Abandoned By My Tech Billionaire Husband (Wives Betrayed #5)

CHAPTER 1

CHARLOTTE

There is a special kind of loneliness that comes with an ocean view.

I’m sitting in a villa that costs more per night than my first apartment cost per year, on a private island in the Seychelles, with a baby latched to my breast like a tiny, furious remora, and I have never felt more marooned in my life.

Elodie pulls off and screams. Her face goes the color of a ripe tomato, fists flailing, and I guide her back with the helplessness of a woman who has done this forty times in three weeks and still isn’t sure she’s doing it right.

“Come on, sweetheart. Work with me.”

She latches. I exhale. My nipples are cracked, my stitches are healing badly, and I haven’t slept longer than ninety consecutive minutes since a surgeon lifted my daughter out of me.

Through the floor-to-ceiling window, I can see my husband.

Xavier sits in the glass office he had installed on the far side of the infinity pool, back before Elodie was born, when he promised me he’d be taking real leave this time.

True leave. Months of it. The office was supposed to be for emergencies, a just-in-case measure, the way billionaires say just-in-case about things that cost six figures.

He’s been in it for nine hours today.

He’s on a video call, one hand carving shapes in the air, that profile that made magazine covers doing its thing under the recessed lighting. Even at forty yards I can tell he’s enjoying himself. Xavier loves a hard negotiation more than most.

Elodie’s sucking slows. Her eyelids droop. Please, I pray to no one, please go down for one full cycle.

My phone buzzes on the side table. A text from Xavier.

Can you keep her quiet for the next twenty? Maddox Neural is on.

I look at my daughter. I look at the text. I type back: She’s a newborn, not a conference room.

The three dots appear, vanish, appear again. Then: I know. I’m sorry. Twenty minutes.

I set the phone face down. The nurse Xavier hired, a kind Seychellois woman named Marie, is off until evening, because Xavier decided one nurse wasn’t enough and hired two, and then scheduled them in a way that leaves me alone every afternoon, which is exactly the part of the day when my body decides to remember it was recently cut open.

The ocean is a postcard outside. Turquoise, white sand, a fringe of palms. It’s gorgeous. It’s a screensaver with a mortgage.

Elodie startles awake and screams again.

“Okay,” I tell her, standing, bouncing, my abdomen pulling in a way that makes my eyes water. “Okay, okay. Tour of the villa it is.”

We do the circuit. Kitchen the size of a tennis court. Living room full of art I’m afraid to touch. The nursery Xavier’s designer put together in a weekend, white oak and organic cotton, a room so beautiful it makes me feel worse, because nothing in it is mine except the baby.

On the terrace, the warm air hits us and Elodie pauses her screaming to consider it. I keep moving. Past the pool. Close enough to the glass office that I can see Xavier’s screen, split into a grid of faces, one of them a woman with dark hair and cheekbones that could open letters.

Terese Maddox. Founder and CEO of Maddox Neural. I’ve read the profiles. Brilliant, glamorous, the most influential woman in machine intelligence, and currently on hour six of today’s call with my husband.

Xavier glances up and sees me through the glass. He smiles. It’s a real smile, the one that crinkles his eyes, the one that made me agree to marry him nine years ago in a courthouse in Boston with two strangers as witnesses. He holds up one finger. One minute.

I hold up my daughter. Your daughter.

He nods, which is not an answer, and turns back to the screen.

By the time Marie arrives at six, I’ve fed Elodie twice more, pumped once, cried once in the laundry room for no reason I can name, and eaten a protein bar over the sink because lunch requires two hands and I have one.

“He’s still in there?” Marie asks, taking Elodie with the ease of a woman who has raised five of her own.

“Mergers wait for no man,” I say.

She gives me a look I can’t quite read and carries my daughter toward the nursery. “Shower, Charlotte. I’ll keep her.”

The shower is the best eight minutes of my day.

I stand under the rain head and let the water hit my shoulders and think about nothing, which is a skill I’m relearning.

Before Elodie, I ran a research division.

I built the language architecture that made Holden Intelligence the company people trusted.

I gave keynotes. I once talked a room of senators out of a bad amendment using a story about my grandmother’s parrot.

Now my greatest daily achievement is remembering to drink water.

When I come out, dressed in the softest clothes I own, which are still not soft enough, Xavier is in the bedroom.

He’s changed into a T-shirt, hair damp from the pool house shower, and he crosses the room and wraps me up carefully, like I’m a package marked fragile. Everyone handles me that way now.

“Hi,” he says into my hair.

“Hi.”

“I’m sorry about today.”

“You said that yesterday.”

He pulls back and looks at me, and the guilt in his face is real.

That’s the thing about Xavier. He means every apology.

He just doesn’t change anything after them.

“We’re close, Charlie. This merger, it’s the biggest thing the company has ever done.

Terese’s prediction engine plus our language systems. It’s going to change everything. ”

“Great,” I say. “Can it change a diaper?”

