Chapter 3
MALLORY
The bedroom is too large without him in it. I stand at the foot of the bed in the dress I wore to the gala, my heels abandoned somewhere near the bathroom, one earring still in my ear and the other clenched in my palm.
Our bed is turned down on both sides. Rourke's side is untouched.
I tell myself I'm looking for my gray sweater. The soft one. The one with the loose cuff I should've thrown away years ago. Something comfortable. Something that'll let me sleep.
The closet lights come on in quiet strips as I step inside.
Everything in here knows its place. Dresses arranged by color.
Shoes lined on slanted shelves. Handbags tucked behind glass.
A whole room built to hold the woman Rourke Carmichael married, or at least the woman everyone expected her to become once she took his name.
I open a drawer. Then another. Cashmere. Silk. A folded scarf I've worn once. No gray sweater.
Eventually, I give up the pretense and go for what I really came in here for. I kneel and pull a storage box from the deepest corner of the closet.
Inside are clothes I no longer wear. Old jeans. A cotton dress with a frayed hem. A pair of boots with dried mud still trapped in one seam because I could never get it all out. Beneath them, in a vacuum-sealed bag, is my old market apron.
I stop with both hands on the plastic. The apron looks smaller than I remember. Faded blue canvas. One pocket stretched out from years of snips and twine. A brown stain near the hem. It doesn't belong in this closet. Neither did I, the first year. Maybe the second.
I break the seal. Air slips in with a faint hiss, and the apron swells between my hands. The smell comes next, muted but alive. Dried flowers. Soil.
I kneel on the floor. It feels like a relic from another life, one I couldn't reach again if I tried. I brush my fingers over the faded cotton, then catch a flash of bright yellow tucked in the bottom of the box.
Beneath the apron lies a yellow sundress I wore to Steph's bachelorette weekend because she insisted the whole bridal party had to look "coastal," which apparently meant we were all sunburned by two in the afternoon.
The resort was too polished for us. Too white.
Too quiet. Even the palm trees looked like paid actors.
I didn't know it belonged to the Carmichaels. I only knew there was a scavenger hunt, a list written in glitter pen, and Steph shrieking that I had to find a handsome stranger and take a picture with him. So I chose the most inappropriate man on the terrace.
Rourke sat alone at a shaded table, wearing a dark suit at a beach resort like he'd come to audit the ocean.
His cuff links caught the light every time he turned a page in the file open beside his coffee.
He looked severe. Beautiful, yes, but in a way that made it look like the beach had risen up around him.
I walked right up to him and said, "I'm going to need thirty seconds of your time and temporary use of your face."
His head lifted.
I can still see the way he looked at me. Like I'd spoken a language no one uses around him.
"Temporary use of my face," he repeated.
"For a photograph," I said, holding up the scavenger hunt list. "Handsome stranger. You qualify, but only barely, because the suit is hurting your score."
His mouth didn't move at first. His eyes did. They warmed.
I had no reason to be careful with him. I thought he was some ordinary businessman too attached to his calendar, probably here for a conference. Maybe waiting for a wife who packed better shoes than mine. He was handsome in a way that should've made me shy, but shyness never arrived. Not with him.
"What's wrong with the suit?" he asked.
"At a beach resort? Everything. Also the cuff links are ridiculous."
He looked down at them, genuinely startled. "Ridiculous?"
"You look like you'd be more at home using phrases like for the family and swim with the fishes."
And then he laughed. Not the polite kind. Not the low social sound men make when they're deciding whether a woman is charming enough to reward with attention. A real laugh, pulled out of him before he could stop it.
I didn't know then how rare that was.
"Do I get terms?" he asked.
"I'd be surprised if you didn't ask for them, wearing a suit like that."
"Good. I require final approval."
"Denied."
"That's not a negotiation."
"That's because your opening position was weak."
The bridal party hooted from near the bar. Steph yelled something unhelpful about cheekbones. I lifted my phone, and Rourke stepped closer, still looking at me with that focused, arrested expression.
His shoulder brushed mine for the picture. He smelled like clean linen, coffee, and sun-warmed skin.
"Smile like you didn't choose those cuff links on purpose," I said.
"I did choose them on purpose."
"Fine. Smile like a man named Tony has just said something about a suspicious shipment at a warehouse."
The photo was blurry because I laughed when he did. Two strangers in bright afternoon light, my hair coming loose from its braid, his formal collar open at the throat because I'd already bullied him into taking off his tie.
Afterward, neither of us moved. The scavenger hunt list fluttered in my hand. His file sat open on the table. Someone called my name from across the terrace.
Rourke looked at me and said, "What else is on the list?"
That weekend returns in pieces because it all seems so far away now.
Rourke at breakfast the next morning, appearing beside the hostess stand in linen trousers and a shirt with the sleeves rolled up, like he'd made a study of how to look less severe but had just enough Miami Vice going that I couldn't take him too seriously.
Rourke carrying my sandals in one hand while I walked barefoot at the edge of the water, my dress tied in a knot above my knees.
Rourke listening while I told him about the flower stall I wanted.
Not the polished version I gave people when they asked about ambition.
