The Home He Betrayed (Cheating Billionaire Second Chance #7)

Chapter 1

The peonies were wrong again.

Adrienne stood at the kitchen island and studied the arrangement Marta had left — a cloud of blush and cream stuffed into the mercury glass vase like someone had grabbed a fistful of flowers and shoved them in.

Too many stems. The proportions were off, the blooms crushed against each other so none of them could breathe.

She'd told Marta twice. Three times, maybe.

The flowers should look like they'd landed there by accident, the way beautiful things do in real life. Not like they were trying.

She pulled the bunch out, set it dripping on the marble, and started over.

Stem by stem. Trimming each one at an angle with the kitchen shears, turning the vase a quarter inch after every addition.

The house was quiet except for the tick of water falling from cut stems to stone.

Late afternoon light came through the bay windows and turned everything gold — the counters, the floors, the copper pots hanging from the rack that no one used to cook.

Twenty years of afternoon light in this kitchen.

She knew every version of it. The thin winter slant.

The summer blaze that hit the backsplash and turned the white tile warm.

This was the October version. Soft. Almost kind.

Her phone buzzed on the counter. She dried her hands on a linen towel and checked the screen.

"Adrienne, hi." Patricia's voice was bright and efficient, the way foundation people always sounded when they wanted something approved. "I'm sorry to bother you — I know you said Thursdays were yours."

"It's fine." She turned the vase again. Pulled one peony forward. Better. "What do you need?"

"The catering contract for the November benefit. Legal wants your sign-off by end of week, and Donovan's office said to run it through you first."

Of course they did. Donovan's office said to run everything through her first, because that was easier than Donovan reading anything that wasn't a term sheet or a pitch deck.

She was the wife who handled the soft things.

The flowers, the foundation, the dinner parties where his investors' wives needed someone to talk to about something other than Series B rounds.

"Send it to my email," Adrienne said. "I'll look at it tonight."

"Perfect. And the seating chart — did you want to keep Senator Aldrin's table near the stage, or—"

"Move him back two rows. He talks through the speeches."

Patricia laughed. "Done. Thank you, Adrienne."

She hung up and set the phone down. The peonies looked right now.

Loose, organic, like they'd grown that way.

She carried the vase to the dining room and set it at the center of the table, adjusting the position until it sat exactly between the two candlesticks.

Then she stood back and looked at the room.

The dining table was a twelve-foot slab of reclaimed walnut.

Donovan had bought it at auction their third year in this house — paid too much for it, the way he paid too much for everything, because the number was the point.

Fourteen chairs around it. She could count on one hand the number of times all fourteen had been occupied.

Most nights it was just the two of them at one end.

Donovan at the head, her to his right. His phone face-down beside his plate, though it lit up constantly, the screen glow leaking around the edges like something trying to escape.

Her chair was pulled out at its usual angle — not tucked in, not quite straight.

She'd done that for years, a small rebellion she couldn't have named if asked.

Everyone else pushed their chairs in when they stood.

Adrienne left hers out. Just slightly. Just enough that the line of the table was broken in one place.

Donovan had never mentioned it. She wasn't sure he'd ever seen it.

The house settled around her. Three floors of it, six thousand square feet of restored Victorian on a street where the fog rolled in every evening like a curtain being drawn.

She and Donovan had bought it when they were twenty-six and thirty, back when the money was new enough to feel like a costume they were trying on.

Now the money was just the air they breathed.

Invisible. Everywhere. She couldn't remember what it felt like to not have it, and that bothered her sometimes, late at night, when she lay in bed and tried to remember the apartment in the Richmond District where they'd lived during his first year of real revenue.

The futon. The radiator that clanked. The way he'd pull her onto his lap at the kitchen table and read code over her shoulder while she ate cereal.

Twenty years. She was eighteen when they married. He was twenty-two. Everyone said they were too young. Everyone was probably right, but not for the reasons they'd thought.

She walked through the living room — the fireplace with its original tile surround, the pair of mid-century armchairs she'd reupholstered herself before she stopped doing things herself — and into the kitchen. Donovan's phone was on the counter.

He'd left it again. He did that sometimes when he went to the gym in the basement, though the machines were quiet.

Maybe he'd left it when he went out. She picked it up to check the time — her own phone was in the dining room, and the kitchen clock had stopped three days ago, and she kept forgetting to replace the battery, which was unlike her, which was a sign of something she didn't want to examine.

The screen lit under her thumb.

She wasn't looking for anything. That was the truth she would come back to again and again in the weeks that followed, turning it over like a stone in her hand.

She was not suspicious. She was not checking.

She picked up his phone to see if they had time before the eight o'clock reservation at Acquerello, because she still needed to change, and the dress she wanted to wear had a zip that sometimes stuck, and she liked to give herself an extra twenty minutes for the zip.

The notification sat on the lock screen like a grenade with the pin already pulled.

Celine Rask

last night was almost too much. I can still feel you. Wednesday works — same place. Don't be late this time.

Adrienne read it twice. Her hands did not shake.

That would come later. Right now there was only the clean, surgical clarity of recognition — the same feeling she'd had in graduate school when a painting revealed its provenance under the right light.

This is what it is. This is what it has always been.

The evidence was always there, and you were not looking, and now you are.

She set the phone down on the counter. Exactly where it had been.

She lined it up with the edge of the marble, the way she lined up everything in this house — the vase, the candlesticks, the edges of the napkins at dinner.

