In Love with My Secret Husband (Wrong for You #11)

Chapter One

THE BATHROOM MIRROR was bare.

The mirror was large and expensive and completely empty. No gold star stickers in the corners. No tiny adhesive residue where they used to be.

She had scraped every one of them off, but he hadn't noticed they were missing. Not when the first one disappeared. Not when half of them were gone. He only noticed now, a full week after his wife had sat across from him at dinner and said, quietly, that she needed to talk.

He hadn't even looked up from his phone. Sure. Next week.

That was what he always said when Laina needed something that required him to stop and be present.

Next week. After the season. When things slow down.

Except things had finally slowed down. He had retired six months ago.

Twelve seasons, a championship, three MVP awards, and he had walked away from all of it because he thought it was time.

Time to be the husband he had never been. Time to make things right.

Instead, everything had gone wrong. And meanwhile his wife had been peeling gold stars off his mirror one by one while he brushed his teeth beside her and didn't notice.

Next week was today. And the mirror was bare.

He brushed his teeth. Rinsed. Dressed. Went downstairs.

And stopped.

Laina was in his kitchen.

She was wearing his old practice jersey, the Waymakers one with the torn hem that she'd stolen out of his closet so many years ago he'd stopped looking for it.

Her hair was up in the knot she slept in, the one that listed to the left and shed bobby pins like a tree shedding leaves.

She was holding a mug he had never seen before, something white with red letters. Her thermos, the one that said Mrs. B on the bottom, the one she had used every single morning of their marriage, was washed and put away in the cabinet.

The cabinet was still open. This was another thing about their marriage that had never changed. Laina always forgot to close cabinets, and unfortunately, it was one of the few things he had been able to do for her as a husband.

A man who had one of the most successful hockey careers in history, and with more money than he would ever be able to spend in several lifetimes...

And that was one of his crowning achievements as a husband.

Closing cabinets behind his wife.

Something on the counter caught his eye, and his jaw clenched. Divorce papers. Next to her staff badge.

In the corner of his eye, he caught Laina jerking, her back turning ramrod straight.

It was a familiar posture. Something he had noticed over the years she would do when she was terrified.

When she was about to check the online results of an exam.

When she was about to read something she wasn’t sure would be good or bad.

And now...

His soon-to-be ex-wife could only be scared of one thing.

And that was him.

The knowledge had his chest tightening as he finally turned to look at her.

Her chin was up and her shoulders were back and her hands were wrapped around the mug so tightly her knuckles had gone white. She looked like a woman who had practiced this in the bathroom mirror for a very long time.

He watched Laina square her shoulders. And then she started...babbling. Not talking. But babbling. Because his wife was now afraid of him.

"I rented an apartment. It's near campus. Two bedrooms. And the lease is month-to-month so it's flexible."

She stopped. Her throat worked. Her body shaking in ways that one could and couldn’t see. And the only reason he knew this was because he knew her.

He knew that the babbling was armor, rehearsed and polished, all the facts in a row, square footage and deposits and lease terms delivered in the same bright, rapid voice she used at parent-teacher conferences when she was explaining to a father twice her size that his child had bitten another student.

He knew that even though she was babbling now, it wasn’t for lack of practice.

Because his wife...

She would make a good athlete, actually, because she was a big believer of practice.

So he knew she had practiced for hours before this, but because she was now terrified of him, her husband...

She had ended up babbling while telling Troy about this new life that she intended to start without him.

“I don’t foresee any problems—”

A better man than him would have eased her burden by telling Laina that it was okay. That she didn’t have to try so hard. Because he got it.

Too bad for her, though, Troy was not a better man.

He was just a man whose wife of seven years was about to leave him for good, and he was not the kind of man to just accept it without a fight.

“Laina.”

And so he cut her off.

“I want you to say all of those things to my face.”

She managed to turn to his direction. But her gaze only got as far as his collarbone, the place where she used to press her mouth when he came to bed late after a road game, half-asleep and reaching for him in the dark because Laina reached for people even when they pushed her away.

Even when they forgot to reach back.

"I...”

