Ignored, Betrayed Wife of a Billionaire Husband (Her Marriage in Crisis #127)

1. Willow

— ? —

Willow

The rule was one egg per johnnycake, and my husband had just handed our son his fourth.

Archie received it in both hands, the way you receive an award. He was up on the counter with Michael’s forearm braced across his back, wearing pajamas with sailboats on them, and he had yolk in his hair from the previous three.

“More,” he said.

“You’ve had more.”

“More.”

“One egg. That’s the rule, buddy.”

“More egg.”

Michael handed him another egg.

“You know he’s going to ask for a fifth,” I said.

“Then he’ll get a fifth.”

“That isn’t how rules work.”

“Not for this one.” He turned a cake with the flat of his palm, no spatula, the way his grandmother did it. “Ask him. He’ll back me up.”

Archie crushed the egg like a grape and looked at me with total serenity.

“Egg hands,” he said.

“Very egg hands.”

“Egg hands, Mama.”

“I’ve seen them, baby. They’re the best egg hands in the building.”

Ruth Folger taught Michael to make those cakes at her own table on the island, and I was there.

Nine years old with my ankles crossed under the chair, listening to her talk about whaling wives while she showed him how to turn one without breaking it.

She told him to pay attention because one day he would have to feed somebody.

He was not paying attention. He was looking at me.

His hands remembered anyway. Decades later, they still know the exact moment to flip. I used to find that comforting.

The phone was face down beside the salt. He had put it there himself when he came in with his hair flat on one side, and he had said nobody has me today, and I had believed him the way I believe him every time.

I keep those sentences. I could produce them on request, dated and timestamped. I don’t know why I collect them. Evidence, maybe. Or proof that I’m not imagining things.

“Sit down,” Michael said. “You’re hovering.”

“I’m supervising.”

“You’re hovering with a plate in your hand. You look like a waitress who’s lost her section.”

“Somebody in this kitchen has to know how many eggs went in.”

“Four,” Archie said, in a way that sounds like fow.

We both looked at him.

“He can count,” Michael said, delighted. “Willow, do you hear this? We’ve got a mathematician.”

“He can say four. He says the last number he hears all the time.”

“Four,” Archie agreed, nodding gravely.

“See.”

“Ask him how many are left in the bowl.”

“Archie. How many eggs have we got left?”

“Four.”

“There are two.”

“Four,” Archie said, and put his hand in the bowl to check.

“He’s committed,” Michael said. “You have to admire a man who commits.”

“He’s committed to being wrong.”

“So is most of my board. At least Archie’s got conviction.”

Michael laughed with his whole chest, the way he used to laugh before deals and contracts from Rotterdam and Shanghai, and my own chest did that quick, traitorous clench. Seventeen years, and my body still hasn’t got the message that loving someone isn’t the same as having them.

The kitchen smelled of cornmeal and butter, which was the first time in a while it had smelled of anything at all.

The house is clever. It puts the lights on when I walk into a room and it has never got it wrong, and it took me a long time to stop thanking it out loud.

What it cannot do is make a smell. That takes a person standing in it.

Then the phone lit up under itself and turned the marble blue.

Michael’s head went toward it before he could stop it.

“Don’t,” I said.

“I’ll just look at what it is.”

“You know what it is.”

“Two seconds.”

He was already wiping his hands. The second batch sat half done on the griddle and Archie twisted around on the counter to watch his father cross the kitchen, which is a thing our son does now. I would like to stop noticing it.

Michael picked up the phone. His shoulders changed.

“I have to take this.”

“It’s Sunday.”

“I know.”

“You said nobody had you.”

“I know what I said.” He had it against his ear already, walking. “Two minutes. I promise.”

He kissed the top of my head on the way past, which he still does, and which I have decided not to have an opinion about.

I heard him say give me the actual figures, not the summary, and then the study door.

Two minutes went.

I took the second batch off the griddle and put a plate over it. I fed Archie at the table and ate standing at the counter, because sitting down in Michael’s chair was not available to me that morning.

He came back with the phone still in his hand and the apology already loaded.

“Rotterdam’s blowing up. The port authority changed the terms overnight.”

“Okay.”

“If it isn’t sorted by Tuesday we lose the western route.”

“Okay.”

“Willow.”

“I said okay. What do you want me to do, argue about a port?”

“I’ll be back by lunch. And I’m not taking the early flight on Tuesday.”

I stopped with the plate in my hand.

“You always take the early flight.”

“I’m not taking it anymore. It wrecks me for two days and I’m no use to anybody when I land.”

“I have said that to you for years.”

“Have you?”

“In this kitchen. On the way to the airport. Standing at that door with your bag in my hand.”

He thought about it, and he was not pretending.

“Then you were right,” he said.

“Who told you?”

“Nobody told me. Somebody made a point and it landed.”

“Which somebody?”

“Willow, it’s a flight.”

“It isn’t a flight. It’s a thing I said for years that never once landed, and now it has, and I would like to know where it landed from.”

