Chapter Nine
SHE COULDN’T STOP THINKING about what Jayne had told her.
For three days, it haunted Paige around the house, at the shelter, into the shower, and even under the covers at two in the morning, turning over and over.
Maddox hadn’t chosen to ruin her. Maddox hadn’t set out to ruin her.
She’d needed to believe he had, and he hadn’t.
Elim had built him into a thing that ruined people without deciding to, and that was worse.
It meant he’d never seen her as a person with her own thoughts and feelings.
She’d always been a means to an end. When she thought he’d understood that and proceeded anyway, it was easier to hate him.
Knowing it was something innate in him now left her with no ability to blindly hate.
He was a grandson who’d been made into a weapon.
She could hate him, or the grandfather who’d made him, and she did, but she also understood better now though she didn’t want to.
She wanted to keep the hate and get rid of any compassion or sympathy. He hadn’t shown her any. She vacillated between wanting to burn down his world, wanting to forget he’d ever meant anything to her, and wanting to leave it all behind.
It didn’t make her want him back, and it didn’t blunt the anger either.
If anything, the anger had teeth now, because the boy Elim built was still the man who’d basically done a hostile takeover of her heart and called it a marriage.
Understanding the machine didn’t unmake the damage.
By Saturday, she needed the one place that had never once asked her to be anything but useful.
She drove to the shelter with a box of donated towels in the back seat, and for the length of the drive, she was almost herself again.
She was halfway across the gravel lot with a box of donated towels when she saw Maddox through the kennel-room window.
He was in casual clothes she didn't recognize, with a hose in his hand as water sheeted down a run while Devon pointed him toward the next thing to clean.
He looked absorbed, useful, and exactly the picture of a changed man.
Paige stood in the lot with the towels getting heavy in her arms, confused for a moment.
Before the suspicion caught up, a treacherous part of her just looked at him.
He was good at it already, gentle with the hose and careful not to spook the dog in the run.
He looked like he belonged there, and he looked lighter than she’d seen him in two years.
It hurt to look at because it was everything she’d begged him for across a hundred canceled dinners, showing up now, in laidback clothes, on a Saturday, for a room full of animals instead of for her.
No, it was for her. It was another performance.
Screw him.
That was how she read it. He’d found the one place that was hers.
He’d put on different clothes for it and picked the job that photographed as humility, and he’d done it where she volunteered, because being seen doing it was the whole point.
The flowers hadn’t worked, so now he was hosing kennels where she’d have to watch.
It was the campaign again in a different costume.
She was so certain of it that she never once considered she might be wrong.
The unfairness of it closed her throat. She’d wanted him to become this man for two years.
Now, he’d supposedly become him in three weeks, the second she left, and she didn’t believe it for a moment.
The timing told her exactly what it was.
A man didn’t transform in three weeks. He’d been quiet because he’d been planning a new play after the old one failed.
She didn't go in. She set the towels inside the front door, got back in her car, pushed the short blonde strands off her forehead, and called Claire from the parking lot before she'd even pulled out. "It's Paige. I need a favor, and I need you not to ask me why yet."
"Name it."
"The new weekend volunteer. Tall, sandy-brown hair, and handsome.” Her voice broke on that.
She cleared her throat. “Don't tell him anything about me, and schedule us oppositely.
" She gripped the wheel, then made herself let go.
"I just need our hours not to overlap. Can you move mine, or move his? Whatever's easier?"
“You mean Maddox Caldwell.” She put a hint of emphasis on the last name, clearly remembering Paige had married a man named Caldwell two years ago, though she’d been Paige Templeton as a volunteer for three years before that.
"I can do that.” She hesitated. “He's good with the jobs nobody else wants, for what it's worth. "
"I'm sure he is," Paige said too aggressively. She heard how it came out but didn't take it back. “He knows how to perform sincerity.”
She hung up. She’d turned down his worst move and arranged never to stand in a room with him again.
