My Husband's Mistress Was My High School Bully (You Chose Her. Now Grovel. #5)

Chapter 1

The treadmill had a screen the size of a windshield and Elena had used it twice.

It stood in the gym room off the primary suite with a towel folded over one arm of it, and every few months a woman came and dusted it, and that was the whole life of the machine.

Julian had bought it the second winter so she wouldn't have to go outside in the cold.

It had been a genuinely kind thing to do for a woman he had never once asked why she went outside.

She went outside.

Five forty-five, October, the sky over the river still the color of a nickel. She got down to the path while the city was mostly delivery trucks and let her legs do what they had done since she was nineteen, which was solve things without consulting her.

Two miles before she permitted herself a single thought. That was the rule. It had been the rule since she was twenty-six and running a studio out of a room on Fourteenth Street, and it was the last piece of discipline from that life she still kept.

At the bridge she turned and let the folder open.

Grand Street. Four hundred square feet of raw concrete with west-facing windows, toured twice, walked once alone on a Tuesday with the agent waiting outside.

The training certification she'd let lapse in year three and had quietly started renewing at eleven o'clock at night.

Miguel the contractor, saved in her phone as Rachel — no last name — so that if Julian ever thumbed through looking for a restaurant he wouldn't find a man.

She had told nobody but Dana.

There was a reason for that, and on the way back she made herself look at the real one instead of the tidy one.

The tidy one was that nothing was signed yet.

The real one was that if she said it out loud to Julian he would be lovely about it, and then he would have an opinion, and the opinion would be good, and it would be his.

Around the second mile she passed the woman she always passed. Older, silver-haired, a windbreaker that had to be thirty years old. They had never spoken once. They nodded. That was the entire relationship and Elena valued it more than most of the conversations she had with her makeup on.

The nod said you're out here too. It asked for nothing else.

This morning Elena nodded back and thought, absurdly, that she would like to be that woman one day. Not rich. Still going.

She was toweling off in the kitchen, hair dripping down the back of her shirt, when Dana let herself in without knocking, as she had since college, carrying a paper bag that smelled like everything good in the world.

"I come bearing bagels and no judgment," Dana said, setting the bag on the island. "The judgment's extra, and it's about the treadmill room. You have a treadmill room, Elena. That's a sentence I just said out loud."

"It's a spare room with a treadmill in it."

"It has a name plaque."

"It does not have a name plaque."

"It has the energy of a name plaque." Dana pulled two mugs down without asking where they were kept, because she'd known where they were kept longer than Julian had.

She was already dressed for the day in a blazer the color of a good decision, curls pinned back, the whole effect of a woman who had somewhere to be and had decided brunch was worth being late for. "How's the secret gym empire coming?"

"It's not an empire. It's four hundred square feet and a guy named Miguel who keeps sending me flooring samples."

"Did you tell Julian about the flooring samples?"

Elena poured coffee she didn't need and didn't answer right away. "Not yet."

"Elena."

"I will. Once it's real. Once I've actually signed something, instead of just—" She gestured at the air, at the whole unformed shape of it. "Wanting it."

Dana studied her over the rim of her mug, the look she'd been giving Elena since sophomore year of college, the one that saw further than Elena wanted it to. "You used to run a whole studio out of a gym on Fourteenth Street. You used to have people on waitlists."

"That was a long time ago."

"It was eight years ago. You're thirty-four, not ninety." Dana bit into her bagel, chewed, considered. "I'm just saying. A woman doesn't rent a studio and hire flooring guys because she's testing an idea. She does it because the idea already won."

Elena spread cream cheese with more attention than it needed. "It's not a secret. It's just — mine. For a minute."

"Those are different sentences."

"They're the same sentence in a good marriage."

Dana let that sit. She had a gift for letting things sit, which was why people told her the truth eventually. Outside, a delivery truck downshifted on the street far below, and the radiator ticked, and Elena replayed what she'd just said and didn't love the sound of it.

"How is he?" Dana asked. "And don't say busy."

"He's busy."

"Elena."

