Page 11 of Neglected By Her CEO Husband
I stopped. There was something underneath the words, packed down tight, the way she packed everything. I crossed to the dresser and started on my cufflinks.
"Do you need a Tylenol?" I asked, forcing my irritation down when I realized she hadn't just left for the hell of it. "There's some in the—"
"I'm fine."
She wasn't. I'd been married to her long enough to hear it, the brittle thing under the fine, the same flatness she used on my mother whenever she said something cutting and Maddie had decided to absorb it rather than answer. But I had a launch to recover from and four hours before the car came and a head that wouldn't stop running the numbers, so I let it lie. I worked the second stud free, set them both in the dish, then started on the shirt.
The silence in the room felt heavy. It pressed against the back of my neck the way the heat from the lights had on the rooftop.
Then, into the dark, a quiet voice.
"Why didn't you tell me?"
My hands paused on the buttons.
"Tell you what?"
"You know what." She still hadn't turned. Just that soft voice, low with hurt, the duvet not moving. "Emily. That you hired her. That she's going to be in the building every day. You tell me about cufflinks, Damon. You text me about ties and meetings and which wine we're running low on. But this—" Her breath caught, evened. "This you let me find out standing behind you in front of forty cameras."
I shrugged out of the shirt. "It happened fast. The whole thing came together in three days. There was the study, the press, I had to fire Patricia, I had Bloomberg calling every twenty minutes—"
"You fired Patricia?"
She finally looked up at that. Her mascara was smeared, and it wasn't like her to just fall into bed without taking her makeup off.
"I didn't think there was a reason to give you a heads-up about a personnel decision. In either case."
"A personnel decision," she echoed, her voice flat.
"That's what it is." I heard my own voice sharpen and didn't stop it. "It's professional, Maddie. It's the best hire I could make in the worst week this company's had in a decade. Emily is as good at PR as she is at her job. I wasn't keeping a secret. There was nothing to keep."
A long pause. The streetlight came thin through the curtains and laid a pale stripe across the foot of the bed.
"If you say so," she said, turning back toward the wall.
The words went into me like a splinter, too clean to feel at first. If you say so. Curtis's words, exact, the same lazy edge to them, and I stood there in the dark with my shirt in my hand and didn't have an answer that didn't sound like the thing I'd just denied.
I came around to her side of the bed. Sat on the edge of it. The mattress dipped and she didn't shift toward me the way she always had, that small unconscious lean she'd done for eight years.
"Maddie." I reached for her shoulder. "Look at me."
She moved before my hand landed—not toward me. Away. A small sharp pull of her shoulder out from under my fingers, the duvet drawing up with it, and my hand closed on nothing at all.
She'd never done that. Not once. Not even in those early awkward days when we were strangers learning how to be newlyweds because our parents had decided that was the best for both our families.
"I want to sleep," she said.
So I let her, and told myself everything would be fine in the morning. It always was.
7
MADDIE
Iwoke late to a silent house, as usual.
Damon's side of the bed was cold, the covers thrown back hours ago and never disturbed since. The car came for him at five most mornings, and on the mornings after the worst nights it came earlier, as though the company could smell blood and wanted him sooner. I hadn't heard him go. That was the new part. For eight years my body had surfaced just enough to register him leaving, a habit it had built without consulting me, and last night I'd slept through it.
My phone sat face down where I'd left it. I'd learned a long time ago to dread the first thing it told me in the morning, because the first thing was always a task.
