9. Heath
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Heath
I had not slept.
The sun was coming up over the ocean, pale winter light spilling through the library windows, and I was still in my tuxedo from the night before.
My bow tie hung loose around my neck. My jacket was somewhere on the floor.
I had been pacing for hours, wearing a path in the antique rug that my mother had always said was worth more than most people’s houses.
I didn’t care about the rug. The only thing I cared about was the woman who had walked away from me in a parking lot and disappeared into the night.
My phone sat on my desk, silent and accusing.
I had called Delphine seventeen times and she had not picked up once.
I kept leaving messages anyway, even though I could hear myself on them, a man coming apart into a machine, and even though I understood that whatever I truly had to say to her could not be said into a phone.
It had to be said to her face, or as close to her face as she would let me get.
I didn’t care about that either.
The events of the night kept replaying in my head, a terrible loop I couldn’t escape.
Walking into the ballroom. Seeing Kendall with blood streaming down her face.
Seeing my wife standing there with her fist clenched and her eyes blazing and the most beautiful red dress I had ever seen hugging her body.
I had gone to Kendall. That was the moment that kept stabbing at me, the choice I had made without thinking. My ex was bleeding and crying and I had gone to her, had gathered her up and tried to help, and the whole time my wife had been standing there watching.
Watching me choose someone else.
I stopped pacing and pressed my hands against my face, trying to push back the exhaustion and the guilt and the overwhelming sense that I had destroyed everything that mattered.
How did this happen? How did I let my marriage fall apart without even noticing?
I knew the answer. I had been living with the answer for three months, carrying it around like a weight I couldn’t set down.
The European branch.
It was supposed to be the biggest achievement of my career.
The expansion that would take the Fairchild firm from a regional powerhouse to an international presence.
Paris first, then London, then who knew where else.
My father had dreamed of it for years before he died.
I had inherited that dream along with everything else, and I had been determined to make it real.
But the posting required someone to run it. Someone to move across an ocean and build it from nothing. Someone to leave behind everything they knew and start over in a foreign country.
I was the obvious choice. The only choice, really. No one else had the experience or the knowledge or the stubborn determination to make it work.
Which meant asking Delphine to give up her life. Again.
She had already done it once. When we got married, she had put her own career on the shelf to hold mine up.
Not the work, she never stopped working, she runs that charity better than my board runs the firm.
But the engineering. The degree. The thing she had actually been for, before she was for me.
She had never complained, never once made me feel guilty, but I knew exactly what it had cost her.
I saw it sometimes in her eyes when she talked about the work she used to do, the designs she used to create, the person she had been before she became an extension of me.
I couldn’t ask her to do it again. I couldn’t look at her and say I need you to leave your home, your friends, everything you’ve built here, and follow me to another continent because my career demands it.
So I had tried to find another way. I had spent three months working every angle, exploring every option, trying to figure out how to make the expansion happen without uprooting our lives. I had buried myself in the problem so completely that I had forgotten to come up for air.
I had forgotten to tell my wife what I was doing.
I had forgotten to be her husband.
The guilt hit me fresh, a physical pain in my chest. I sank down onto the leather sofa and stared at the ceiling, at the ornate plasterwork that had been there for a hundred years, and wondered how I had become this person.
This man who was so focused on solving a problem that he had created a worse one.
This man who had let his wife believe he was having an affair rather than admit he was afraid.
Afraid of asking too much. Afraid of losing her. Afraid that if I told her the truth, she would look at me and see the selfish bastard I was, putting his career above her happiness.
So I had stayed silent. And my silence had let other people fill in the gaps.
My mother. Kendall. The women who had been waiting for years for an opportunity to drive Delphine away.
I thought about what Del had said in the parking lot. The things Montana had told her. The text message she had found on my phone.
That text. I remembered it now, and remembering it made me feel sick, because I remembered exactly how it had been built.
Kendall had connections in Paris. She had said so eleven times.
