My Husband’s Secret Baby with His Secretary (Her Marriage in Crisis #56)

1. Adriana

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Adriana

I am very good at waiting but it seems I’ve gotten too good at it.

Smoothing my hands down the front of the dress, I press the silk a bit nervously, and my finger catches. A small pain lights up the side of it as I lift my hand to look.

The burn has gone from red to white at the edges, which means it’ll blister by morning. I press it to my mouth on instinct. The burn sits close to my wedding ring, raw skin almost touching the band, and the two of them catch the light together.

I turn the ring with my thumb the way I do without thinking. Around and around, and for a moment, I just look at it.

A knock at the bedroom door pulls my eyes up. In the mirror, Renata, the housekeeper, appears in the doorway behind me with her coat already on and bag over her shoulder.

“Ma’am?” She meets my eyes in the glass. “Everything’s plated and resting. The duck’s under foil.” She pauses carefully, the kind of care that’s its own small kindness. “It’s getting late. Did you want me to set it to reheat before I go, or leave it as is?”

The clock on the nightstand says 7:40. I told him about tonight on Monday. Reminded him again yesterday, and once more this morning on his way out the door, home by seven, don’t forget. He’d kissed my cheek and said he wouldn’t.

As I watch, the minute hand drops with a small mechanical click.

7:41. No call, no message, nothing.

“Leave it,” I say. “He’ll be here any minute. It’s better not overdone.”

She nods and doesn’t say what we both know, that any minute has been the answer for forty minutes now.

“You can head home, Renata. It’s late. I’ve got the rest.” I keep my voice light, holding myself steady. “Thank you.”

“Of course, ma’am.” Her bag shifts on her shoulder, and for a moment, she hesitates before adding, “Goodnight, then. Happy anniversary.”

The words land soft and well-meant but somehow worse for it. She gives me one last look I pretend not to catch, and then she’s gone.

The side door clicks below and the house goes still, just me and the quiet with the burn on my finger. I cooked tonight, his favorite, the dish he never stops bringing up, and I wanted it perfect, so I caught my hand on the oven rack and decided the burn was a fair trade for getting it right.

One year. I wanted to give him one done properly. No restaurant, no waiter hovering, just my own hands in our own house.

My eyes find my own reflection again, and I try to decide whether I overdid it.

The dress I’m wearing is midnight blue. I’ve never been drawn to blue, but William gave me this dress, picked it out himself for once, or had someone pick it, and it isn’t a bad dress.

It hugs places I’d forgotten I wanted hugged.

I reach up and touch the matching earrings, small sapphires with the drop that catches the lamplight when I turn my head.

He gave me those too, last winter, in a velvet box someone else had clearly wrapped. Blue is what William thinks of when he thinks of me, and I’ve never had the heart to tell him he’s thinking of the wrong color. For tonight, I put on his dress and his stones on purpose.

Headlights wash across the bedroom window.

The hope comes up before I can stop it, ears up, stupid and animal. I cross to the glass and look down at the drive. His car, the engine cutting, and then him, sitting in it. Head tipped back against the rest, not moving, and I tell myself he’s composing himself for me.

Back at the mirror, I fix a strand of hair that didn’t need fixing and bite a little more color into my lips, pulling a slow breath all the way down.

Then I go to meet him.

The staircase curves down from the landing, and I take it slow, one hand on the rail, the dress moving against my legs. I’m at the turn of it when the front door opens below me.

“God, what a day.” William comes through already in motion, tie loosening under that one-handed tug he does when his mind is three rooms ahead of his body.

He glances up and finds me on the stairs and blinks, as if the sight of his own wife in his own house at this hour is a small puzzle he hasn’t the energy to solve. “You’re still up.”

I stop on the last step, one hand on the newel, and press my lips together before I answer.

“It’s our anniversary.”

After a second, he chuckles, hollow and with no humor.

“Right… Right, of course. The seventeenth.” He drags a hand down his face.

“Well, as I’ve said, it’s been a day, Adriana, you have no idea!

Gunderson would not get off the phone for three hours, and then the Hartley numbers came back wrong.

One more spreadsheet and I’d have put my head through a window. ”

He stops, exhales, and his eyes move past me toward the dining room. To the warm light, the candles, and the duck I bled for. “Is that dinner? Come on, then. Feed me before I fall over.”

