Page 10 of Neglected By Her CEO Husband

"Mm." He looked out over the gold-washed deck, the flowers, the city falling away beyond the glass. "Where's Maddie?"

I turned. Scanned the half-step of space to my right where she stood, or rather where she had been. Where she'd been standing for eight years of these.

Empty.

The flute of champagne I half-remembered her holding wasn't there either. I checked the bar, the cluster near the doors, the knot of executives by the balustrade. Black gown, dark hair pinned up. Nothing. The shape of her absence was strange against the crowded rooftop.

I set my glass down and went to look, because Maddie didn't simply leave, and I found Curtis instead, leaning against the rail with two flutes in his hands, one of them clearly not his.

"Where's Maddie?"

Curtis looked at me over the rim of his glass and scoffed, a short ugly sound that didn't fit the rooftop at all.

"There it is," he said. "About time you noticed."

"What's that supposed to mean?"

"It means your wife left an hour and a half ago." He set one flute down on the rail with a click. "And you were too busy making eyes at your college fling to notice."

The word hit wrong. Heat climbed the back of my neck.

"I didn't make eyes," I said in a clipped tone. "She's the most qualified researcher in the country for what this company needs right now. What was I supposed to do, Curtis—pass on the one person who can put this study to bed because she and I shared a lab once a decade ago?"

"If you say so." He picked the second flute back up and tipped it toward me, lazy, like a toast to something I couldn't see.

"It's professional. It's the right hire. That's all it is."

"If you say so," he said again, and drank.

"Dr. Cavendash and Mr. Sterling—over here, gentlemen—" A photographer was waving us in, Emily already half-turned, finding me across the deck with a tilt of her chin that meant come on, we're not done. The pack wanted the two of us framed under the lights. The power shot. The one that ran above the fold.

I left Curtis with his two glasses. I'd sort out whatever this was with Maddie later. She'd gone home, fine. It wasn't like her—that was the part that felt wrong—she didn't do this, didn't walk out, didn't leave me to find her gone like a man patting his pockets for missing keys. On a night like this, of all nights, the biggest of the year, when the whole company was riding on one clean public moment. It needled me, that she'd choose tonight of all nights to just walk out.

The flashbulbs caught me as I stepped back into the gold, and for half a beat, I wondered if it was because I hadn't told her.

That I'd hired Emily. That she'd be in the building.

It had slipped my mind. There'd been the study and the data and Patricia and the press and the forty pages of nothing—there hadn't been a window.

Had there?

The shutters fired, and I smiled, and I let the thought go where the rest of them went.

-

The house was dark when I got in, past one, the city still smeared across the inside of my eyes. No lights downstairs. No coffee left warming. I took the stairs two at a time out of habit and found the bedroom dim, the lamp on her side already off, and Maddie a long shape under the duvet with her back to the door.

I stood in the doorway and loosened my tie.

"You left," I said.

The shape didn't move. For a moment I thought she was asleep, and then her voice came, low and flat and aimed at the wall.

"I wasn't feeling well."

"You didn't say anything. You didn't text. Curtis had to tell me you were gone." I pulled the tie free, dropped it over the chair. "Do you have any idea how that looks? My wife vanishing in the middle of⁠—"

"I wasn't feeling well, Damon."