He Wanted the Boss's Wife, I Won the Boss (The Betrayed Spouses Club #2)

Chapter 1

Ireconcile the house accounts between a lunch drop for ninety and a board dinner for twelve, which is the only slot the last Thursday in September ever gives me.

The spreadsheet is open on the office laptop, the walk-in compressor is cycling behind the wall, and I have a legal pad next to the keyboard because a screen lies to you if you let it and paper doesn’t.

Quarter-end reconciliation is the part of this job nobody wants to hear about at a dinner party, and it’s what has kept my catering company, Fulcher Provisions, solvent for fifteen years.

You find the mistake in September, you don’t find it in a January audit with a client on the phone and your Health Department letter grade riding on how fast you can explain yourself.

Two people. Twenty-two dinners. Twenty-six months. Somebody has been eating a lot of rosé and rack of lamb for a leadership offsite with a headcount of two, and I am the one who staffed every plate of it.

Garland, my kitchen manager, comes through with a hotel pan of braised short rib for tomorrow’s client dinner and sets it on the rack without breaking stride. “You want me to portion tonight or in the morning?”

“Tomorrow morning. I’m still on the account side.” I keep my eyes on the screen. She reads a closed conversation off the back of my neck without another word and returns to her prep.

Glenda, who runs our office and knows every client balance by memory, comes through next with a rack of clean pans and stops long enough to set them down. “You’ve had that same page up since four.”

“Double-checking a wine account.”

She tilts her head at the screen before she says anything else. “The Gilliard one that never eats anything? I told Garland back in June that account was strange. Buys wine like it’s throwing a party every month and never once orders a single canapé to go with it. A household that only drinks.”

“You said that in June?”

She’s already turning for the walk-in by the time she answers.

“I say a lot of things in June. Nobody listens to me until September.” The door thunks shut behind her.

I sit there with the fact that my own operations manager clocked this account as strange three months before I did.

She wasn’t the one whose husband’s company had put it on the books.

I don’t call it an affair yet, not even in the privacy of my own head.

I call it an anomaly, the way I would in a report to a client, because an anomaly is something you can investigate without setting your whole life on fire before you’re sure.

But I know my own bookkeeping well enough to trust it, and I know that an anomaly this steady, this quiet, this precisely sized to stay under a threshold, is not an accident.

Nobody accidentally keeps a two-year pattern under ten thousand dollars a ticket.

Somebody built it that way on purpose, and built it to survive exactly the kind of glance I almost gave it in June.

None of it comes out loud. I don’t have anything yet that isn’t a guess dressed up as a fact, and guesses are how a vendor loses a client for good, or worse, how a wife says something she can’t take back over a fact she hasn’t finished proving.

I copy the event names onto the legal pad in my own handwriting instead, one line per dinner, dates down the left margin the way I’d log a delivery.

My face goes flat and even, the same look it gives when a walk-in temperature reads two degrees high. Controlled. Not alarmed. Not yet.

My daughter, Reese, comes in from school around four, backpack still on one shoulder, and drops onto the stool across the pass the way she has since she was tall enough to reach it.

She smells like a school bus and a gym locker, and she goes straight for the tray of shortbread cooling on the rack without asking, which is fair, since half of it is hers by rights.

She worked the Saturday it came out of the oven, a hundred and twenty napkins for gas money, complaining the whole time about the crease.

“Are we doing the Windrow thing again this month?” She says it around a mouthful of shortbread, already reaching for a second piece. “I need to know if I’m folding napkins Saturday or if I can go to Emma’s.”

Something behind my sternum goes tight before my brain catches up to why. “Windrow. You’ve done that setup before.”

“Like a bunch of times. It’s always the same two-top, which is weird for a leadership thing, right?

I figured it was some VIP retreat deal, some board guy who doesn’t like crowds.

” She shrugs, unbothered, sixteen and entirely uninterested in the politics of a purchase order. “Anyway. Napkins or Emma’s?”

I close the laptop halfway before I answer her. “I’ll know by tomorrow,” I say, and my voice comes out level, which surprises me more than the question did.

“You okay? You’ve got your inspection face on.”

“Just tired.” It’s half true, since I’m tired regardless, and true enough to satisfy a sixteen-year-old already thinking about Emma’s.

She takes it as good enough for Emma’s and heads upstairs to change out of her uniform, and I sit there with a sixteen-year-old’s cheerful, unknowing confirmation of a headcount she has been dressing tables for since she was old enough to fold a napkin in thirds.

She has done Windrow a bunch of times. She has no idea what she was folding napkins for. An hour ago, neither did I.

