Destroyed by Her Billionaire Husband (The Unseen Wives #6)

Chapter 1 – Emily

Emily

The morning air still holds the last of the night's coolness when I set out, my sneakers finding their familiar rhythm against the pavement.

The gated community is quiet at this hour, the kind of hushed that makes me feel like I'm the only person awake in the world, though I know behind each of these manicured hedges and wrought-iron gates there are lives unfolding, marriages settling into their grooves, families eating breakfast in kitchens I'll never see the inside of.

I like this loop. Past the Hendersons' with their obsessive topiary, around the little man-made lake where the swans pretend to be wild, down the long slope where I can let my legs open up and pretend, just for a few seconds, that I'm running toward something instead of away.

Eight years. In two months it will be eight years since Ben slid that ring onto my finger in the rain because he'd been too impatient to wait for the reservation, too impatient to wait for anything, because that was who he was then.

Ravenous. Alive with wanting. I remember how he looked at me like I was the only thing he'd ever won that mattered.

I don't run from that memory. I run toward it, or I try to. But it keeps getting smaller, the way things do in a rearview mirror.

My lungs burn pleasantly by the time I round the final curve and our house comes into view—our house, though I still think of it as the house, this enormous glass-and-stone thing that echoes when I play, that swallows sound and light and, some days, me.

I slow to a walk, pressing a hand to the stitch in my side, and it's then that I hear it.

Laughter.

Ben's laughter.

I stop entirely, one hand still on my ribs, and I listen the way you'd listen for a sound you'd convinced yourself you'd only imagined.

But no. It comes again, rolling out through the half-open window of his study, warm and loose and completely unguarded.

It's the laugh I haven't heard in—God, I don't even know.

Years. The kind that used to come out of him when we were young and broke and he'd burn the pasta and we'd eat cereal for dinner and it didn't matter because we had each other and a future we couldn't yet see the shape of.

My heart does something complicated. Something hopeful and afraid at once.

I let myself in through the side door, quiet as I can, sweat cooling on the back of my neck. And I follow that sound like a woman following the smell of bread in a house that's been cold for a long time.

He's leaning back in his chair when I reach the study doorway, phone pressed to his ear, and when he sees me his whole face is still bright with whatever's just been said.

He looks young. He looks like the man I married.

And for one dizzy second I think, There you are. I knew you were still in there.

He holds up a finger.

One moment.

I stay in the doorway. I fold my arms over my damp shirt and I wait, and I let myself imagine who could possibly be on the other end of that call to make him look like this.

A friend from the old days, maybe. Someone who remembers who he was before the money made everyone around him careful.

I've been watching him grow more tense for months now—the tight jaw at dinner, the way he answers me in single syllables, the light in his study on until two, three, four in the morning.

I've been telling myself it's the merger.

I've been telling myself it's a phase. I've been telling myself a lot of things.

Whatever this is, I think, I want more of it. I want to bottle it. I want to know how to make him laugh like that again, because if I can just remember how, maybe I can save whatever it is we've become.

"No, of course," he's saying now, and his voice has gone gentle in a way that catches at me. "Don't be ridiculous. You'll stay here."

I blink.

"We've got more room than we know what to do with. Emily won't mind."

Emily won't mind.

I feel my own name land in my chest like a stone dropped into still water. I mouth it back to myself—mind what?—and something in my expression must shift, because Ben doesn't quite meet my eyes as he finishes. He swivels his chair a quarter-turn away.

"I mean it. Pack a bag and come. You shouldn't be alone right now." A pause. That soft laugh again, quieter this time, more intimate. "Okay. Okay. Text me when you're on the road. Drive safe."

He sets the phone down.

The brightness is still on him, but it's rearranging itself now, tucking itself into the corners of his mouth as he turns back to me. And I stand there in my running clothes, my pulse still high from the hill, and I ask the only thing I can think to ask.

"Who was that?"

"Tara." He says it easily, like it's the most natural thing in the world, like the name doesn't do to the room what it does. "She's going to come stay with us for a while."

Something in me goes very quiet and very cold.

Tara. Of course it's Tara. It's always Tara, the way weather is always weather.

I think of the last time, the anniversary of the company's founding, how Ben canceled our dinner because Tara was in town and needed help with a pitch.

I think of the time before that, and the time before that.

Tara arrives in our lives like a change in barometric pressure and everything Ben has—every ounce of that attention I've been starving for—bends toward her the way plants bend toward a window.

"She's going to be staying with us," I repeat. My voice sounds strange to me. Careful. "Here. In our house."

"That's what I said."

"You didn't think to ask me first?"

He frowns, and the last of that beautiful laughter drains out of his face, and I watch it go, and I hate that I'm the reason.

"Ask you? Emily, her fiancé just walked out on her.

Left her. Two weeks before the wedding, all the deposits paid, the whole thing.

She's devastated." He stands, and he's tall, he's always been so tall, and the study feels smaller with him on his feet.

"She needs to be around people who actually care about her right now.

That's what you do for the people you love. You show up."

"I'm not saying we shouldn't help her." I hear how thin my voice has gone, and I hate that too, hate how it shrinks when I need it most. "I'm saying you could have talked to me. This is my home too, Ben. Just a conversation, that's all I?—"

"Do you hear yourself?" He says it quietly, which is worse than if he'd shouted. "A woman's whole life just fell apart, and you're worried about being consulted."

"That's not?—"

"You have everything." He gestures around us, at the glass and the stone and the eight years and the ring still on my finger, and for a second I can't tell if he's talking about the house or about himself, about being the thing I have.

"You have everything, Emily. Would it kill you, just once, to think about someone other than yourself? "

The words go in clean. That's the thing about the ones that hurt most—they don't tear. They slide.

I open my mouth, and nothing comes. All the things I could say—that I've thought of nothing but him for eight years, that I've been trying so hard to find my way back to him that I've worn a groove in the floor of myself—all of it stays lodged behind my teeth, because I am who I am, and I have never learned how to fight a man who's already decided I'm the villain.

He shakes his head, like I've disappointed him in some way too obvious to name, and he walks past me out of the study, close enough that I catch the familiar scent of him, close enough to touch, and he doesn't.

I stand alone in the doorway with my heart still pounding from the hill, listening to his footsteps recede down the marble hall, and the house does what it always does.

It swallows the sound of him.

And then there's just me, and the silence, and the cold clean truth I've been running from all morning, all these months, maybe all these years: that I love a man who I'm no longer sure loves me back.