My Husband's Secret Affair with His COO (Cheating Husband Betrayal Second Chance #1)

Chapter 1

Caroline

The lamb came out of the oven at seven, and by seven-forty it had stopped steaming.

Caroline sat at the head of a table set for two, in the good dining room they used maybe four times a year, and watched the fat go dull at the edge of the platter.

Twelve candles, the beeswax kind that burned clean and cost more than the meat.

She had polished the silver herself that afternoon, run the cloth over each piece with care, and sent the housekeeper home early, wanting the house quiet for once in a way that had nothing to do with anyone else's schedule.

Fourteen years today. She had planned it for three weeks.

There had been a version of this dinner every year since the beginning, and the beginning was a card table in a one-room apartment with a bath down the hall.

That first anniversary they'd had eleven dollars between them and one plate of pasta they passed back and forth.

Grant had drawn their someday-house on the paper napkin in blue pen, a ridiculous glass thing with a roof like a folded wing, and promised he'd build it for her before he turned forty.

She had kept the napkin pressed in a book for years.

She wasn't sure, sitting here now, where the book had gone.

On the sideboard a bottle of the Barolo they couldn't afford the first time stood open and breathing, the one indulgence, the bottle that in the lean years was a joke and a promise, now just another thing money had made ordinary.

She had opened it at six-thirty, the good one, meant to be drunk within the hour.

His text came at seven fifty-two.

Tower emergency. City moving on the Hartwell. Don't wait up. — G

She read it twice, the first time for the content, the second for the tell, the little formal sign-off he used with contractors, with the city, and with men he was about to disappoint.

He didn't sign texts to her, hadn't in years, because you don't sign your name to the person you live with.

Unless somewhere in the back of your hand you've started to file her with the contractors.

Her thumb hovered over the glass. She could call.

She could be the wife who called, who made it a thing, who forced him to choose out loud between her and the building, and she could hear exactly how it would go, the reasonable voice, the weariness, the way he'd hand her the tower's problems one by one until she apologized for having asked.

She set the phone face-down on the linen instead and poured a glass of wine she no longer wanted.

The candles she left burning. Blowing them out would have conceded something she wasn't ready to concede, so she sat in the warm flickering room with a cooling anniversary dinner and did the thing she'd gotten expert at over two years.

She held a large feeling quietly and completely and let no evidence of it reach the surface.

She gave it an hour. She drank one glass and left the second poured and untouched.

When the candles had burned down an inch she cleared the table herself, scraped two full plates into the disposal, and ran it too long, the grind of it loud and satisfying in the empty kitchen.

She washed the good china by hand. She was drying the last plate when she found the box on the console by the front door, where she'd walked past it twice without looking.

It was wrapped in the heavy cream paper the boutique on Aster used, the shop where a certain kind of Belhaven husband bought a certain kind of apology, her name on the tag in a looping hand with a small flourish beneath it.

She untied the ribbon standing in her stocking feet, the cold of the marble floor coming up through them.

Inside, in a bed of tissue, a watch. Rose gold, the face mother-of-pearl, a beautiful expensive thing a person buys after reading a file on what the recipient likes.

The card said All my love, Grant.

She knew his hand. Fourteen years of grocery lists and permit signatures and one long unhinged love letter he'd written her at twenty-three that she still had, somewhere, in the same lost book maybe.

This was not his writing. The G carried a small serif his had never had, a trained hand, a woman's careful cursive.

Denise, then. His assistant, who ordered his mother's birthday flowers, his dry cleaning, his dentist reminders, and now, apparently, his wife's fourteenth anniversary.

She'd chosen the watch, written the card, wrapped the box, and left it on the console for Caroline to find on her way to bed alone.

Caroline set the watch back in its tissue and closed the lid. Her jaw ached. She'd been holding it clenched since the text without noticing, the way you hold a thing you've decided not to say.

It was a lovely watch. That was the part that stayed with her in the dark front hall.

Not the forgetting, he hadn't forgotten, there was a gift, and the gift was correct in every particular.

It was that the whole apparatus of remembering her had been handed to a woman she'd met twice.

That Grant would come home tomorrow believing he had done the anniversary, checked it, handled it.

That somewhere in an office forty floors above the city there was a line item that said C's anniversary, watch, Aster, done, and a man who would sleep soundly on the strength of it.

And underneath all of that, the thing she'd been not-looking at for two years, so long now that the not-looking had worn its own groove in her.

The distance in this house had gotten so wide she couldn't even find anger at the far side of it.

Only a flat astonishment that this had become her life, and that she'd let it, and that she no longer had any idea what she'd trade to get out.

The Camellia Society met on Thursdays, and had met on Thursdays for longer than anyone at the table had been alive.

In the warm months they gathered in the garden room at Eleanor Vance's, and in the cold months in the front parlor where a fire was kept going all evening by a man whose entire job, as far as Caroline could tell, was the fire.

