The Wife He Left Behind (Hers to Forgive #1)

1. Nora

NORA

The dress is right.

That's the first thing I tell myself when I step into the Welling ballroom and feel my confidence drain out of me.

The dress is right. Navy silk, fitted through the waist, soft at the sleeves.

Expensive enough that I stood in the shop for ten minutes pretending to think about it while my stomach did math.

I bought it because Daniel said tonight mattered, and because after six years of being his wife I should know better than to think the right dress can make me feel right in one of these rooms.

Still, I tried. I always try.

The room is all glass and low gold light, the kind of pretty that costs so much money it stops looking like money and starts looking natural.

Men in dark suits stand in loose circles with women who know exactly when to laugh.

Waiters move between them with champagne and tiny food arranged like jewelry.

Someone is talking about Singapore near the windows.

Someone else says Daniel's name and then laughs, warm and impressed, like even his name belongs better here than I do.

I'm standing near the bar with a glass of white wine I don't want.

Daniel said seven-thirty.

"I'll find you before dinner," he told me in the car, his hand on my knee at a red light. "I'll introduce you to Marcus properly tonight."

Properly.

I held on to that word like an idiot.

Marcus Chen is Welling's managing partner, which means he's important in the way men become important when nobody in a room ever has to explain why.

I've technically met him twice. Both times Daniel put his hand on my back and said, "This is my wife, Nora," and Marcus said something polished and forgettable before Daniel got pulled into another conversation.

That's how it usually happens. Daniel brings me close enough to be seen, then the work takes him back.

I used to think that was temporary. Early in the marriage, I thought everything hard was temporary.

Late nights, missed dinners, the way he could be in the same house and still not be with me.

I told myself we were building something.

I told myself careers had seasons. I told myself Daniel loved me, and that should have been enough to make all the lonely parts less lonely.

It wasn't.

Across the room, Daniel is with Charlotte Proctor.

I spot them in the mirrored column before I let myself turn my head. It's a trick I've learned at Welling events: how to look without looking. How to check where my husband is without becoming the kind of wife who checks where her husband is.

He stands beside Charlotte and Marcus and two men from the Singapore team.

His shoulders are relaxed, his head bent slightly so he can hear what Marcus is saying.

Charlotte is angled toward him in that easy way she has, like the room naturally makes space for her.

She wears black, because of course she does.

It fits her like confidence. Her hair is tucked behind one ear.

Her hand rests lightly on Daniel's sleeve while she laughs.

It's probably nothing. That's the awful part — most of the things that hurt me are probably nothing.

A hand on a sleeve. A missed introduction. A work dinner that runs late. A text that says sorry, still here when I've already eaten alone. One nothing is survivable. A marriage can hold one nothing.

It's the pile of them that gets heavy.

I take a sip of wine and wish immediately that I had eaten more than half a protein bar over the sink at four o'clock. My stomach turns. I set the glass down and reach for one of the little salmon things from a passing tray, mostly because I need something to do.

The waiter smiles at me. I smile back too brightly.

I'm good at this. Smiling at strangers. Looking fine. Standing in rooms where nobody is cruel enough to make a scene and nobody is kind enough to notice I'm drowning.

I start toward the bathroom because I need a minute. Or because I need to move before I become part of the carpet. The bathrooms are past a cluster of Welling people, and I'm almost clear of them when I hear Charlotte's voice.

"Daniel's wife," she says.

I stop before I can stop myself. There's nothing sharp in her tone, and that almost makes it worse.

"She runs a little catering business, I think. Very sweet."

Very sweet. The words land softly — that's how they get in.

Nobody gasps. Nobody laughs at me. Someone murmurs something I don't catch, and Charlotte says, "No, she's lovely," like she's being generous. Like I'm a small harmless thing she has decided not to step on.

I keep walking.

In the bathroom, two women are finishing their lipstick at the mirror. They glance at me, smile politely, and leave. The door closes behind them with a soft, expensive click.

I turn on the tap and put my wrists under cold water.

For a second I'm back on Newark Avenue in Jersey City, standing under the striped awning outside Honey & Rye at six in the morning with flour on my jeans and the first tray of almond croissants cooling behind the counter.

There was a man named Mr. Alvarez who came every Saturday and bought six.

He said he was taking them to his grandchildren.

