Page 25 of Neglected By Her CEO Husband

I watched the screen. No dots. Nothing came back. I called. It rang out to her voicemail, the recording I'd heard twice in eight years and now twice in two weeks.

I tried to think where she'd be at this time of night and came up empty. I didn't have her friends' numbers. I didn't know if she still spent time with the redhead with the gallery. I couldn't name one place my wife might go that I hadn't sent her to myself.

Eight years, and I had no idea where she spent her evenings now, because for eight years the answer had been here, and I'd built my whole life on her being the part that stayed put. I'd never had to learn where she went, because she'd never gone anywhere.

I stood in the dark kitchen and made myself think it through.

This was bad. This was not going to blow over in a night. She'd locked the guest-room door over a fight two weeks ago, and that was before I missed the actual day. The quiet in the house was about to get worse. There'd be the careful sentences again, the locked door, Maddie answering me in three words that meant nothing, and I'd be managing all of it on top of the board call and the press and the eight a.m. meetings with the analysts.

I was already drafting the fix in my head. Something big enough to balance what I'd missed. Flowers wouldn't cover it. A trip, maybe. The bracelet had been last year, so something past the bracelet.

She loved art. Maybe something rare and priceless from her favorite artist, but…

Who was her favorite artist? I remember in college, she'd asked me to take her to a Van Gogh exhibition in Amsterdam, but maybe that was for her classes.

Shit. I got halfway through pricing my own marriage back to quiet before I heard myself doing it.

I'd hurt my wife, and I was standing in our own kitchen adding up what it would cost my week. Maybe that was the problem to begin with.

15

MADDIE

We were hanging the charity show that Friday night, set to open the next weekend. Ellie had pulled it together in three weeks. Local kids, mostly, painters and a couple of photographers from the streets around the youth center, none of them shown anywhere before. Every piece that sold sent its money straight back to the center.

Ellie had bullied me into putting something in even though I didn't think anything was ready. I'd dug an old canvas out of storage, a harbor at dusk I'd painted in my twenties. It was finished, but it wasn't good. I told her so. She hung it in a corner anyway. I was sure it wouldn't sell, and part of me hoped it wouldn't, because the harbor was who I'd been before I stopped painting and I wasn't sure I wanted to dig her up again.

"Stop looking at it like it owes you money," Ellie said, handing me a level. "It's a fine painting. It's going to a good cause. Hang the kids' wall and leave your sad boats alone."

The kids' wall was the easy part. A boy named Jason had done a whole series of his block at night, streetlights and wet asphalt, and they were better than half of what hung in real galleries downtown. I leveled his frames with more care than I'd given my own. That was the work I wanted to be near. Not the harbor.

My phone buzzed against the table while I was straightening Jason's third frame. Damon. I let it sit. I'd gotten good at letting him sit.

A few minutes later it buzzed again, and the second one was enough to make me look.

The first one I read and ignored. Where are you? I'm home. He was home. That was new. It wasn't new enough to move me. The second had come in while I was still looking at the first. I'm sorry about our anniversary. We need to talk.

So he knew. Eight days late, he'd finally realized his mistake. I stood there with the phone and felt the old reflex start up, the pull to drop everything and go smooth it over before it cost me anything. I didn't obey it.

Ellie read my face. "Him?"

"He remembered the anniversary. Over a week late." I put the phone in my pocket. "He's home. He wants to talk."

"You don't have to go."

"I know." I looked at the harbor in its corner, the boats all wrong. "But I won't get another thing done tonight wondering what he's going to say. I'd rather go hear it and stop wondering."

Ellie didn't love it. She helped me into my coat anyway. "Call me if you need a reason to leave. I'll invent a gallery emergency. I'm very good at those."

The Lexus was in the drive when I pulled in. Half past nine on a Friday, in the middle of the worst stretch of his career, and the car was home. In eight years he had never once picked the house over the office during a crisis. We were in a crisis. He was here. I figured that was something.

He stood up too fast when he heard the door. There were flowers covering the counter, still in their plastic. The expensive kind, roses that had been hand delivered by some overpriced boutique and probably cost a thousand dollars per bouquet. I knew before he said a word that he'd planned this, costed it, lined the apology up like a deal he meant to close.

"Maddie." He came around the counter. "I'm sorry. I missed it. There's no version of this where I didn't, and there's no excuse. I let the date go and that's on me." He kept talking, fast, the words rehearsed somewhere between the office and here. "I want to make it right. Properly. I was thinking Amsterdam. The museum we went to in college is having an exhibition as it turns out, and we can do a tour of Europe while we're at it. I'll clear a week the second I can. Anything you want. Name it."

I waited for the old leap, the part of me that used to grab at any scrap of his attention. It didn't come. What came was cold. I stood in my own kitchen looking at the flowers and the booked trip and the word anything, and I felt nothing warm at all. Then, lower down, under the cold, I felt how much of me still loved him, and that frightened me worse than the cold did.

"You're trying to buy this. Flowers and a trip and name it." I hugged myself. "You think there's a number on the table that erases eight days, and there isn't. You're reaching for your wallet instead of standing here, and that's the whole problem, and it always has been."