Chapter Six
JAYNE CAME OFF THE evening boat and drove straight to him.
He opened the door to his mother and wanted, at thirty-four, exactly what he’d wanted at eight—for her to walk in and fix a thing he couldn’t name.
She stepped into the hall, set down her overnight bag, and reached for him.
That was when Laila’s voice floated out from the kitchen, easy and at home, asking whether anyone wanted the kettle on.
Jayne froze with her hand half-raised. The color drained out of her face and came back wrong.
She turned toward the kitchen, then back to Maddox, and he watched her understand in real time that the woman in there was Laila Denatto.
She hadn’t known. He hadn’t told her on the phone.
She’d walked in expecting a grieving son and found the other woman making tea in his wife’s kitchen.
“She’s staying here,” Jayne said. It wasn’t a question.
“For a few days. She needed somewhere, and I—”
“I’ll take a hotel.” She picked up the bag again before he could argue.
“I’m not sleeping under a roof with that woman, Maddox, and if you had sense left you’d feel the same.
” She held his gaze a moment, and whatever she was looking for she didn’t find, because she scowled.
“I came to help you. I can’t help you while she’s in this house, drinking tea out of your wife’s cups like she’s already won something. Call me when she’s gone.”
She didn’t know the full truth of it yet, and he didn’t tell her. He walked her to the car, taking the easy way out.
She lowered the car window before pulling away. “Maddox.”
He stepped closer. “What?”
“Think hard about who’s still in that house.”
His gaze flicked toward the front door. “Laila?”
“Not just who she is. Why she’s here. Why she came back now.”
He hesitated. “I will.”
Mom’s eyes narrowed. “Will you?”
“Yes.” He nodded.
Jayne held his gaze another second. “Then don’t give yourself the easy answer.”
She raised the window and drove away, leaving him in the driveway with every piece of the warning and no idea how to put them together.
HE’D LIVED IN QUIET houses. He’d grown up in one, after his father died, a big cold house with his mother holding it together by will.
He knew the ordinary kind of quiet. This was a different animal.
Every room carried the quiet Paige had left behind.
It followed him from the study into the kitchen, then upstairs to the bedroom where her side of the bed stayed cold.
He lay in it that night and couldn’t understand why he couldn’t breathe.
He remembered her singing, badly and tunelessly, over dishes she didn’t have to do because they had staff for it.
It had irritated him for two years. He would have given the collapsed merger and everything under it to hear it now.
She interrupted him mid-sentence when she got excited about something at the shelter, some dog placed, or some kid who’d come in nervous and left with a kitten.
Every night, she pressed her cold feet to his shins and started the same old argument.
He’d complained every time. He’d give anything now for the complaint back.
The coffee and the smooth-running house weren’t the ache.
He missed Paige, her noise, her heat, and every opinion she gave him whether he’d asked for it or not.
The missing was so total and so sudden that he lay awake trying to put a name to it and couldn’t.
He missed the whole of the life he’d walked past every morning for two years without once stopping to look at it.
He understood at least part of it lying there, and the understanding dragged everything behind it, every canceled dinner and every night he’d come up past midnight to find her already turned toward the wall. Every time she’d tried to reach him, and he’d told her to wait for after the deal.
She’d told him at that anniversary dinner, in plain words, that she was tired of waiting for him to come back.
He’d said the right things, then gone straight back to the study.
She’d watched him do it and had probably known exactly what it meant.
She’d been leaving for at least a year, and he’d been too busy closing his grandfather’s deal to notice his own marriage going into foreclosure.
He knew all of that now and still couldn’t say plainly what losing her had done to him.
Unable to sleep, he got up. He found Laila in the living room after dark, curled on the white sofa with a glass of his wine and a magazine, arranged like a woman waiting to be noticed.
She looked up and smiled, warm, ready, and he understood abruptly that she’d been waiting all evening for this, for him to come find her at the end of the worst day of his marriage.
“I need to ask you to find somewhere else to stay,” he said. “Tonight, if you can. Tomorrow at the latest.”
The smile held a beat too long. “Maddox, you’ve had a terrible day. You shouldn’t be alone in this big house. You should—”
“I need to try to save my marriage.” He kept his voice even, which took everything he had left. “I can’t do that with you sitting in my living room. It isn’t personal, Laila. My wife won’t believe my sincerity if I keep you here when she was uncomfortable with your presence because of our past.”
An emotion he couldn’t name crossed her face, gone before she folded the magazine closed and set down the glass with great care.
“Of course,” she said, sweet again, unbothered on the surface.
“Whatever you need. I’ll call a car in the morning.
” She rose, smoothed her skirt, and paused at the foot of the stairs.
“She’ll come back or she won’t, you know.
That was always going to be true whether I was here or not. ”
He didn’t answer, and she went up to the guest room.
He stood alone in the living room. The house was quieter than it had been since the wedding, and only then, with the wine glass still warm where Laila had left it and the whole ruined day behind him, did he let himself understand what had been coming at him all evening.
He loved Paige. Not with the loud consuming thing that had swallowed him for Laila at twenty and taken a decade of grief to bury, but with something quieter, a steadiness he’d walked past every morning for two years without once stopping to look at.
Paige, with her cold feet, her shelter hair, and her bad singing over dishes she didn’t have to do.
He loved his wife. He’d told another woman in his kitchen that he’d married her for a merger, and his wife had heard him say it.
The terror came all at once, and it wasn’t grief. It was closer to waking up.
Then Maddox reached for the only skill he trusted.
He went at it like a campaign, the same play that had won him the company, the merger, and Paige in the first place.
He called the jeweler she liked, then ordered the anniversary dinner remade by the restaurant that had catered their wedding.
Next, he wrote David a letter, in his own hand, listing every concession he’d make, every Templeton cost he’d absorb, and every right he’d sign away.
If he made the numbers large enough, she would have to see that he meant it.
He worked on it all night instead of sleeping, adding money, concessions, and spectacle until the campaign looked large enough to prove what he meant. Certain he’d found the answer at last, he sent the first order out the next morning as Laila’s car arrived to take her to wherever she was staying.