That was the smart call, the safe call, the only call.
It should have been a relief, but it wasn’t.
It was still grief. She sat in the lot a while with the engine running, watching the door she wasn’t going to walk through today.
Slowly, she realized keeping him out of her sightline wasn’t going to keep him out of her head.
Finally, she put the car in gear and drove home before she could talk herself into going in.
NEARLY TWO WEEKS PASSED after she engineered the schedule, and Paige didn’t see him at the shelter again.
She'd arranged it that way, so the not-seeing should have satisfied her.
Instead, it bothered her. Every shift, she caught herself checking the volunteer log without meaning to, looking for the name that was never on it during her hours.
She decided he'd quit. Of course, he'd quit.
The audience had walked away, and a performance without an audience wasn't worth Maddox's Saturday.
That was the whole point she'd been making to herself since the day on the step.
He'd volunteered to be seen. She'd made sure he couldn't be seen by her with his one-man show, so he'd stopped.
The read confirmed everything, which should have satisfied her too.
It didn't do that either. She'd wanted him to be exactly what he was, a man performing contrition until the cameras left, and the not-seeing was supposed to prove it, but she still couldn’t stop thinking about him.
She mentioned it to Kelsey once while they did the dishes.
Kelsey figured he'd just given up. Paige agreed out loud without being fully confident. She couldn't have explained why.
Then, on a gray Tuesday in the second week, she came in for her evening shift and found Skipper's kennel empty.
Her stomach dropped before she understood why.
The scarred old shepherd mix had lived in the last run for sixteen months, longer than any dog she'd known there.
He was too big, too damaged, and too old for anyone to want.
An empty kennel at Harbor Street meant one of two things.
Only one was good. The other had claimed more scarred senior dogs than Paige let herself count.
She stood at the wire door with her keys still in her hand and made herself breathe before she went to find Claire.
"Skipper...?" She couldn't finish the question in her anguish.
Claire looked up from the intake desk, took one look at Paige, and stood. "Oh. No. Paige, no. He got adopted."
The relief came so fast it left her dizzy. "Adopted. Somebody adopted Skipper?"
"Three days ago." Claire watched her carefully. "The weekend volunteer. The one you asked me to reschedule."
The floor tilted a degree under her.
"He took the worst dog in the building," Claire said.
"The one nobody could get near. Sat on that concrete floor with him for multiple shifts until the old boy decided to trust him, then did the adoption paperwork and took him home.
" She paused and was clearly choosing her next words slowly, watching Paige as she said them. "He never stopped coming, Paige. After I moved his hours, he kept every one of them. Worst jobs in the place, and he kept coming. He came when he wasn’t schedule sometimes.”
She shook her head. “It was all for show, just to get my attention.”
Claire frowned. “If he'd been doing it for show, he'd have quit when he never saw you watching. He did the opposite."
Paige stood very still. She had been completely wrong about what he'd done after she moved the shifts. She’d been sure he volunteered to be seen, she’d ensured she would never ben his audience, and as far as she’d known, he had vanished. The story was tidy and fit everything she knew about him.
It was also wrong.
The Maddox in her version would have quit as soon as he realized she wasn’t watching. The real one had adopted an unadoptable dog and kept scrubbing drains in an empty building on Wednesday nights, when the only witnesses were a teenager named Devon and a row of animals who couldn't tell anyone.
"I need to see," she said, and didn't fully know what she meant until she was in her car.
She drove downtown without deciding to, the same route she'd taken to his office when they were first married, and she still thought surprising him was a kindness he'd want. He could be at home, but she doubted it on a weekday.
She recalled some of those spontaneous visits with a pang that made it hard to breathe. She'd bring lunch he never ate and coffee he let go cold, and she'd tell herself he was busy, but busy was temporary, and the man she’d fallen in love with would come back to her when the merger was done.
