Ignored By Her Billionaire Husband (You Chose Her. Now Grovel. #14)

Chapter 1

The bag had been in the closet for two years.

Erin took it down at twenty of six and set it on the bed, and it made almost no sound.

She had packed it in stages. A sweater here, a spare charger there, the good scissors, Wyatt's blue rain boots that he had grown out of and then grown back into.

Nothing anyone would miss. Nothing that would make a gap on a shelf.

She was already dressed. She had been dressed since four.

The Point house was quiet at that hour in a specific way.

Not empty. The heat came on. The refrigerator in the back kitchen ran and stopped.

Somewhere below her the tide was doing what it did, and the windows were old enough to let a little of it through.

Five years and she still woke up to that water like it belonged to someone else.

She checked the hall. Nothing.

The box was under the window seat, behind the folded quilts, in with a stack of manuscript pages she had never once been asked about.

On top of the pages was a blue ledger from the hardware store in Camden.

Four ninety-nine. She had bought three of them at a time so she would never have to buy one in a hurry.

She put the ledger in the bag first. Then the pages. Then the sweater on top of both, which was what the sweater had always been for.

Wyatt was asleep on his side with one arm out of the covers. Five years old and still slept like he'd been dropped there. She stood in the door for a second, no longer.

"Hey," she said. "Bud. Up we go."

He didn't wake. She hadn't expected him to.

She got an arm under his knees and one behind his back and lifted, and he made a sound and put his face into her neck and went straight back under.

He was heavier every month. There would come a morning when she couldn't do this, and she'd thought about that more than she wanted to admit, and she had made sure this morning was not that one.

The stairs were the hard part. Sixteen of them, and the fourth from the bottom had a voice.

She took it on the outside edge, where it didn't.

Gail was in the kitchen.

Erin had known she would be. Gail Norquist had been getting up at five in that house since before Erin existed in it, and there was no version of this morning that got past her. That was fine. Erin had accounted for Gail the way she accounted for everything.

Gail was at the counter with the coffee not started yet, holding the empty pot. She looked at Erin. She looked at the bag on Erin's shoulder and the boy on Erin's hip and the fact that Erin had her coat on at ten of six.

She didn't say anything.

"Morning," Erin said.

"Morning."

That was all of it. Gail put the pot down. She went to the pantry and came back with a package of the crackers Wyatt liked, the ones nobody bought but him, and she held them out.

Erin took them. Her hand was steady. She noticed that it was steady and filed it, because she was going to want to remember it later.

"Thank you," she said.

Gail's mouth moved. Not a smile. "Drive careful. It's wet out past the gate."

"I will."

"He's got that call at seven," Gail said, and then stopped, because she had heard herself, and because it wasn't her business, and because she had just told Erin exactly how much time she had.

Erin nodded once. She went out through the mudroom.

The dish by the front door was blue-and-white and had been in that house longer than anyone living. It held keys and stamps and, for five years, a ring.

Not the wedding band. She was still wearing that, and would be until a lawyer told her it didn't matter anymore.

The other one. Graham's grandmother's, the one that had come to her already sized, in a box, at a dinner where nine people watched her open it. She had never been asked what she thought of it. She had never once been asked whether she'd have picked a different stone.

She worked it off. It came off easier than it used to.

She held it a second. She thought about leaving a note under it and decided the note was for people who wanted a conversation.

She put the ring in the dish and heard it touch the china, and that was the loudest thing that happened in that house all morning.

The car was where she'd left it, nose out, because she'd turned it around at ten the night before while Graham was still in Boston and there had been nobody in the drive to think it was strange.

She got Wyatt into his seat. He half-woke for the buckle and said something with no words in it and went back down. She put the bag in the trunk and shut it with her hip instead of her hand.

Then she stood there for a second in the cold, in front of a house with four generations in it, and she did not look up at any of the windows.

The drive was a quarter mile of crushed shell. The gate took six seconds to open, and she knew that because she had timed it once, standing right here, the fall she was pregnant and could not sleep.

