16. Maddie
CHAPTER 16
MADDIE
“ I s Dad coming home for dinner tonight?” Charlie asked.
He posed the question without much hope in his voice, and Maddie couldn’t fault him for that. It had been a week since Eli had eaten dinner with them — and more to the point, in her mind, almost a week since the night the two of them had slept together. Since then, Eli had been staying at the office late every single night. It was as if he had forgotten everything he’d said to Maddie on the day he’d presented her with the ballet studio — as if he had forgotten the gratitude he supposedly felt toward her for showing him how important it was to be around for Charlie’s childhood.
“I don’t think we’d better wait for him,” she told Charlie. “I think we should go ahead and have our dinner without him.”
“Are you sure? Because if he’s coming, I don’t want him to be sad that we ate without him. I don’t mind waiting.”
Maddie wished she could make a recording of that and play it for Eli. Let him see what his actions were doing.
“I think he would have told us if we could expect him,” she said.
“He doesn’t really come to dinner very much anymore. Maybe he got tired of it.”
“I don’t think that’s it,” Maddie said gently, even though in fact she thought Charlie was probably right. “He has a hard job. We know that. I think he just needs to focus on his work. We should give him the space to do that, and I’m sure he’ll come back and eat with us again eventually.” He had to do that eventually , didn’t he?
“I was hoping we could do another beach day this weekend,” Charlie said. “But I guess he’s probably going to be working, huh?”
“Yeah, I think he probably will be,” Maddie agreed. “You know he does all that for your sake, Charlie, don’t you?”
“What do you mean?”
“I don’t want you to think your dad is always at the office because he doesn’t like being at home with you. That isn’t what it is. He loves being with you. But he wants you to have everything you want in life. He wants to send you to great schools, and he always wants to be able to buy you everything you want. That’s why he works so hard — to get the money it takes to give you what you need.”
“Maybe,” Charlie said.
“You don’t think that’s right?”
“I think he probably thinks that’s right. But what if what I want is to go to the beach with my dad? We can’t do that if he’s at work all the time. And that doesn’t cost money. He could work less and we could still have a good time. If it was about what would make me happy, that is what we would do.”
“You should tell him that,” Maddie said.
Charlie shook his head. “It wouldn’t matter.”
The tragic thing was that he was probably right. It wasn’t as if Eli didn’t realize how much it meant to Charlie to be able to spend time with him. He knew. Anybody could see it, and Eli was no fool. He had chosen to prioritize something else, that was all.
Charlie probably didn’t want to talk to his father about it because he feared the idea of rejection. Maddie couldn’t blame him for that either.
The truth was, she was living in fear herself these days. The thing she hadn’t yet reckoned with was that this change in Eli’s behavior had happened right after they had slept together. In fact, it had happened the moment he had left the bed. He had stepped out of the room for a moment and had come back transformed.
She had believed him, that day, when he had told her that he had a work emergency that had required his presence in the office. But now she was starting to wonder. Had that been the truth, or was it possible that he had been making an excuse to get away from her — that he had found himself regretting what had happened between them as soon as he’d left her side and had needed to get some space?
Maybe that was why he was at work all the time. Maybe it was because of her .
And if that was true, she didn’t think she could stand it. The one thing she had wanted in all of this was for her feelings about Eli not to affect Charlie. But if Eli was returning to his old habit of working long hours and ignoring his son — if he was doing that as part of an attempt to avoid Maddie — then she had been a negative force in Charlie’s life, and she ought to leave this family alone before she did them any further harm.
It was a terrible thought. She’d come to care so much about both of them. Could leaving really be the thing she had to do to make all this right?
She waited for Eli in the foyer that night, sitting on the bottom step. It was after midnight when he came home.
He startled a little when he saw her. “I didn’t think you’d still be up.”
“Sorry to disappoint you.”
“That’s not what I meant.”
“I know you stay out all day and night because you’re avoiding me, Eli.”
“I’m at work, Maddie. I have a job to do. It isn’t because of you.” He shook his head. “Not everything is about you, you know.”
“Don’t you do that. I’m not making this about me when I shouldn’t,” she said. “I know not everything is about me. But I think this is. And if you tell me I’ve got it wrong, I’ll honestly be more relieved than I can tell you.”
“You’ve got it wrong.” He started past her.
“Don’t walk off.”
“There’s nothing to talk about here.”
“No?” She got to her feet. “Because you were staying at home so much more. You know that, don’t you? You recognize that everything changed — and then changed again?”
He sighed. “It’s late. Do we need to do this right now?”
“When do you want to do it? I’d happily talk to you at a more reasonable hour if you were ever around , but you’re not. I have to take what I can get when I can get it.”
“Fine,” he said. “Say what you have to say, then. I want to shower and get to bed.”
“You’ve been treating me like… like an employee.” She blushed, knowing how foolish she sounded.
“You are my employee,” he said quietly.
“Damn it, Eli — you know what I’m saying. We should be more to each other than that. We are more to each other than that! We’ve become?—”
“What? What did you think we were?”
“Well, friends, certainly.”
“Friends?”