There were rules no one had written down.

You brought nothing. You wore what you'd wear to church but better.

You did not discuss your husband's business or your own money, and you never discussed anyone's marriage, which turned the whole evening into an elaborate dance around the one subject nobody named, performed in wine.

Caroline came late on purpose, so she wouldn't be the one who started the laughter, who set the evening's key.

There were nine of them that week. Old Mrs. Fowler, who'd buried two husbands and improved each time.

The Pratt sisters, married to brothers, who finished each other's cruelty.

Young Meredith Callahan, three years married and still glowing about it, who'd brought a bakery box nobody would eat and set it down like an offering she already suspected was wrong.

And Eleanor at the head of all of it, silver and small and eighty-some, missing nothing.

Someone asked about the anniversary before Caroline had her coat off. She had the answer built and waiting.

"He took me to the lake," she said. "Fourteen years, and the man still can't find a restaurant."

The warm ripple of laughter came right on schedule.

It was a good line. She delivered it with the ease of long practice, and not one woman in that room believed the lake.

Not one would ever say so, because that was the choreography, the whole point of the room.

You performed the marriage, they applauded the performance, and everyone went home having agreed, wordlessly, over good wine, that the performances would continue.

She was at the sideboard refilling a glass she didn't need when the two voices behind her, the Pratt sisters, dropped half an octave into the register women keep for the good material.

"—up at that tower till all hours. Him and that COO."

"Vivian Cross. You've met her. Gala, two years running."

"Have I?"

"You have. Caroline sat her at the good table, both years. Pretty thing. Younger."

"She's the one who left Kestrel, isn't she. Walked out of a partnership."

"Took no salary, is what Bill says. Took a piece of the tower instead. Every dollar she has is in that building, and Bill says she wanted it that way, said it like it was a boast."

A small, delighted pause. "Well. Then she'd better hope it goes up."

Caroline stood with her hand on the wine and did not turn around.

It was nothing. It was less than nothing, a woman with an aggressive comp package, the sort of thing men were admired for and women were discussed for.

She filed it exactly there and would not find it again for months.

When she did, it would arrive with the force of a thing she had been told plainly and chosen not to hear.

A hand settled on her elbow.

Eleanor Vance had crossed the whole parlor without Caroline marking it, and now stood close, a small woman gone entirely silver, her rings loose on fingers that had thinned with the years.

She didn't glance toward the Pratt sisters.

She didn't have to. She held Caroline's eyes one beat past comfortable, then a second, then a third, until it stopped being a look and became a message Caroline couldn't yet read.

"You look tired, dear," Eleanor said at last, and there was nothing idle in it. "Belhaven is a tiring place to be married in."

She patted Caroline's arm once and moved off toward the fire, leaving the sentence behind her like something set on the mantel to be looked at later.

Caroline drove home the long way, though she couldn't have said why, past the Meridian site where the cranes stood lit and motionless against a sky gone the deep blue of very late evening.

Grant's floor was lit too, forty stories up, one bright grid in the dark tower.

She did not slow down. She had learned not to slow down.

At a red light three blocks on she checked her phone out of habit, the reflex of years spent on call for a man who was never on call for her. One voicemail, from a number she hadn't saved, from a name she knew the instant the voice began.

"Caroline. God, is this still your number.

It's Adrian. Adrian Cole, from Whitfield, before you delete some unknown creep.

" A short laugh, low, unchanged since they were twenty-two.

"Look. I'm heading up the preservation bid on the Hartwell and it is a disaster, a beautiful hundred-year-old disaster, and we're getting slaughtered for lack of anyone who can actually save the thing instead of standing in front of it crying about history.

We need a real architect. I thought of you.

I always think of you on the hard ones. So call me.

Or don't, and I'll assume you got rich and dull, that you forgot you were ever the best in the studio.

" A pause, and when the last of it came the joke had gone out of his voice.

"Come do something real, Caroline. Call me. "

The light went green. Caroline sat through it, both hands on the wheel, until the car behind her leaned on its horn.

She could see the whole shape of it from the intersection.

Adrian Cole, who'd loved her a little in school and never once made it heavy, who thought of her on the hard ones.

A real building in real trouble. The woman she'd been before she folded herself into the shape of this house, drafting at a light-table at two in the morning, happy in a way that had nothing to do with being anybody's wife.

It was all sitting there in a saved voicemail, a version of her life still running somewhere without her in it.

She saved the message. She told herself she saved it for reference, the Hartwell being a genuine problem and she a genuine architect, and she almost believed herself.

She set the phone in the cup holder and drove the rest of the way home, to a dark house and a husband who wasn't in it.

She did not call Adrian Cole back that night, or the next day, or the day after that.

She just knew, without being ready to look at it, that she'd started something by keeping it.