His fists clenched. He prepared himself to hear the words all over again—

“I d-don’t love you anymore.”

But instead, his young wife succeeded in doing something that his opponents had always said was impossible to do, and that was to catch Troy completely off guard.

Did Laina just say...she no longer loved him?

He stared at her.

Saw the way she had paled.

And he just...

He just couldn’t tell.

This wife he had once thought—arrogantly, he now realized—he knew inside and out...was now someone whose words had become something he couldn’t discern. And it made him suddenly think...he really might lose her for good.

Troy wanted to say something.

But for the life of him, he just didn’t know what to say.

And when she sensed that he was about to speak—

Laina suddenly ducked under his arm, and a moment later, she was gone, the front door closing behind her.

And Troy...

It was as if he was frozen in place as he listened to her car start in the driveway, the engine sound getting smaller and smaller until the house was quiet in a way it had never been quiet before. Not empty quiet, but gone quiet, the kind that gnawed at Troy all the way to his soul.

He slowly looked around him. On the wall opposite the kitchen, the framed photo from his retirement ceremony still hung where Laina had insisted on putting it.

Troy at center ice in The Res, the Waymakers' arena, with the crowd on their feet and Old Goldie's voice cracking over the speakers as he said, And that's the last shift for the greatest player this franchise has ever seen.

Laina had cried harder than anyone that night. He remembered that now.

He saw the cabinet door she'd left open swung in the draft. The divorce papers on the counter, and her signature on it, which didn’t resemble at all the tiny, pretty mess of scrawled lines he was more familiar with.

Her signature on the divorce paper looked like she had spent hours on it. Like every line...made his wife bleed.

He put the papers down.

He had to.

The next thing that drew his attention was her mug.

The Mrs. B one. She didn’t go anywhere without it.

The one time he had asked her if she would like to replace it with a newer and expensive one, Laina had looked at him, aghast. This is the first thing I owned as your wife. I would never part with it.

And yet...

She had left it behind her now.

Troy set the mug down and looked at the staff badge.

Her photo beamed up at him: Laina Blackett, Kindergarten Teacher, mid-laugh, hair falling into one eye.

The Laina in this photo was the Laina he had met the first time.

Beautiful. Innocent. Optimistic. And as he stared at her photo, his mind slowly drifted to the past.

He remembered what she impishly insisted on calling their ‘meet-cute’, mostly because she loved seeing his pained expression every time she did so.

And as for their so-called ‘meet-cute’, it was when at a hockey game he had attended as a spectator, way up in the bleachers, and she hadn’t recognized him at all.

She had accidentally dumped an entire tray of nachos into his lap, and even to this day, he recalled how her face had completely turned red like cherries.

“I am so, so sorry, I'm not usually—I mean, I guess I’m usually this clumsy, but not usually onto people, and you have cheese on your—oh no, it's everywhere, I'm so—"

He'd handed her a napkin. She'd used it on his shirt instead of her own hands. Three weeks after that, he had proposed, they had their secret courthouse wedding, and on their wedding night, she had somehow ended up wearing one of his old shirts, and he remembered thinking, Mine.

Seeing her in his shirt, that was when it had hit him.

This beautiful, innocent girl whose smile could light up even the darkest of nights...

She was his.

That first night, she had babbled like usual, her words only stuttering to a stop when his hands curved around her waist, and her fingers ended up curling into the front of his shirt.

Her eyes had been big and dazed when they met his, her words spilling out in a whisper.

“I’ve n-never—”

“I know.”

“I’m probably going to be terrible at this.”

“You won’t be.”

“You can’t possibly know—”

He had cut her off with a kiss, her lips immediately parting under his, and of course he had been right.

She had not been terrible. In fact, she had been the opposite.

From the moment her arms had gone around his neck, and her shaking body had arched into his, everything had been perfect because she was perfect.

Seven years had passed since that night, but Troy still hadn’t forgotten what it meant and how it felt when he had slowly pulled the shirt over Laina’s head, and she had covered her face with both hands.

“D-Don’t look at me—”

“You know I’ll do more than that.”

“T-Troy!”