First, the Italian espresso machine—worth more than most people’s rent. Fourteen seconds to grind the beans, no more, no less. Water heated precisely to 200°F. The Venetian demitasse cups from his mother, pre-warmed before pouring.
Our kitchen stood as a monument to Travis’s values. Marble counters from Carrara, a detail he liked to mention casually at dinner parties. A Sub-Zero refrigerator synced to his phone, though he’d never bothered learning how to use it. The eight-burner Viking range I used each morning to prepare his single cup of coffee, because he insisted fresh beans must be ground per serving.
I moved through a space that never felt like mine, remembering the cramped galley kitchen in our first apartment where we once danced while waiting for pasta water to boil. Back then, Travis wrapped his arms around me while I stirred sauce, talking excitedly about cases at the firm when he was still an associate with ambition instead of a partner with expectations. Now he drank his espresso by the floor-to-ceiling windows, scrolling through market reports, barely aware of my presence.
“Don’t forget the Washingtons tonight,” he said that morning—my birthday—without glancing up. “Wear the black Armani. And fix your hair.”
The Washingtons. I had completely forgotten, foolishly hoping my birthday might mean dinner for just the two of us. But Travis had been pursuing their portfolio for months, and apparently my birthday was the perfect excuse to disguise business as celebration.
By 7:15 a.m., I was pulling into Lincoln Elementary’s parking lot, trading marble and precision espresso for construction paper and burnt-tasting coffee made by people who actually smiled at me. My third-grade classroom was a world apart: twenty-eight desks in various degrees of disorder, walls covered with multiplication charts and crayon drawings of families—some with dogs that had too many legs.