Business contacts, she said, people who could open doors, and she wanted in on the expansion the way she wanted in on everything. Fine. Ordinary. Boring, even.
But she had not written a boring message.
She had written I can’t wait to go to Europe with you.
It will be amazing. We’re going to build something great there, us together.
Not the firm. Not the branch. Us together.
Twenty-two words with every single noun filed off, and she had sent it to a man whose wife she knew was watching him, from a bedroom down the corridor from that wife, five days after she moved into the house to do it.
Nobody writes like that by accident. Kendall Saladino had never written a sentence by accident in her life. She had put a loaded gun on my desk and then sat at my dinner table for three weeks, eating Del’s food, waiting to hear it go off.
And I had ignored it. I had glanced at it and put my phone face down on my desk and gone back to my spreadsheets, because I had been ignoring everyone who wasn’t directly relevant to the problem I was trying to solve.
I had not deleted it. I had not answered it.
I had not thought about it for one second more.
She had aimed it at my wife and I had handed her the range.
God, I was an idiot.
I sat up and reached for my phone again. Still nothing from Delphine. But there were other notifications. Texts from business associates wondering if I was okay. A message from my assistant reminding me about a meeting I had obviously missed. And one from my mother, sent at two in the morning.
Montana: Really, Heath. All of this drama over that woman. Come find me tomorrow and we’ll discuss how to proceed.
I stared at the message for a long moment, feeling a cold, hard weight settle in my stomach.
How to proceed.
My mother had been feeding my wife poison for weeks. Maybe longer. She had been telling Delphine that I was having an affair, that I didn’t love her, that she was nothing more than a mistake I was finally correcting. And now she wanted to discuss how to proceed.
I stood up. The exhaustion was still there, weighing down my limbs, but beneath it was a fury so hot it burned.
I needed to find my mother. To look her in the eye and demand to know exactly what she had done.
The house was quiet as I walked through it. No sign of Montana. No sign of Kendall. Their doors were closed, their rooms silent. Sleeping, maybe. Or gone out.
I checked the kitchen, the drawing room, the breakfast nook where my mother liked to take her morning coffee. Empty. All of it empty.
I pulled out my phone and sent a text.
Me: Where are you?
The response came within seconds.
Montana: Breakfast at The Chanler. Join us. We have much to discuss.
Us. Which meant Kendall was with her. The two of them, having a cozy breakfast together while my wife was somewhere crying and my marriage was in ruins.
I grabbed my car keys and walked out the door.
***
The Chanler was one of those Newport establishments that existed purely to remind people how much money they had. Crystal chandeliers. White tablecloths. Waiters who moved silently and never made eye contact. The kind of place my mother loved and Delphine had always privately mocked.
I found them in the main dining room, seated at a corner table with three other women I vaguely recognized from various society functions. They were all dressed immaculately, all drinking champagne and picking at fruit plates, all pretending that nothing unusual had happened the night before.
Kendall had a white bandage across her nose. It stood out against her tanned skin, a visible reminder of what my wife had done. When she saw me approaching, her eyes went wide and then soft, expecting me to come comfort her again.
I walked straight past her to my mother’s chair.
“What the hell did you tell Delphine?”
The conversation at the table stopped. The other women exchanged glances, their perfectly made up faces flickering with surprise and barely concealed interest.
Montana looked up at me with an expression of mild annoyance. “Heath, darling. You look terrible. Sit down and have some coffee.”
“I’m not sitting down. I’m asking you a question. What did you tell my wife?”
“I’m sure I don’t know what you mean.”
“Don’t.” My voice came out harder than I intended, sharp enough to make Kendall flinch. “Don’t play games with me, Mother. Delphine told me exactly what you said. That I was having an affair. That I was planning to leave her. That she was never supposed to be part of this family.”
Montana set down her champagne glass with a delicate clink. “I may have expressed some concerns about the state of your marriage. That’s hardly a crime.”
“Concerns? You told her I was cheating on her with Kendall.”
One of the other women at the table gasped softly. Montana’s eyes narrowed.