My Billionaire Husband Chose His Best Friend Over Our Marriage (Her Marriage on the Edge #7)

1. Six Months

One

Six Months

The ballroom at the Cross Hotels & Resorts flagship smelled like white peonies and money, and I had chosen both of those things myself, down to the last detail.

I stood near the entrance in the dress I’d picked three fittings ago — deep emerald silk, the color Damian once told me made him forget how to finish a sentence, back when a comment like that still felt like the most natural thing in the world instead of something I filed away and turned over later, checking whether it still meant what it used to.

I watched two hundred of the city’s wealthiest people drift beneath chandeliers I’d spent four months sourcing from a workshop outside Venice, small crystal drops that caught the light in a way no domestic supplier could match, no matter how many samples they sent me.

Every table setting was mine. Every floral arrangement — white peonies mixed with garden roses in low, asymmetrical clusters so they wouldn’t block sightlines across the tables — mine.

Every note the string quartet played in the corner, chosen from a list I’d spent two weeks narrowing down with the quartet’s director, arguing gently for warmth over grandeur.

Six months of my life, distilled into one perfect night, and I could feel every hour of it in the particular ache behind my eyes that came from caring too much about details no one else would ever consciously notice, but would absolutely notice if they were missing.

Tonight was the opening gala for the Meridian, Cross Hotels’ new flagship property, and the largest charity fundraiser Damian’s company had ever hosted.

The board had set a goal of two million dollars for pediatric care before the night even started — an enormous number that had made even Damian raise an eyebrow when the development committee first proposed it.

Watching the silent auction paddles go up around the room now, watching a bidding war break out over a week at the Maldives property between two hedge fund wives who clearly wanted to prove something to each other, I suspected we’d clear that number by dessert.

I hadn’t slept properly in a week. I’d been up until two the night before, walking the ballroom alone with a flashlight, checking that every place card sat exactly where it should, that the seating chart accounted for the two last-minute changes the events office had emailed me at nine p.m. I didn’t care about the exhaustion.

This was the kind of night that made the sleepless ones worth it — the culmination, the proof that six months of decisions I’d defended one by one, against three different board members and a caterer who’d wanted to cut corners on the raw bar, had actually added up to something whole.

“You did all this?” A woman I didn’t recognize touched my arm, gesturing at the room like it might answer her instead of me.

Diamonds at her throat, the unmistakable ease of someone who’d never once had to argue for a seat at a table like this one.

“It’s stunning. Truly stunning. I don’t think I’ve been to an event this beautifully done in years, and I’ve been to quite a lot of them. ”

“Thank you,” I said, and meant it, and felt something in my chest loosen for just a second — the particular relief of being seen doing the thing I was good at, even by a stranger who’d forget my name by the time her car service arrived.

“Are you with the venue, or with the design firm they hired?”

“I designed the event,” I said. “All of it, start to finish. I’m actually the host’s wife, if that matters.”

“It matters,” she said, delighted, like she’d stumbled onto a secret worth repeating to everyone at her table. “It absolutely matters. Someone should be telling people that tonight. Does your husband know how good you are at this?”

“He does,” I said, and the words came out easily, automatically, the way you answer a question you’ve stopped examining for truth. I laughed, a little embarrassed, and excused myself before the conversation could turn into something I’d have to manage instead of simply enjoy.

I found Damian across the room, deep in conversation with a city councilman near the auction tables, looking exactly like what he was: a man who built things and made them succeed.

Dark suit, no tie, the kind of unhurried ease that made people lean in when he talked, like whatever he said next might matter more than what they’d been discussing before he arrived.

He caught my eye over the councilman’s shoulder and something passed between us — pride, maybe, or just recognition, the private language of ten years married to the same person. We did this.

Except I had done this, specifically and completely, hour by hour for six months, and he had shown up tonight to be photographed in front of it, charming and effortless, thanking the board and the architects and the city in a speech I hadn’t seen yet but already half-knew the shape of.

For six months I had told myself that distinction didn’t matter.

That it was enough for him to be proud, even if the pride landed on the wrong verb — we built this instead of she built this and I benefited from it.

I was refilling my champagne near the bar, half-listening to two board members debate whether to close the silent auction before or after dessert, when my phone buzzed in my clutch.

A text from Luna, my assistant, who’d worked events with me long enough to know exactly which names required a warning: Camille’s here. Just fyi.

Just fyi. As if that phrase had ever once been neutral where Camille Rhodes was concerned. I felt my shoulders tighten before I’d even processed why, some old, well-worn reflex kicking in a half-second ahead of conscious thought.

I found her by the bar within a minute — she had a way of becoming the center of a room without appearing to try, dark hair loose over a black dress that cost more than my first apartment, laughing with someone from Damian’s board like she’d known him for years, which, for all I knew, she had.

She saw me and waved, easy and warm, the kind of warmth that always seemed to switch on precisely when there was an audience to witness it.

“Elena. This is incredible. I don’t know how you do it — six months of planning and you still look like you slept last night.”

“Six months and very little sleep,” I said, matching her warmth because I always did.

Because being cold to Camille made me look unreasonable in front of a room full of people who’d known her for two decades, and I had learned that lesson early and expensively, back when I’d tried it once and spent the rest of the night fielding gentle, concerned questions about whether everything was all right between me and Damian.

“I need to steal your husband for five minutes,” she said, already moving past me toward Damian, close enough that I caught the specific, expensive scent of her perfume. “Family emergency. Well — not family, but you know what I mean.”

I didn’t, actually. I never knew what she meant, only that it always meant Damian’s attention, redirected, immediately, without question, on a night when I had a hundred small fires of my own that needed exactly the kind of calm, decisive presence he was so good at providing to everyone except me.

I watched her reach him at the auction tables.

Watched his face change — that quick shift into focus he got when Camille needed something, a version of alert I rarely earned unless something was actively on fire in front of two hundred witnesses.

He said something to the councilman, apologetic, brief, already turning, and followed her toward the terrace doors without so much as a glance back to see if I’d noticed.

Five minutes, she’d said.

I looked at my watch. Then I looked at the two hundred people who still needed a party to run — a caterer signaling me about a timing question near the kitchen doors, a board member’s wife asking where the coat check had gone, the string quartet’s director catching my eye about whether to extend into a fourth set — and I put my phone back in my clutch, and I did what I always did.

I kept going. I smiled at the caterer, redirected the coat check question, thanked another donor whose bid had just crossed the six-figure mark for the Maldives trip, and told myself, the way I always told myself, that five minutes was nothing.

That I could give five minutes away without noticing the loss.

I didn’t know yet how wrong that math would turn out to be.