Betrayed by Her Billionaire Husband (The Unseen Wives #3)

Chapter 1

Cole told me Tiffany was moving back to Seattle the way you'd report a change in the weather, like it was happening to both of us equally and neither of us had any say in it.

We were in the kitchen, the absurd one, the one the architect had photographed for a magazine before we'd ever cooked an egg in it.

Forty feet of honed Calacatta and a range that cost more than the first house I grew up in, and the only thing in that whole gleaming room that was actually mine was my grandmother's Sunbeam Mixmaster, jadeite green, chipped on one beater housing, sitting on the marble like a working-class relative at a black-tie wedding.

I was creaming butter and sugar in it when he came in holding his phone, and I knew before he said a word that something had landed, because Cole has two faces, the one he wears for me and the one he wears for an audience, and he'd walked into our own kitchen wearing the second one.

"Tiff's coming home," he said. "She took the Meridian advisory seat. She'll be back end of the month."

The Mixmaster kept turning. I had learned, over eleven years with this man, that the most useful thing I could do in the half-second after he said something that mattered was nothing. So I creamed the butter and I watched the paddle fold the pale ribbon over on itself and I said, "Home.”

"Seattle. You know what I mean."

"I do," I said. I knew exactly what he meant. He meant home the way a person means it about a place they grew up, except Tiffany did not grow up in Seattle, Tiffany grew up in Connecticut, and the thing that made Seattle home to her was that Cole was in it.

But if I acknowledged that fact, I got called jealous and jealousy is the cheap word people reach for when they don't want to look at the expensive truth underneath it.

I was not jealous of Tiffany. I was afraid of her, the specific way you are afraid of a thing that has hurt you before and is walking back through the door smiling.

I met Cole my sophomore year of college, in a fluorescent-lit campus kitchen at two in the morning, where I was baking off two hundred dinner rolls for a catering job and he was looking for somewhere quiet to study.

He stayed and proofed dough he had no idea how to proof and we talked until the sun came up.

He was twenty and broke and brilliant and he had a way of looking at you like you were the most interesting problem he'd ever been handed, and I fell for it the way you fall down stairs, all at once and with no dignity.

By the time I understood that the look was something he could turn on and off, I was already in love with the version of me that existed inside it.

Tiffany was his best friend before I ever showed up. Freshman-year best friend, dorm-across-the-hall best friend, the girl who'd decided in the first week of college that Cole Brandt was going to be somebody and had appointed herself the keeper of his somebody-ness.

She was magnetic in a way I have never been and never wanted to be, magnetic enough to reorganize a whole room around herself without seeming to try, and she had decided, somewhere in those first months, that I was a phase.

She was very warm about it. That's the part nobody believes. She was never once cruel to my face.

She would put her hand on my arm and say Heather, you have to understand how Cole and I are, we're basically the same person, and then she would pull him out of whatever we were doing and into whatever she needed, and she would do it so smoothly that if I objected I was the one making it weird.

For four years I was the girlfriend who didn't get it. Then we graduated, and Tiffany took a job in London, and I exhaled for the first time in years.

Cole and I got to find out who we were without an audience, and it turned out we were good. We were really good.

He built Meridian out of a rented unit in Georgetown with three engineers and a whiteboard, and I worked the closing shift at a bakery in Ballard and brought home the day-olds, and we were broke and happy and we got married in a friend's backyard with a cake I made myself at four in the morning because I didn't trust anyone else to do it.

Then Meridian became Meridian. A company with a verb made out of its name.

And the money came in like weather, like the tide, like something with no off switch, and we moved to the glass house in Medina with the lawn that ran down to Lake Washington, and I kept saying I was going to open my bakery any month now, and the months turned into years, because there was always an event to host and a foundation to sit on the board of and a version of Cole's wife that the company needed me to be.

I was good at it, and I told myself good-at-it was the same as happy.

And now Tiffany was coming home.

"She's going through a divorce," Cole said, into my silence, like that explained the advisory seat, like a divorce was a job qualification. "It's been rough on her. I think being near friends will be good for her."

"Friends," I said.

"Heather." He set the phone down on my grandmother's marble, face up, and put both hands flat on the counter, and I watched him get ready to manage me, which is a thing I had not yet, in that kitchen, on that night, fully admitted he did.

"She's my oldest friend in the world. She helped me when nobody believed in me. I'm not going to pretend I'm not glad she's coming back. I'd like it if you could be glad with me."

I turned off the Mixmaster. The kitchen went quiet, that big expensive quiet, the lake going gray-gold outside the glass.

"I'm glad you're glad," I said, which was true and was also the most careful sentence I have ever constructed.

Cole heard the first half and not the second, the way he always heard the first half, and he smiled and kissed my temple and said he knew I'd come around, and went to take a call from Singapore.

I stood there with the bowl of pale ribboned batter and I thought about the four years I'd spent being a phase. I thought about the way Tiffany said how Cole and I are.

I thought, very clearly, in a voice that did not sound like fear at all, that she had not come back for just being friends, and that I was going to spend the next part of my life being told I was imagining it.

I was right about both. I want that on the record before anything else, because by the time Cole agreed with me, it was already too late to matter.

I scraped the batter into the pans. You can't leave it sitting; the leavening starts the second it's mixed, and if you wait too long the rise is already spent before it ever sees the oven.

My grandmother taught me that. Some things start whether you're ready or not, and the only choice you get is whether you're standing there when they do.