He looked at me with a face full of nothing useful, because he did not know the answer and could not see why the question mattered.

“I’ll be back by lunch.”

“All right.”

“I’m sorry.”

“I know you are. That’s not the same as being here, but I know you are.”

He crossed the kitchen and kissed Archie’s head. Archie held up his fire engine.

“Dada. Truck.”

“That’s a great truck. I’ll look at it properly when I get back.”

Then the door, and the elevator, and nothing.

Archie watched the doorway for a while.

“Dada?”

“Daddy’s gone to work, baby.”

“Dada back?”

“Daddy always comes back.”

That sentence costs me every time and I have never let him hear the price.

***

Pia rang while I was getting egg out of my son’s hair, which is a job that requires a bath and a negotiation.

“Tell me you’re coming out this year,” she said.

“Hello to you as well.”

“I’m not doing hello. Hello is how you get talked out of the actual question. Are you coming out?”

“We’re coming out.”

“That’s a we. That word is doing an enormous amount of work and I want you to know I’ve noticed.”

“Pia.”

“There’s a room here with nobody in it. My mother has views about that.”

“Your mother has views about my posture, so let’s not open the file.”

Pia made a noise down the phone that I have missed all season. Behind her there were gulls and somebody dragging tackle across a dock, and I had to hold the phone away from my ear.

“How’s my nephew?”

“He has four eggs in him.”

“Four?”

“His father is a criminal.”

“His father is a menace and always has been. Levi taught him to sail and he thanked him by beating him at it.” A pause. “Where is he, then?”

“Work.”

“It’s Sunday.”

“It’s Rotterdam.”

“What’s a Rotterdam?”

“A port.”

“I know it’s a port, Willow. I’m asking what it is that a port does to a man on a Sunday that his own kitchen can’t.”

“It rings.”

Pia went quiet.

“Right,” she said. “Put Archie on.”

I put Archie on. He said boat, then egg, then boat again, and then he pressed the screen with a wet hand and hung up on his aunt, and I let him think that was an accident.

***

The day went the way days go when Michael is not in them. Block towers built for the express purpose of being knocked down. The book with the dog in it, read out nine times, because Archie has found a dog he approves of and there is no negotiating.

I have developed a position on that dog. It is not favorable. Biscuit’s owner is neglectful. What kind of owner leaves a dog to have an adventure all week? There is nobody in my life I can say that to.

Then Archie got up from the books.

He went to his basket and got the truck, the loud blue one that has to be surgically removed from him at bedtime, and he carried it across the room with both arms and set it on the seat of his father’s chair. Then he stepped back and looked at it.

Then he went and got a spoon. Orange, plastic, from the play kitchen. He put it beside the truck and stepped back and looked again.

Then a sock. Then the book with the dog in it. Then the rubber whale from the bath, still wet.

He was not upset. Nobody was crying. He went around our apartment collecting everything he loves and arranged it on a chair, and every time he set something down he stood back to check, and then he went and found another.

He was making it worth coming back for.

Duck went last. The rabbit is called Duck because Archie named it and nobody has ever corrected him, least of all his father, who says it with a completely straight face in front of adults. It sleeps in his crib. It does not leave his hand.

He put Duck on the seat with everything else and stood there with his arms at his sides.

“Dada sit,” he said.

Nobody sat.

He said it twice more. Then he went back to his blocks, because he had done what he could.

I went into the kitchen and held on to the edge of the sink and looked at nothing for a while. I did not cry. Crying is a thing I gave up around the time I worked out that it does not bring anybody back. It is one of the few economies in my life that has actually paid.

He texted at six. He texted again at eight.

***

He came in late. I heard the door and the coat and the fridge, and then his footsteps stopped in the living room.

I came out and found my husband standing over that chair.

He picked up the truck. He picked up the spoon, the sock, the whale, the book, and he moved them one at a time onto the side table so he could sit down.

Then he sat and rubbed both hands down his face.

“Rotterdam’s sorted,” he said. “Properly this time.”

“Good.”

“I’m sorry about today.”

“I know.”

“I’ll make it up to you.”

“You don’t have to.”

“I want to.”

He reached over and took my hand, and I let him, because I have never in my life made a man ask twice. I open the door before anybody has to look for the handle. I call it being easy to live with. It is not that.

“He built you something,” I said.

“He built me what?”

I looked at the side table. Michael looked at it too. The whale had left a wet ring on the wood, and Duck was face down across the book, and none of it meant one single thing to him.

“A pile,” I said.

“He’s two. He puts things on things.”

“He does.”

Michael nodded and closed his eyes and was asleep in the chair inside a minute, with his hand still around mine and our son’s entire afternoon sitting behind his head where he had put it to get it out of the way.

He does not know Archie carries things to that chair for his dada to play with him if he comes back early. He does not know it happens every time. He came home and cleared his own seat and never once asked why there was a wet whale on it.