated when I arrived, looking at something on his phone with the focused, unhurried attention he brought to everything, and he looked up when I came in and stood.

“Jane,” he said.

“Eric,” I said.

We shook hands.

I want you to understand the specific quality of that handshake: his hand was warm and his grip was firm and he looked at me when he did it with the calm, clear attention of someone completing a greeting correctly. His eyes were exactly the grey I had catalogued at twelve and refined my understanding of at fourteen and sixteen and eighteen and twenty.

He looked at me for approximately two seconds.

Then he sat back down and returned to whatever was on his phone.

The lawyers explained things. The structure of the merger – because that was what it was, really, a family merger with a human element, though nobody called it that in the room. The legal arrangement. The timeline. The prenuptial provisions, which were extensive and which both sets of lawyers had clearly spent considerable time on, and which I read with the focused attention of someone who had grown up in business families and understood that legal documents were how people in her world said what they actually meant.

The terms were fair. More than fair, actually – whoever had drafted them had been thorough and careful in a way that protected both parties genuinely rather than merely performing protection.

I asked three questions. The lawyers answered them. My father watched me ask the questions with the specific, quiet pride of a man who raised his daughter to read contracts.

Eric asked four questions. They were good questions – specific, practical, directed at the business succession timeline rather than the personal arrangement, which was either very professional of him or very revealing, depending on how you read it.

At the end of the meeting, the lawyers indicated that if both parties were in agreement, signatures could happen today.

Everyone looked at me.

I looked at the documents.

I thought about the eight years of a feeling that had lived in my architecture without requiring anything of me except to be carried.

I signed.

Eric signed.

He used a specific pen – a good one, the kind of pen that means something to the person who owns it, a detail I noticed and filed alongside all the other details I had spent years filing – with the efficient, unhurried certainty of a man who had made his decision and was executing it without drama.

The lawyers gathered the papers.

My father shook Gerald’s hand. My mother embraced Gerald’s wife. The room did the warm, social movement of an occasion concluding correctly.

Eric looked at me.

“I think this will work well,” he said. He meant the business. He meant the combined operation, the succession plan, the elegant solution to a succession problem that had been presenting itself since my father started talking about countries and lists.

“Yes,” I said. “I think so too.”

He nodded. He put the pen in his inside pocket. He said goodbye to my parents with the warm, correct courtesy of a man who had known them his whole life and valued them accordingly.

He left.

I stood in the boardroom with the signed documents and my parents and the lawyers for a few minutes more. My father put his arm around me and said something quiet and fond that I received with genuine warmth because I loved him and he had meant well and the arrangement was, in its way, a gift – the specific, imperfect, complicated gift of a father who was giving his daughter the best thing he could think of, which happened to coincide, in this case, with the thing she had quietly been wanting for eight years.

“Are you happy?” my mother asked, when we were alone.

“Yes,” I said.

She looked at me with the specific, layered attention of a woman who had known me for twenty years.

“He’ll come around,” she said.

Which was the most honest thing anyone said to me about my marriage before it started.

The wedding was three months later.

Small, by our families’ standards – forty guests, a venue that was beautiful without being theatrical, a ceremony that was exactly the right length. My dress was something I had found with my mother and Haley in an afternoon that I remember as being genuinely fun, which seems like a strange thing to say about an afternoon that contained the subtext of everything I have been telling you, but the dress was beautiful and my mother cried at the fitting and Haley said “you look devastating” with the specific, loyal emphasis of someone who means it completely.

Eric in a morning suit was an experience I was not fully prepared for, which says something about my existing level of preparation, which had been considerable.

The ceremony was performed by a registrar with a warm voice and efficient phrasing. We said the words. His hand was warm when he took mine. He looked at me when we said the relevant parts with the steady, calm attention he brought to everything – not romantic, not swept away, not the expression of a man in the grip of something he cannot contain, but present. Fully, clearly present.

He kissed me, which was brief and appropriate and which I received with the composed expression of a woman who has been waiting for this specific moment in some form for eight years and is not going to let it show.

“Mrs. Davies,” he said, quietly, after.

“Mr. Davies,” I said.

He smiled. A real one – small and slightly surprised, as if the response had pleased him unexpectedly. It was the first time I had made him smile with something that was simply myself rather than any performed version of myself, and I filed it immediately because I was twenty years old and I filed everything.

The reception was warm and went late and our parents were happy in the specific, complete way of parents who have solved a problem they were worried about and found the solution also good, which is the best possible outcome for parents who have been worried about a problem.

Haley danced with me at eleven o’clock to a song we had loved since we were sixteen, badly and enthusiastically and with complete disregard for the tempo, and Eric watched from across the room with the expression of a man observing something he does not entirely understand but does not find unpleasant.

I caught him watching.

I kept dancing.

I drove home that night in the car with my husband, which was a sentence I was going to have to get used to, and I looked out the window at the city and I thought about the signed document and the warm hand and the small, surprised smile and the eight years of a feeling that had been waiting for exactly this, and I felt, in the honest, unperformed way of a person who is alone enough in a car to be simply herself: happy.

Complicated. Uncertain. Slightly terrified.

But happy.

I should have been more concerned, in retrospect, by how calm he had looked while agreeing to marry me.

But I was twenty years old and I had just married Eric Davies and I was not, that evening, in the business of being concerned.

What I did not understand, at twenty, was the specific shape of the problem I had said yes to.

I understood, in the abstract, that Eric did not love me. I had never been foolish enough to believe otherwise – he had not wooed me, had not pursued me, had not produced any of the evidence that would typically suggest a man’s romantic attachment to a woman. The arrangement had been practical on his end and I had understood this going in.

What I had believed, in the quiet, private optimism of someone who had been waiting eight years for proximity and had finally been given it, was that proximity would produce something. That living with someone, being in their daily life, sharing the accumulated ordinary detail of a shared existence – that these things would build something, the way water builds canyons, slowly and without drama but with results.

I had believed I had time.

I had believed that being good enough, present enough, appropriate enough would eventually cause Eric Davies to look at me the way I wanted to be looked at.

I had been, in this belief, wrong.

But I did not know that yet.

I was twenty years old and I had married the man I had loved since twelve and I was going to go home to an apartment that was now ours, and I was going to do this correctly, and it was going to work.

I was going to make it work.

This is what I thought on my wedding night, looking out the window at my city.

It is also, in a different form, the belief that I carried for the next four years – that if I just did this correctly enough, performed this well enough, waited patiently enough, the thing I wanted would eventually arrive.

It did not arrive.

Not the way I was trying to produce it.

But that is what the other twenty-three chapters are for.