Neglected by Her Billionaire Husband (Her Marriage in Crisis #110)

Prologue

Delphine

The gold box sat at my feet.

I remember staring at it, thinking how beautiful it was.

How someone had wrapped it with such care, the ribbon curled into perfect spirals, the paper catching the chandelier light like it belonged under a Christmas tree in a magazine.

I remember thinking that whoever wrapped it must have loved the person they were giving it to.

I remember thinking it wasn’t for me.

Montana’s hand was raised. I could see the diamonds on her fingers, the ones her husband had given her thirty years ago, the ones she never took off, the ones that would leave marks.

I had always known she hated me. Nine years of knowing.

But I had never seen it like this, stripped of its polite venom, its cutting remarks dressed up as concern.

This was different. This was the truth of what she thought I deserved.

I should have moved. I should have stepped back or raised my own hand or done anything other than stand there like a woman who had forgotten how her body worked. But I couldn’t stop looking at my husband.

Heath was across the room. Not far. Maybe fifteen feet. Close enough that I could see his face, the way his jaw was set, the way his eyes had gone dark the way they did when he was trying to hold himself in. Close enough that if he wanted to, he could have reached me in seconds.

He wasn’t looking at me.

Kendall was in his arms. Bleeding, and he was holding her the way you hold a treasure you’re afraid might break. Her head was tucked against his shoulder. Her fingers were curled into his shirt. And he was holding her.

Not me.

Her.

I had spent nine years learning the geography of my husband’s body.

The scar on his left hand from a sailing accident when he was twelve.

The way he slept on his stomach with one arm thrown over my waist. The sound he made when he laughed, really laughed, the kind that came from somewhere deep.

I knew him. I knew every version of him.

The one who brought me coffee in bed on Sunday mornings.

The one who forgot anniversaries but remembered the exact date of our first kiss.

The one who had been so distant lately that I sometimes wondered if I was sleeping next to a stranger.

I thought I knew him.

But I had never seen him hold anyone the way he was holding her.

The room was full of people. I could feel them watching, could hear the whispers starting, could sense the way Newport society was cataloging every detail for later.

Delphine Fairchild, standing there like a fool while her husband cradled his first love and her mother-in-law prepared to strike her down.

They would talk about this for years. They would tell the story at brunches and benefits and boat parties, and I would be the punchline.

The middle-class girl who thought she could marry into the Fairchilds and be one of them.

I was never one of them.

I knew that now.

Montana’s hand was still raised. The gold box was still at my feet. And somewhere inside me, in the place where I kept the things I couldn’t say out loud, a seam was giving way.

Not my heart. That had been cracking for months, every night he came home late, every conversation that ended before it started, every time I reached for him and found empty space.

This was worse. This was the last small hope I had been carrying, the one that whispered maybe it’s work stress and maybe he still loves you and maybe you’re imagining things.

That hope died in the space between one breath and the next.

I looked at my husband holding another woman, and I understood that whatever we had been, whatever I thought we were building, it was already gone.

The gold box sat at my feet.

I never did get to give it to him.