I knew he ate two in his car before he drove away because I saw him once, and after that I always put an extra napkin in the bag.

I had regulars. I had staff. I had a lease with my name on it and a sourdough starter I fed more consistently than I've fed myself some weeks.

I had brides who cried over sugar flowers and restaurant owners who trusted me with their dessert menus.

I had my own keys, my own invoices, my own tired body at the end of a day I had built myself.

Then Daniel's career got bigger.

Not all at once. That would have been easier to resent.

It happened slowly. A late meeting here.

A site visit there. A promotion, then a project, then another project that mattered too much for him to step back.

We were always almost at the point where things would settle down.

Almost at the weekend he would take off.

Almost at the dinner he would make. Almost at the life where I could stop being the flexible one.

I closed Honey & Rye because something had to give.

Daniel never asked me to. That's the sentence he would use if we fought about it honestly, and he would be right. He never asked. He just became the kind of man whose life required a wife at home, and I loved him enough to become her before I realized what it was costing me.

My reflection waits for me in the mirror.

The dress is right. My makeup is right. My pearls are right. I look like a woman who belongs to a man who belongs here.

My eyes are too bright.

I press a paper towel under them, because crying would be inconvenient and I'm nothing if not convenient.

When I come back out, Daniel is still across the room.

For one foolish moment, I think he'll look up.

I imagine it so clearly that my chest actually lifts for it.

His eyes finding mine. His face changing.

That private smile he used to give me at parties when we were younger and he still seemed surprised that I had come with him, like being married to me was a secret he got to keep in public.

He doesn't look up. Charlotte says something and Daniel laughs, and I stand there and miss my husband while looking straight at him.

That feels like the whole marriage lately.

At nine-fifteen, Daniel appears at my side.

"There you are," he says, a little breathless, like he's been looking for me.

I want to believe that. I hate how much I want to believe it.

"Here I am."

He touches my lower back. The touch is familiar enough that my body softens before the rest of me can object. Daniel smells like cedar and clean cotton and the whiskey he only drinks at these events. His hair is slightly mussed from running his hand through it. He looks handsome and tired and mine.

Still mine.

That's the confusing part. He hasn't stopped being mine. He's just stopped coming back to me in all the small ways that count.

"I'm sorry," he says. "Marcus grabbed me, then Shen had a question about the glazing timeline."

"Of course."

His eyes flick over my face. "Are you all right?"

I could tell him. The thought opens in me so fast it hurts.

I could say, No. I stood by the bar for nearly an hour waiting for you. Charlotte called my business little and sweet. I hate this room. I hate how small I feel in your life.

I could say all of it.

But Daniel's phone buzzes in his hand.

He glances down. Only for a second. Only a second.

That's the part I'll remember later — not that he looks, but that he looks so automatically.

His thumb moves over the screen. "Damn. The Singapore team needs--"

I step back before I mean to.

He notices then.

"Nora."

I hate when he says my name like that. Soft and worried, as if worry is the same thing as attention.

"I'm going home," I say.

His face changes. "Now?"

"I'm tired."

"I was going to introduce you to Marcus."

I smile because if I don't, my mouth will do something worse.

"At ten?"

He looks pained. "I know. I'm sorry. I got pulled in."

"You always do."

It comes out quiet. Not sharp, not dramatic, just tired.

That seems to trouble him more than if I had snapped. Daniel knows what to do with sharp things. He can meet them. Contain them. Solve them. Tired is harder. Tired means the thing has been happening for a long time.

Charlotte appears at his shoulder before he can answer.

Naturally.

"Daniel," she says, then looks at me with a smile that's perfectly kind. "Oh, Nora. I didn't mean to interrupt."

She didn't mean to. Maybe she really didn't. I'm so tired of injuries that come with plausible deniability.

"Marcus is asking about the equity structure," she says.

Daniel's attention shifts. I feel it happen. His body is still angled toward me, his hand still close to mine, but some essential part of him has gone across the room already.

He looks back at me, torn now, and that almost undoes me.

Because he does love me. That's what makes this hard — if he were cruel, I could hate him cleanly.

"Go," I say.

"I'll be ten minutes."

I hold his eyes a moment.

He believes that too.

"Goodnight, Daniel."

I leave before he can decide whether to follow.