William doesn’t take my hand. He doesn’t wait, either. He turns toward the dining room with his back already to me, certain I’ll fall in behind him, and the worst part is that he’s right. My feet move before I’ve decided to let them.

A year of making myself smaller runs deeper than the thing clawing up the back of my throat, the part of me that wants to stay rooted to this step and make him turn around and notice he’s walking alone.

But I swallow it and I follow. I hate that I follow, and I do it anyway, the obedient little ghost of a wife I’ve turned into in twelve short months.

He stops two steps into the dining room.

For a second, maybe he sees my effort. The table, the candles burned down an honest inch, the duck resting under foil, the wine I decanted at six so it would open up before he got home. His eyes move across all of it.

“You cooked.” He sounds tired, not pleased. “You didn’t have to do all this.”

“It’s for our first anniversary.”

A pause. His hands go still at the knot of his tie.

“But you really didn’t have to go to all this trouble. We could’ve just booked somewhere, you know. Would’ve been a lot less work for you.” He says it as if he’s done me a favor by pointing out my effort was unnecessary. “Smells good, though. I’m starving, actually.”

The reply rises hot and ready behind my teeth but I hold it there, the way I hold everything, and feel it scald going down. Pride first, then the hurt under it, then the small mean flare of anger I’m not allowed to have.

So I smile. “I wanted to. Sit, it’s getting cold.”

We sit. I serve him the good slices and pour his wine, watching him take a bite and nod, already reaching for the phone he set face-up beside his plate.

“How was the rest of it,” I ask. “After Gunderson?”

“Mm.” His thumb is moving on the screen. “Fine. Long.”

“You say the Hartley thing was a nightmare since last week. Did it settle?”

“It’s fine now.” He doesn’t look up. The phone glows, goes dark, glows again, and he answers it the way you answer a child tugging your sleeve, eyes never leaving it as the duck cools on his plate after four bites.

I last about as long as I can stand it.

“Can you put the phone down? Just for dinner. Please.”

He sighs, the put-upon sigh of a man being asked for too much, and sets it face-down beside his plate with exaggerated care, as if I’ve cost him. His eyes cast around for a change of subject and land on the bud vase between us.

“These are nice.” He points at the white tulip with his fork. “The new flowers. Good change.”

New flowers.

It’s a white tulip. The same white tulip I put in that vase every single week. One stem, bought every Friday from the stand outside the market, the same ritual since the week we moved in.

A year of Fridays, the same vase, the same flower, and he thinks it’s new. Which means he has never once seen it. Which means he has sat across from this small weekly act of love for twelve months and it registered on him the way wallpaper registers.

The way I register.

“They’re not new,” I say.

“No?” He’s already reaching for the phone again. “Huh.”

My hope is dwindling more by the second.

Then the phone buzzes again, and he looks at it. His whole posture changes, the slump gone, replaced by an alertness, a relief he doesn’t bother to hide. He’s pushing his chair back before I’ve registered that he means to leave.

“I have to take this. Business stuff.” He’s already standing, napkin tossed beside a plate still half full.

“William, you’ve barely touched the…”

“Adriana.” It comes out flat, edged, and he turns just enough to aim it at me.

“It’s the company. Some of us are keeping this family afloat while you arrange flowers.

I don’t expect you to understand how a business works, but the least you can do is not make me feel guilty for answering my own phone. ”

The burn on my finger throbs in time with my pulse.

I don’t say anything. I have a hundred ways to say nothing, and I use one of them now, a small nod, a smoothing of the napkin in my lap, while he carries the phone into the next room.

Through the doorway, I catch the shape of him. Shoulder to the wall, head bent, his voice low and clipped, too far off to make out a word of it.

The company. Of course it’s the company. I take the excuse he handed me and fold it up small and put it away with all the others, because the alternative is a thought I’m not ready to have at my own anniversary table.

When he comes back, the warmth has drained out of him again, spent somewhere I wasn’t. He stops in the dining room doorway and looks at me the first time all night, and for one ruined second, I almost hoped again.

“That color’s good on you,” he says. “Where’d you get the earrings? They suit you.”

My hands curl into fists in my lap, the burn pulling tight across my knuckles. The thing I’ve been swallowing all night climbs up anyway, because some part of me still believes if I just say it plainly he’ll hear it.

“William, you gave me these. Both of them. The earrings, the dress, you don’t even…”