"He's — fine. He's good." She heard herself reaching for the word, which was its own answer. "The Wexford thing has him up at five most mornings. He came to my cousin's thing in August and he was actually there, you know? Phone in his pocket the whole night. He was charming. Everybody loved him."

"That's a review," Dana said. "I asked how he is."

Elena looked at her friend a second too long, and something in her chest shifted a half inch to the left, and then she laughed and it went back where it was.

"He leaves the kitchen light on for me," she said. "Every night. Six years."

Dana smiled, but it was a careful smile. "Okay."

"That's not nothing."

"I didn't say it was nothing." Dana brushed crumbs off her hands and stood, checking her watch, already halfway back to the day she had somewhere to be in. At the door she turned around. "Tell him about the studio. Not because you owe him. Because I want to hear what he says."

"Why?"

"Because I've known you since you were nineteen," Dana said, "and I've never once seen you hide something you were proud of from somebody who deserved to hear it."

Then she was gone, and the door clicked, and Elena stood in her own kitchen holding half a bagel and told herself the gala tonight would be easier to think about than her own life. It wasn't, but it was a good lie to have in reserve.

At three-forty that afternoon she stood on a box in a fitting room on Madison while a woman with pins in her mouth took in half an inch at the waist of a green dress, and she thought about paint.

Specifically about whether a north wall could take the color she wanted or whether it would go grey by four in the afternoon and make everybody in the room look ill. She had a photograph of a swatch on her phone. She looked at it twice while she was standing on the box.

She would come back to that afternoon so many times in the following year that it eventually stopped being a memory and became a kind of address — a place she could go and stand in and check that she had really been that unbothered, that she had actually spent those particular minutes on a paint color.

At the time it was simply a Sunday.

Julian got home at six with forty minutes to spare and his tie already loose, which meant the day had gone well.

She knew his whole vocabulary of arrivals by now.

Tie loose was good. Tie tight and jacket still buttoned meant a bad call with an investor and a quiet hour before he was any use to anyone.

"Tell me you're wearing the green one," he said, from the bedroom.

"I'm wearing the green one."

"Thank God. I've built an entire evening around it."

She was at the mirror doing her earrings when he came up behind her and put his hands on her shoulders, and for a second neither of them said anything.

That was the part outsiders never got about a marriage like theirs.

Not the money. This — the ordinary standing-still of it, two people taking up the same six square feet of bathroom floor for six years and mostly not minding.

"Long day?" she said.

"Long month." He met her eyes in the glass. "You look expensive and unimpressed."

"One of those is your money."

"And one of them is free, and it's the one I like.

" He kissed the top of her head and went to find his cufflinks, and she watched him go in the mirror and thought, with no particular weight to it, that he was still the best-looking man she'd ever been in a room with, and that she'd stopped telling him so about two years ago, and she couldn't remember deciding to stop.

She almost told him about Grand Street then. She got as far as opening her mouth.

"Car's downstairs," he called.

"Coming," she said.

The Cross-Ashford Family Foundation held its gala every October in the same Park Avenue ballroom, a room with gilt on everything and acoustics that had been ruining conversations since 1931.

Elena had the floor plan by heart — where the bar should have been, which doors the staff actually used, the corner by the auction tables where you could stand and not be approached for four minutes.

She wore green. Julian liked her in green, said it made her look like she was daring the room to disagree with her, and some nights that was exactly the energy she wanted to bring to a fundraiser full of people who measured worth in board seats.

"You look expensive and unimpressed," Julian said, low, his hand at her back as they came through the doors. It came out like most things did lately — a little amused, a little absent, like he was reading it off a card he'd prepared in the car.

"I'll be more impressed when I find out who did the seating."

"Theo did the seating."

Theo Marsh, four feet away and not pretending he hadn't heard, raised his glass a half inch. He wore a tux like a man who had never fully relaxed in his life and had decided to let the tailoring compensate.

"The Delacroixs asked to be near the family," he said.

"So you gave them us."

"I gave them you. I gave them the one Ashford who can survive ninety minutes of Bill Delacroix without visibly aging." Theo drank. "You should hear what I did to the Hendersons."

"That's very nearly a compliment."