Page 23 of The Wife He Replaced
CHAPTER 13
MADELEINE
Paige foundthe envelope in the mailbox.
She brought it inside with the rest of the mail — a seed catalog, an electric bill, a postcard from a former client — and set it on the kitchen table without comment. Madeleine was sitting at her usual spot, the one by the window, with a cup of coffee and a notebook where she'd been sketching out the weekend breakfast service menu for Broad Street Kitchen. She'd been working on it for days, building the rotations, calculating portions, designing meals that could be prepped by volunteers with minimal training and still taste like someone gave a damn. It was the most engaged she'd been in weeks. The work steadied her. It gave her hands something to do and her mind somewhere to go that wasn't the penthouse, the parking garage, the bar at Lark where Victoria had sat with her manicured hands folded on the counter and saidhe kissed me back.
Madeleine saw the envelope. She saw her name on the front in Drew's handwriting. It wasn’t his quick, slashing signature from checks and contracts but something slower, more deliberate, each letter formed with visible effort. She picked it up. She turned it over. She set it down.
"You don't have to read it," Paige said. She was rolling out pie dough at the counter, her back to Madeleine. She said it without turning around, which was one of the things Madeleine loved about Paige: she could address the thing in the room without making you look at it.
"I know."
"You also don't have to not read it."
Madeleine picked up the envelope again. She opened it with her thumb, tearing the flap unevenly, and pulled out four pages of cream-colored paper covered in Drew's handwriting. The pages were dense — both sides, the writing getting tighter toward the bottom of each sheet, the ink smudged in places where his hand had dragged across wet words.
She read it. By the second page her hands were trembling and by the fourth she was pressing her knuckles against her mouth, breathing through her nose in short, controlled bursts because if she opened her mouth she was going to make a sound she couldn't take back.
I lay there and thought about a valuation cap.
You were cooking for me. You were keeping yourself alive in a marriage that was starving you.
The person holding it doesn't get to complain about the patina if they never once picked up the cloth.
She read it twice. She folded the pages, put them back in the envelope and set the envelope on the table. She stared at it while Paige transferred the pie dough to a dish and crimped the edges and said nothing, because Paige knew when to talk and when to let silence do its work.
"He wrote me a letter," Madeleine said.
"I gathered."
"It's — Paige, it's everything. Every single thing I tried to tell him, he heard it. He's repeating it back to me word for word. Thedinner party, the Friday night, the Sunday morning, the office — all of it. He names all of it."
Paige slid the pie into the oven, closed the door and leaned against the counter. She looked at Madeleine with an expression that was gentle and wary at the same time. "And?"
"And I don't know if it matters."
"Why not?"
"Because he's good at this. He's good at identifying what someone wants to hear and delivering it in exactly the right package. That's what he does for a living. He pitches. He closes. He reads the room and adjusts. How do I know this isn't that? How do I know this isn't Drew Adler building a case?"
"Does it read like a case?"
Madeleine looked at the envelope. She thought about the handwriting. She thought about the smudged ink. The cramped letters at the bottom of each page. The places where he'd crossed out a word and written a different one, leaving the mistake visible instead of starting over on a clean sheet.
"No," she said. "It doesn't."
She stood and gave Paige a quick hug. “I’ll be back.”
Madeleine drove to the penthouse.She didn't plan to. She'd intended to stay at Paige's, to sit with the letter for a few days, to let it settle before she responded — if she responded. But her keys were in her hand, her coat was on and she was in the car before she'd made a conscious decision, driving east on Route 23 with the letter on the passenger seat. Her heart was slamming against her ribs: she had no idea what she was going to say when she got there.
She let herself in. The penthouse was different. Everything was where she'd left it, the furniture, the art, the copper pans hanging from the rack. But the quality of the space had changed. It was cleaner than she'd expected, but in the wrong way: surfaces wiped but not polished, dishes washed but put away in the wrong cabinets, the bathroom towels folded in halves instead of thirds. A man maintaining a house he didn't know how to keep. On the island, one of her cookbooks was open — the butternut squash soup, the page she'd flagged and annotated — and beside it, a lined notepad with Drew's handwriting:more nutmeg than you think. roast squash first?? how long?
She was still holding the notepad when Drew came down the stairs. He was in jeans and a T-shirt, barefoot, his hair damp. Her entire body ached at the sight of him, this handsome man she loved with her whole being.
He stopped on the last step when he saw her. He didn't speak. He looked at the letter in her hand — she was holding it, she realized, the envelope crumpled against her palm.
"You read it," he said.