“I know I work for you. I also know we transcended that the first time you poured me a glass of wine. The first time I gave you advice about Charlie and you took it. We’ve been more than employer and employee for a very long time, Eli. And then, a week ago, when Charlie was away — that night…”
“I know what happened.”
“You won’t even look at me. I’m supposed to pretend that isn’t the reason you’re staying away now?”
“It isn’t.”
“I don’t believe you.”
“Believe me or don’t. I’m telling you the truth.”
“Eli, I’m not stupid. I know that was the moment everything changed. You were pouring time into Charlie. You were so happy with me that you built me a ballet studio. And then that night happened, and it’s like we’re strangers again.”
“It’s like we’re employer and employee. It always should have been like that. I know you know that every bit as well as I do.”
“But I don’t understand it. What changed? We were so close. You gave me that ballet studio. And the morning after — we were talking about how neither of us regretted what happened, and I swear, you were telling the truth. But then you left, and it’s like you never came back. It’s like we never finished that conversation.”
“We shouldn’t have done what we did.”
Maddie felt as if she’d been punched. “Do you mean that? You were so intent on making sure I had no regrets. Are you telling me that the whole time, you regretted it?”
“It’s not that I regret… being with you.”
“Then what? Make me understand this.”
“Maddie, my company lost millions of dollars that night.”
“What?” It was the last thing in the world she’d expected him to say.
“You knew I had a work emergency that day. You knew there was trouble at the company.”
“I didn’t realize it was that extreme. You said you needed to go into the office. You always say that.”
“You just finished telling me how things have changed, though,” Eli said. “How I stopped prioritizing work. Well, you were right. And my whole company is paying the price now, because I lost a client.”
“Eli, I’m sorry you lost a client,” Maddie said gently. “But that’s something that happens, isn’t it? Even if nothing had ever happened between you and me… sometimes clients end their contracts.”
“You don’t know anything about the business world.”
That was a slap in the face. “You don’t need to be rude. I might not be in that world myself, but I’m not an idiot. I do understand how things work.”
“Then you should understand that clients stay or go depending on the level of service they’re offered. My client ended our contract — costing me and my associates millions of dollars and jeopardizing the business — because he wasn’t happy with the service he was getting.”
“What on earth was he expecting? Service in the middle of the night? You’re allowed to have times when you’re not on the clock, Eli. Everyone is allowed to have that.”
“I should have had an eye on my work. I allowed myself to focus on things I shouldn’t have been paying attention to, and because of it, I lost an extremely important client. I know you had a point about me needing to spend more time with Charlie. I’ll have to figure out how to make that happen without things like this going wrong at work. That doesn’t mean I have time to spare for — anything else.”
“For me.”
“I have people who depend on me. My company relies on me being there. I need to keep my attention where it belongs, Maddie.”
“Don’t you see how backward all this is?” Maddie demanded. “Okay, I get it — you work as hard as you do because you want to provide a good life for yourself and your son. But it’s flipped around now. It’s gone too far in the opposite direction. You’re not working hard so that you can have the life you want. You’re sacrificing the life you want for the sake of your job.”
“This is something you wouldn’t understand,” Eli said firmly. “And I don’t expect you to.”
“You’d be surprised what I can understand. Maybe you should try me.”
“You’re already showing me that you don’t understand. You disagree with the choices I’m making here.”
“Of course I do, but that’s not because I can’t comprehend your reasons for making them, Eli. Do you think I’m an idiot? I know what’s going on.”
“Okay, then tell me.”
“You’re hiding in your work,” she said. “You feel like you have control at work, and you can’t handle it when anything is out of your control, so you’re hiding. You’re using it as an excuse to pull away — to put up a wall between the two of us, when we just managed to break that wall down.”
“Or maybe you should trust me that I know what I’m doing. I’m sorry things aren’t going to work out between you and me, but that just can’t be my top priority.”
“You want me to trust you,” she repeated. “Trust you, after everything. Trust you after I finally allowed myself to trust you only to have you pull away from me again.”
“Is that so much to ask? That you put a little faith in the fact that I know what I’m doing, even if it isn’t what you hoped I would do.”
“Where has trusting you gotten me so far? For that matter, where has it gotten Charlie? I told you not to get him used to the idea of having you around if it wasn’t something you would be able to keep up. He puts a brave face on it, but he’s devastated, you know. He doesn’t understand why you’ve stopped coming home early to be with him.”
“Don’t bring Charlie into this,” Eli said harshly, clearly infuriated that she would even consider it. “I’ve put up with a lot in terms of you telling me what to do with my son. But you need to remember that I’m his father. I was his father before you came into our lives and I’ll be his father when you’re gone. I’ve listened to your advice, but there was never any agreement or understanding that I would do whatever you told me to do. Not when it comes to my son.”
Maddie shook her head. “You can do whatever you like with me,” she said. “You’re right. We should probably never have crossed that line. But for God’s sake, treat Charlie with some more kindness. He’s your son. He should be your number-one priority in all the world — miles above some stupid client. And I will never stop telling you that he deserves that. If you don’t want to hear it, fire me right now.”
Eli stared at her for a long moment, and Maddie wondered whether he really would fire her.
But he turned and walked away, leaving her alone in the foyer.