The real one. A white farmhouse with bad floors and good light.
Rows of zinnias and dahlias. Buckets in the back of an old truck.
A chalkboard sign with crooked lettering.
Market mornings that started before sunrise and smelled like wet stems and coffee from a thermos.
He asked what color the front door of the farmhouse would be.
"Green," I told him. "Not tasteful green. Real green."
He nodded solemnly. "Oscar the Grouch green."
I laughed so hard I had to stop walking.
He kept finding reasons to be near me. Small, transparent reasons.
He offered to show Steph a quieter beach for photographs, then spent most of the walk beside me while Steph took pictures.
He sat through a ridiculous sunset cocktail class and muddled mint with the concentration of a man defusing something. He let me tease him.
He asked questions and listened like he actually wanted the answer. Not waiting to speak. Not scanning the room for someone more useful. Not dividing me into categories. Pretty enough. Polite enough. Suitable enough. He looked at me like I was someone he wanted to be around.
The first time someone called him Mr. Carmichael, I thought they had the wrong man.
He went still. His jaw tightened for one second, and then he looked at me as if something fragile had been placed between us.
Not because he'd lied exactly. Because with me, for those few days, he'd put it down.
The name. The weight. The whole beautiful, hungry machine.
"I should've told you," he said later, when the others had gone inside and the beach had gone dark except for the resort lanterns behind us.
"Probably would have been a good idea," I said.
"I liked that you didn't know."
"That's not a defense."
"No." He looked down at my sandals in his hand. "It isn't."
I should've been angrier. Maybe I was, a little. But he looked so tired in that moment. Tired of being recognized before he was known.
So I took my shoes from him and said, "You're still getting judged for the cuff links."
His face changed. Relief. That's what I saw. Not victory. Not charm. Relief that I hadn't turned into someone careful.
I married that man. Not the properties. Not the surname.
Not the penthouse with its glass walls and silent closets.
I married the man who looked grateful when I called him ridiculous.
The man who stayed awake on a beach because he wasn't finished listening to me.
The man who carried my shoes as if it were an honor and not a service.
I sit on the closet floor with the apron in my lap and try to feel foolish for still loving him. It won't come.
Grief comes. Humiliation too, small and hot when I think of Jocelyn in burgundy silk beside him tonight, knowing the names before he needed them. Knowing when to touch his sleeve. Knowing when he wanted to leave a conversation. Knowing what he was about to say.
I used to know him like that. I used to know when his silence meant irritation and when it meant exhaustion.
I knew when he needed food, when he needed quiet, when he was trying not to laugh because the room expected him to be Mr. Carmichael and not Rourke, the man who knows all the words to I've Got a Lovely Bunch of Coconuts.
I knew which version of his smile belonged to strangers and which one arrived unguarded, quick and almost boyish, when I caught him off balance.
I don't know when I stopped being the person who could finish his thoughts. I don't know if he noticed when someone else began doing it.
The apron lies open across my thighs, wrinkled from the bag, smelling faintly of a life I packed away because love asked and I answered.
Rourke never told me to give anything up. He only needed so much. Another event. Another dinner. Another property. Another crisis that would end soon, Mal, I promise, and then we'll breathe.
I've lived for years on the promise of after. After the acquisition. After the board vote. After Singapore. After Ridgeline.
I fold the apron carefully. Not the tight, flat fold that would fit back in the plastic. A softer one. The kind I used when I knew I'd wear it again in the morning. I set it on the open shelf beneath the sweaters. Visible.
Then I stand, turn off the closet lights, and go back to the bedroom.
Rourke's side of the bed waits in the city glow.
I don't want it empty. And damned if part of me doesn't hate that.
I want him to come home. I want him to loosen his tie, climb in beside me, and reach for me in the dark like he's that stranger on the beach and I'm the girl who has his undivided attention.
My phone lights on the nightstand. For one breath, my heart lifts. It's not Rourke.
A calendar notification slides across the screen, sent through his office with my name copied because his schedule affects mine.
Ridgeline Site Visit
I open it. The details load in neat, indifferent lines. Flight. Ground transport. Lodging. Two nights. Attendees: Rourke Carmichael. Jocelyn King. Ridgeline property seller.
Two nights. Jocelyn King.
I read the words once. Then again.
There's a reasonable explanation. There's always a reasonable explanation. Jocelyn leads expansion. Rourke travels with colleagues. Ridgeline matters. Nothing here is proof of anything except business moving forward at the speed business always moves in his world.
But he hasn't told me.
The arrangements aren't tentative. They're not a thought he forgot to mention over dinner because we haven't had dinner. They're real enough for flight times and lodging.
I see Jocelyn's hand on his arm. Then her mouth near his ear. Her laugh catching the joke I couldn't hear. Rourke leaning close while I stood twenty feet away with a headset mark pressed into my hair.
Across the room, the closet door remains open a few inches. I can see the pale edge of the apron on the shelf, folded but not buried. I look from it to the phone in my hand.
The man who carried my shoes on the beach. The man preparing to leave town for two nights with another woman and not tell me himself.
And me not knowing if I'll ever be the woman who finishes his sentences again.