That gets a laugh, quick and surprised. “Any day now. That’s the dream.”

“I’m serious, Xav.” I sit on the edge of the bed because standing has a time limit lately. “I’m drowning here. I know how that sounds, we have a villa and two nurses and a chef, and I’m still drowning. I need you. Not staff. You.”

He crouches in front of me and takes my hands. He’s handsome in the way of men who’ve never once been told no by a mirror, all dark hair and focus, and right now every ounce of that focus is on me, which is exactly the problem. It never stays.

“What do you need?” he asks. “Tell me. I’ll fix it.”

“Don’t fix it. Just be here. Take tomorrow off. Hold your daughter. Hold me. Let the merger sit for one day.”

His thumb moves over my knuckles. “One day,” he repeats, testing it, and I watch him not-quite-commit, watch the calendar run behind his eyes.

“What about another night nurse? A full night. You’d get real sleep.

That’s what you need most, sleep. I talked to a postpartum specialist in Geneva today, she’s the best in the world, she can be here by the weekend. ”

I look at my husband. He has heard everything I said and answered none of it.

“I said I was lonely,” I tell him slowly. “And your solution is to hire another person so you can keep working.”

“That’s not fair. I’m trying to give you rest.”

“I don’t want rest from strangers. I want my husband.”

Something crosses his face, frustration maybe, or confusion, and he smooths it away before it can settle. He stands, kisses my forehead, and says, “Let me make some calls,” as if my loneliness is a scheduling conflict that the right consultant could resolve.

He makes his calls from the hallway. I hear fragments. Zurich. Rates. Discretion.

Fine, fine, fine.

The next morning, for one strange and lovely hour, it works.

Elodie is fussing at five a.m., and Xavier gets up before I do.

He lifts her out of the bassinet with those big careful hands and settles into the armchair by the window, and she quiets instantly.

She goes still against his chest, eyes open, studying him with the grave concentration of a tiny elder.

“Look at that,” he whispers, wonder all over him. “She likes me.”

“Don’t get cocky. She likes being vertical.”

But I’m smiling. I’m actually smiling, because this is the man I married, this is what I pictured in the delivery room between contractions, the three of us in a pool of morning light.

His phone rings.

He glances at it. Silences it. It rings again.

“Sorry,” he says, “sorry, it’s the documentary team, they just need two minutes for the merger announcement footage. They want a shot of me with her.”

“The documentary?”

“It’s already contracted. Two minutes. She’s asleep anyway.”

She isn’t asleep, she’s staring at him, but he’s already answering, already murmuring yes, fine, keep it short.

A camera operator slips in through the terrace door with the hush of expensive equipment, and Xavier angles Elodie toward the lens, one hand supporting her head, his voice dropping into the register he uses for shareholders.

“Family has always been the foundation of Holden Intelligence,” he tells the camera. “Everything we build starts here.”

I sit on the bed in my milk-stained T-shirt, just out of frame.

They get their shot in four takes. Elodie cooperates until she doesn’t, and the moment she starts to cry the operator is already backing out, already thanking us, already gone, and Xavier passes her back to me with the apologetic grimace of a man returning borrowed property.

“That footage will be beautiful,” he says.

“I’m sure it will.”

He leaves for the office. The pool flashes blue between the palms. The villa settles into silence.

That night I feed Elodie alone on the terrace, because the evenings are the worst, because her latch falls apart when she’s overtired and so does mine, metaphorically speaking.

It takes three tries and both of us are sweating by the time she finally gets it, and I sit there in the dark with her small damp weight against me, too tired to go back inside.

Through the glass, lit up and golden, Xavier is still working.

His voice carries across the pool, not the words at first, just the cadence, warm and engaged. Then I catch pieces, because the night is quiet and the villa is open and my husband has never lowered his voice for anyone.

“It’s about emotional intelligence,” Xavier is saying. “That’s the whole future of this industry. Not computation. Connection. People don’t want a smarter machine, they want a machine that understands them.”

A pause. A woman’s voice answers, thin through the glass, and Xavier laughs.

“You’d know,” he says. “Honestly, Terese, nobody gets this like you do.”

Elodie’s mouth goes slack. Milk runs down her chin. My daughter is finally, finally full, and I sit very still in the dark, holding everything I have, watching my husband give my words to another woman in a room made of glass.

Because that’s my line. Emotional intelligence as connection, not computation. I wrote it in a memo six years ago. It’s in the company’s founding documents. It’s in half his speeches.

And tonight it’s a compliment for Terese Maddox.

I get up, slow, because standing fast still costs me. I carry Elodie to the nursery and lay her down and she sleeps, one arm flung out, utterly unbothered, the way only the truly secure can be.

Then I go back to the bedroom, close the doors against the light from the pool, and get into our enormous bed alone.

Tomorrow, Xavier promised once, things will calm down. After the merger. After the launch. After.

I lie there and listen to the ocean I can’t see, and I start counting all the afters I’ve already lived through.

I lose count before I fall asleep.