Page 27 of Neglected By Her CEO Husband

"It's beautiful. It's too much."

"Nothing's too much." He kissed my temple. His phone was already in his hand before he reached the hall. "Paint me something with it."

I doubted he actually cared, but it meant something that he'd asked.

We planned the trip in the evenings, and I liked it more than I let on. He'd booked nothing, because the trial reading out came first, but he kept a paper folder, and we spread it on the bed, hotels in Amsterdam, a train through to Vienna. I didn't want to take the jet. I wanted this trip to feel special, to be something different.

He'd found the Van Gogh exhibition. He asked me where I wanted to eat. I wanted it badly, two weeks in rooms where nobody knew us, where he'd have no office to walk out to and no Emily down the hall, where it would be us and whatever was left when you subtracted the company. I wanted to find out what was left. I let myself want it.

"So I take it things are good," Ellie said. We were at the gallery, the spring wall bare, waiting for primer. "You're glowing in a way I find deeply suspicious."

"They're good, or at least in the neighborhood. He's trying."

"He's spending." She handed me a roller. "I need those to stay separate in your head, because they live close together and they dress alike."

I laughed. "Trust me, I know the difference."

"I know you do. I'm saying it out loud so it stays said." She ran a long stripe of gesso up the wall. "Enjoy the car. Wear the earrings, they're gorgeous, and I hate that they're gorgeous. I'm not telling you to refuse a good month. I'm telling you to keep one eye open, because men who buy their way back keep buying instead of changing. Buying's the part they're already good at. The day something goes wrong, watch what he reaches for. That'll tell you everything the flowers won't."

"You've said a version of this before."

"And I'll say it at your second wedding if I have to." She bumped my shoulder with hers. "I just want you to hold out for the treatment you deserve."

I primed the wall and didn't argue, because I'd had the same thought and put it somewhere I didn't have to look at it.

That night he came home with peonies, my favorite, which he'd finally learned without being told, and we ate on the expensive rug on the living room floor because the table felt too far apart, and he told me a story about Mark in London that made me laugh until I couldn't breathe. For a few hours he was the man I'd thought I was marrying, and the gap between that man and the real one stopped mattering.

Later, half asleep, I asked him to come see the window painting in the morning. Really see it. The one going in Ellie's show.

"Of course," he said. "First thing."

In the morning he was gone before I woke. There was a note on the counter next to a fresh vase of peonies in a sea of roses.

Early call. Tonight.

I'd sighed and told myself it wasn't a setback. Just a little blip. Every painting had its mistakes.

17

MADDIE

Iused to run the Sterling Foundation gala in my sleep.

Three hundred people, a silent auction, a seating chart that was basically an exercise in interpersonal Minesweeper, a program timed so the checks came out before the wine wore off. For eight years it was mine, the one night a year nobody could call me decorative, because you can't call a woman decorative while she's running a room that size from behind an earpiece.

This year Damon hadn't let me touch it. He'd said it like a present. You don't lift a finger, I've got Taylor on it, you just show up and be beautiful.

Taylor did a fine job. The room could have been one of mine, the same uplighting, the same merciless order in the bar lines. I stood in the middle of it in a dress I hadn't chosen for an event I hadn't built, holding a drink, with nothing in my hands and nowhere I was needed.

Old habit kept trying to make me useful. I saw a centerpiece listing on table nine and started toward it before I caught myself. A server was fighting a tray near the doors and I had my hand half up to flag the captain before I remembered the captain wasn't mine to flag. Taylor found me doing it and steered me away with fresh champagne. "It's handled, sweetie. Go enjoy. You've earned a night off." She meant it kindly, but it felt like being pushed out of my own room.

Emily found me at the silent auction tables.

"Maddie. You look lovely." Her eyes went down the dress, the emeralds, and came back up. "It must be wonderful, getting to just enjoy these now. No clipboards, no earpiece. I honestly don't know how you ran them all those years and stayed sane."

I forced a smile that felt thinner than the silk of her gown. "Practice."

"It's a different kind of work, isn't it, keeping a man like Damon comfortable through a year like this. Not everyone could do it." She sipped. "I'd lose my mind. But I've always needed something of my own to point at. A project with my name on it. I suppose that's a temperament thing."