Then the causeway. Water on both sides, flat and pewter-colored, the light just starting to come up behind Camden.

Two lobster boats out already. A truck coming the other way flashed its lights at her out of politeness and she flashed hers back, and that was the last human transaction she had on Gannet Point.

At the end of the causeway the road turned inland and the trees came up on both sides, and the house went out of the mirror, and she didn't watch it go.

There was a turnout a mile past the gate where people stopped to take pictures of the harbor. Erin pulled into it and put the car in park and sat.

Wyatt slept. The engine ticked.

She had a little over an hour before the seven o'clock call, and after the call there would be maybe another hour before anyone thought to go up to the yellow room, and after that it would move fast. Vanessa would be on the phone by nine. There would be a version of a plan by lunch.

None of which mattered, because Erin had a lawyer and Vanessa didn't know it, and that was the whole of her advantage and it was enough.

She got her phone out. She turned off the thing that let the house see where the car was — a feature that had been installed for her safety, in the winter, on the ice, by a man who had never once used it to check whether she'd gotten home.

Then she sat with the phone in her lap and noticed something.

She was not counting.

For five years there had been a number running somewhere behind everything else.

Hours since he left. Hours until he was back.

Days in Boston, nights in Boston, the difference between the two.

She had gotten so good at it that she could produce the number without looking for it, the way you know how much money is in your pocket.

The number was gone. It had gone sometime between the stairs and the gate and she hadn't felt it go.

She put the car back in drive.

Five years and three days ago, she had been carrying a box of place cards up the back stairs of that same house.

Three hundred of them. Somebody had spelled a state senator's wife wrong and there had been a small crisis about it at nine at night, and Erin had said she'd redo them, because saying yes was still, at that point, a thing she did automatically.

A week out from the wedding, she used to say, when she said it at all.

Wrong. Three days. She kept getting that wrong for years afterward, the way you get a thing wrong when your body doesn't want to hold it.

Three days.

The back stairs came up past the study. There was a landing there where the house turned, and the study door was on that landing, and the study door did not close all the way.

It never had. The frame had swollen sometime around the war and nobody had ever planed it, because in that family you did not plane a door, you simply knew which doors did not shut.

She heard Vanessa first.

"—not asking you to be cruel about it. I'm asking you to be honest about it, which you have not been, with me or with yourself."

Erin stopped on the third stair below the landing. She would think about that later too. Not why she stopped. Why she didn't cough, or scuff a foot, or do any of the ordinary things a person does when they realize they are about to hear something.

She stopped because she wanted to hear it.

"It's done, Van."

"Nothing is done. Nothing is done until Saturday and possibly not then." Papers. Vanessa always had papers. "I want you to look at it. That's all. Look at the number."

"I've looked at it."

"Then look at it as a man who has to live for forty more years and not as one who wants a quiet week."

Erin shifted her grip on the box. Whatever it was, it was on paper, and Vanessa had brought it to the house at ten at night three days out, which meant Vanessa thought there was still time to use it.

"She's a decent person," Vanessa said. "I'm not saying she isn't. I'm saying she is a decent person you have known for four months, and there is a shape this can take where everyone is provided for and nobody spends thirty years being polite at Christmas."

"Don't."

"The child is provided for. Generously. Permanently. She's provided for. You've read the number, it's not an insulting number, it's a—"

"Van."

"She'd take it." Vanessa said it flatly, the way she said everything. "I want you to hear me. They always take it. Every single time, in every one of these, they take it, and then five years on they are grateful, and they say so."

There was a silence in the study that went on slightly too long.

"No," Graham said.

That was all. One word, and Erin could not tell from three stairs down what it was attached to — the number, the shape, the Christmases, the woman.

She would carry that one syllable around for five years without ever once taking it out and looking at it, because she already knew what the rest of the conversation was going to be, and she was right.

Papers moved. Vanessa let out a breath through her nose.

"Then say the true thing at least," she said. "To me. Once. And then we never do this again."