I put the legal pad in the office drawer, not the fireproof box yet, because I’m not ready to call this something that needs a fireproof box. Not out loud, and not to myself. I lock the drawer anyway. Force of habit, or the first honest thing I’ve done all day.

Weston’s at the island when I get to Sedge Lane a little after nine, jacket off, sleeves rolled, a glass of the good scotch he keeps for himself and never offers around.

His reading glasses are pushed up into his hair.

He’s got Loomworks binders fanned across the marble like a man who’s been working, though I know for a fact he does most of his real work standing up in a hallway somewhere, saving the island for the parts he wants me to watch.

His running shoes sit by the back door where they always are.

The good knives sit untouched in the block above the stove, because neither of us has cooked in this kitchen in years.

We pay other people to cook. Me, mostly.

“Long one,” he says. Not really a question, so I take it as a statement, setting my bag down and pulling leftovers out of the fridge, since I haven’t eaten since noon and neither of us is about to cook anything now.

“The Loomworks opening’s coming up fast,” I say, mostly to have something in the air that isn’t the number fourteen. “You’d think with a job that size they’d have picked a hospitality vendor by now.”

He uses the voice I used to think meant he was being careful with me. Tonight, for the first time, it sounds like a setting somebody flips on. Warm. Slowed down maybe ten percent. Reasonable in a way that leaves no room to argue without sounding unreasonable yourself.

“Candidly,” he says, “it would look terrible if my wife’s company had the biggest hospitality contract in the building.

Optics. You know how boards are.” He says it like he’s handing me a gift, a decision he made on my behalf so I’d never have to know I’d been passed over for a reason that was actually about him.

Nineteen years I’ve heard that voice and taken it for care. Tonight it sounds rehearsed, a line worked smooth somewhere else first, on somebody who wasn’t me, before he brought the polished version home to me.

“Right,” I say. “Optics.”

Reese leans in from the stairwell in an oversized T-shirt, hair already out of its ponytail. “I’m going to Emma’s Saturday, right? You said you’d know by tomorrow.”

“Saturday’s fine,” Weston says, before I get a word out, like the answer belongs to him. “Your mother’s just tired. Big dinner week.”

“I can hear him talking about me like I’m not standing here,” I say, dry, and Reese laughs on her way back up, used to both of us, unaware there’s anything underneath it worth noticing. I watch her disappear upstairs and know this cannot be allowed to touch her. Not the accusation. Not the cost.

“You’d hate the paperwork anyway.” He goes back to his binder, and that’s the whole conversation, over before I’ve decided what I actually think about it.

He never asks how the board dinner went, or whether the lamb held, or whether Reese finished her homework.

He never does on a Thursday. He has already decided what tonight looked like: ninety covers, a delivery van, a woman who comes home smelling like garlic and doesn’t have the energy left over to be interesting.

I eat standing up at the counter, watching him not look at me.

Fourteen bottles of a wine only one client in this county has ever asked for.

Twenty-two dinners for two people at a retreat my own daughter has set tables for, without ever being told who she was setting them for.

Weston handed me a reason for the Loomworks bid tonight, unprompted, before I’d asked him a real question about it, and in nineteen years he has never once explained something to me before I brought it up first.

None of it makes it out loud, not tonight.

Half a proof isn’t a fact. It’s an accusation waiting to happen to me instead of him, and I’ve spent fifteen years learning not to tell a client a number until I’m sure of it.

My husband isn’t a client. The discipline holds anyway, and it’s the only thing standing between what I found today and the version of tonight where I say something I can’t take back before I know what I’m actually holding.

I rinse my plate and catch myself thinking about the office drawer one more time before bed, which is ridiculous, since I locked it four hours ago and nothing in Tarleton has ever come looking for a caterer’s legal pad. I leave my keys on the counter and make myself trust the lock.

Upstairs, Weston is already reading, glasses back down on his nose, the picture of a man with nothing on his mind bigger than a binder full of ribbon-cutting logistics.

I lie next to him in the dark and go through what I’ve been avoiding since four o’clock.

Twenty-six months. Fourteen bottles. Twenty-two dinners.

Nine sets of my own initials on the sign-off sheets, like a signature on somebody else’s confession.

The fourth grade year comes back to me, the one where I catered every classroom party because nobody else volunteered.

Weston came to exactly one of them, the year he was running for the county chamber board and needed the photograph.

A marriage can run nineteen years on the same quiet arrangement as a business: one partner supplies the labor, the other supplies the signature, and everybody calls it a partnership because the alternative is admitting what it actually is.

I fed those dinners myself, some of them. I know exactly what I cooked.

I just don’t know yet who ate it.