He never did. There was always another task to ensure the merger. She'd learned to stop bringing lunch, and then she'd learned to stop expecting him, and somewhere in there, she'd learned to stop, full stop, expecting anything, which was most of what the marriage had taught her.
The Caldwell offices were downtown, glass and stone, the lobby she'd walked through as a wife, on her way up to a husband too busy to want her there.
The receptionist recognized her, hesitated, and let her go up, because no one had told the front desk that Mrs. Caldwell had moved out and filed nothing yet.
Paige took the elevator up with no plan for what she'd say.
She was prepared to be angry. She assumed he’d adopted Skipper then paid someone else to make the dog their problem, all so he could look good. She was prepared to storm in, demand to know where Skipper really was, and rescue the dog.
His office door stood half open. She stopped in the gap.
Maddox wasn't at the desk. He was on the floor of his own office in shirtsleeves, tie gone, a spreadsheet glowing ignored on the monitor above him, and stretched across the white leather office sofa was Skipper.
It was the twin of the one at the house, the same designer, with the same untouchable white leather Maddox had always kept pristine.
Barney the foster dog had incurred a glower from touching it.
The scarred old dog lay sprawled on his back with all four legs in the air, torn ear flopped inside out, dead asleep on cushions Maddox would once have guarded from a stray hair.
Dog hair covered the white leather now. A chew toy lay on the floor, and a water bowl sat by the credenza that cost a thousand times what the bowl did.
The sight took her straight back to the foster dog on the sofa at home.
That night, Maddox had looked at the fabric instead of Barney, and she'd sat with the dog on her lap and understood he'd never meant a word about getting a dog.
She'd carried the moment for two years as the first time she knew things were wrong with their marriage.
Now he sat on his office floor beside the matching sofa, letting the ugliest dog in the county drool on the leather, and he hadn't even risen to move the animal off it.
He looked up and saw her, and neither of them said anything for a moment. The dog didn't stir.
"He likes the sofa," Maddox said finally, like an apology or a confession. She couldn't tell which.
Her mouth was dry as her righteous anger fizzled. "I can see that."
"He wouldn't settle at the house the first week.
Paced all night and wouldn't eat unless I sat on the floor with him.
" He said it plainly with no angle to it.
Just a man reporting a fact about a dog he'd taken responsibility for, with phantom pain at being unable to help the dog sooner lacing his tone.
"Turns out he settles fine as long as he can see me, so he comes to work with me. "
Paige stayed in the doorway, because crossing the threshold meant something she hadn't decided.
She looked at the water bowl by the credenza, the chew toy, and the dog hair worked into white leather that used to be untouchable on the sofa at his house.
She tried to square it against the man she'd married and couldn't make the pieces meet.
She had no brace for this. She looked at the dog, the sofa, the man on the floor, and the anger she'd walked in with had no clear target.
That made her angrier because she'd wanted him to stay the man she could cleanly hate.
He was making that harder on purpose. Or maybe he wasn't, and she couldn't tell which was worse.
"I have to go," she said, and left before he could answer, because staying meant deciding whether she trusted what she'd just seen, and she wasn't anywhere close to ready.
She didn't owe him that. She'd spent two years extending him trust he spent like it was free, and one dog on a sofa didn't entitle him to anything.
The elevator down took longer than the elevator up or seemed to. She sat in her car in the Caldwell garage for ten minutes without starting it, seeing the dog on the white sofa and the man on the floor. None of it fit the conclusions she’d reached about the man she’d married.
She had needed to believe the man she left was the only man Maddox could ever be. He'd valued things over people. He'd married her for a merger. Whatever love he'd carried for her had never mattered enough to change how he treated her.
Those truths still made the leaving right because he’d married her as a strategy, and she'd been right to walk out the day she learned it.
His changes didn't touch that. They only made the future less simple than she'd wanted it to be.
The man she'd left belonged in the past, and Maddox no longer seemed content to remain him.
She started the car. She still didn't know what she wanted from him. She only knew she could no longer dismiss everything he did as another performance.