Precision as control. Precision as the thing that kept her from flying apart.

Celine Rask.

She knew the name. Of course she knew the name.

Celine was on two of the same nonprofit boards.

Celine had been at the Harvest Gala in September.

Tall, angular, sharp features, the kind of beauty that looked like it had been carved rather than grown.

Adrienne had spoken to her for four minutes near the bar.

They'd talked about a Diebenkorn exhibit at SFMOMA.

Celine had touched Adrienne's arm when she laughed.

I can still feel you.

Not a first message. The phrasing had the ease of repetition, of a conversation that had been running for a long time.

Don't be late this time. That word — this time — opened a door onto a hallway she couldn't see the end of.

How many Wednesdays. How many same places.

How many evenings when Donovan said he had a late meeting, a dinner with Lennox, a call with the Tokyo office, while she sat in this kitchen with her flowers and her foundation work and her perfect, pointless house.

She pressed her palms flat against the counter. The marble was cold. She counted the veins in it — gray on white, forking and branching like a river delta seen from a great height. Her breath was even. Her chest was not.

Something inside her was rearranging itself, and she felt it happening in real time — the way you can feel a bone set. The pieces of her life, which had been arranged just so, were shifting into a new configuration, and the new configuration was the true one. The old arrangement had been the lie.

She did not cry. She would not cry in this kitchen.

Adrienne walked upstairs. The master bedroom was at the end of the hall — their bedroom, though Donovan slept in the guest room more often than not these days, because he came home late and didn't want to wake her.

Considerate. He was so considerate. She opened the closet — her side, the left, organized by color and then by season — and pulled down the leather weekender bag from the top shelf.

The bag she used for Napa weekends. The bag that smelled like lavender and old wine because she'd spilled a glass in it three years ago at the St. Helena house and the stain had never fully come out.

She packed the way she did everything: precisely.

Three days of clothes. Underwear. Her laptop.

Charger. The small zippered case with her moisturizer and toothbrush and the prescription sleep aid she'd started taking six months ago when the insomnia began.

She hadn't connected the insomnia to anything. Now she connected it to everything.

She did not pack the dress for Acquerello.

She did not pack the emerald earrings Donovan had given her for their nineteenth anniversary — last year, eleven months ago, which meant the affair had already started when he clasped them around her neck and kissed her temple and said twenty years next year, Addie, can you believe it.

She could believe it now.

The bag was zipped. She carried it downstairs, set it by the front door, and walked back to the dining room.

The peonies glowed in the last of the afternoon light.

The table was set for two — Marta had done that before she left, the way she did every day, because dinner in this house was a standing appointment whether or not anyone showed up.

Adrienne looked at her chair. Pulled out. Crooked. The small, persistent disorder.

She reached down and pushed it in.

The legs scraped against the hardwood. The sound was louder than it should have been in the empty house. The chair slid flush against the table, aligned with all the others, and the line was perfect now. Complete. No break anywhere.

She picked up her bag and walked out the front door. She did not leave a note.

#

Donovan came home at seven-fifteen.

He called her name from the foyer — "Addie?

" — the way he always did, two syllables tossed into the house like a stone into a well, listening for the echo.

The echo didn't come. He set his keys in the ceramic dish on the entry table.

Hung his coat in the closet. Loosened his tie as he walked toward the kitchen, already thinking about the reservation, already composing the text he'd send if they were running late, because Adrienne liked to be on time and he liked to make her happy, or at least he liked the version of himself that made her happy, which was not exactly the same thing.

The kitchen was clean. The peonies were perfect.

His phone was on the counter where he'd left it. He picked it up, glanced at the lock screen, and felt nothing — the notification from Celine was gone, cleared by the system's timer, already pushed below the fold by two work emails and a text from Lennox about the quarterly board deck.

He walked through the house. It looked the way it always looked.

The living room, the study, the dining room with its twelve-foot table set for two.

He almost didn't notice. He was already pulling out his phone to call her, already assuming she was running an errand, picking up wine, meeting Taryn for a quick coffee that ran long the way their coffees always did.

But something stopped him in the dining room doorway.

The chairs were all pushed in.

Every one of them, evenly spaced, flush against the table. The line unbroken. He stared at it for a long moment, his phone halfway to his ear, and something shifted in the air — a change in pressure, like the moment before weather turns.

Adrienne's chair was pushed in.

He didn't know why that mattered. He couldn't have said, if asked, that she always left it out.

It was the kind of thing that lived below the level of language, in the body's memory of a room — the way a space feels when it's occupied versus when it's not, the difference between a house someone lives in and a house someone has left.

He called her. It rang four times and went to voicemail.

He stood in the dining room with the peonies and the candles and the table set for two and the fourteen chairs all pushed in, and he did not yet understand what had happened, but his body knew.

His body had known since the doorway. The house was exactly as it always was, except for one thing he couldn't name and one woman who wasn't there, and the silence had a weight to it now that pressed against his chest like a hand.

He called her again.

Voicemail.

He set his phone on the table, next to her empty plate, and sat down in his chair at the head of the table.

The peonies smelled like summer ending. The light was gone.

The fog had come in while he wasn't looking, the way it always did, soft and gray and total, and the windows showed him nothing but his own reflection — a tall man with dark eyes and the beginning of gray at his temples, sitting alone at a table set for two, waiting for someone who was not coming home.