My Billionaire Husband Doesn’t Think the Baby Is His (Her Marriage in Crisis #105)

1. Willow

— ? —

Willow

The candles have burned down to nubs.

I bought them this morning from that little shop on Fifth, the one with the old woman who always asks about Corey even though she’s never met him. She wrapped them in tissue paper like they were precious, and I carried them home thinking tonight would be different.

It’s not different. It’s never different.

I check my phone again. Three texts from him in the last four hours.

Running late. Don’t wait on dinner.

Then: Almost done. 30 more minutes.

Then, an hour ago: Sorry. Soon.

The roast went cold at eight. It’s almost eleven now.

I scraped my plate into the trash an hour ago, but his still sits across from me, untouched, the meat congealing in its own fat.

I should put it away, blow out what’s left of the candles, go to bed, and stop sitting here waiting for a man who isn’t coming.

But it’s our anniversary. Five years.

Five years of this.

The dining room looks ridiculous. I spent three hours setting this table.

The good china, the set we got as a wedding gift and never use because there’s never anyone to use it with.

Cloth napkins folded into little swans because I watched a YouTube tutorial and thought it would make him smile.

A bottle of wine breathing on the sideboard, the expensive kind he likes, the kind I bought because I thought maybe if everything was perfect he’d actually stay.

I don’t even like red wine. I never have. But he does, and I keep buying it anyway, keep pouring glasses I won’t drink, keep pretending we’re a couple who shares a bottle over dinner and talks about our days.

We used to be that couple. I remember when we couldn’t stop talking, when we’d stay up until 3 a.m. on his shitty twin mattress just to hear each other breathe. When did that stop? When did I become the woman who eats anniversary dinners alone and pretends it doesn’t break her heart?

I hear his car in the driveway and my whole body reacts before my brain catches up. My pulse kicks and my shoulders pull back before I can stop them. I hate myself for it, hate that after twelve years with this man I still perk up when he walks through the door.

The front door opens. Keys in the bowl by the entrance, that familiar clatter. Footsteps in the hallway, slower and heavier than usual.

“Willow?”

“In here.”

He appears in the doorway and he looks like hell.

Tie loosened, top button undone, hair a disaster from running his hands through it.

The shadows under his eyes have shadows.

He’s lost weight again, I can see it in his face, in the way his collar gaps at his neck.

He forgets to eat when he’s stressed. He’s always stressed.

But he’s holding a velvet box, and when he sees the table his whole expression shifts. Guilt, maybe. Or grief. They look the same on him these days.

“Shit,” he says. “The candles.”

“They were taller when you left this morning.”

He crosses to me, drops into the chair beside mine instead of across from me.

His hand finds my knee under the table, and even through my dress I can feel how cold his fingers are.

He’s always cold. I used to warm his hands between mine when we were kids, pressing them between my palms until he stopped shivering.

“I’m sorry.” He squeezes my knee, and I can feel the desperation in his grip.

“I know I said I’d be home by seven. The call ran long, and then there was an issue with the servers, and everything just kept piling up, and I couldn’t get away, and I know that’s not an excuse, I know you’ve heard it all before… ”

“It’s fine.”

“It’s not fine.” His voice cracks slightly on the word. “You cooked.”

“I cook sometimes.”

“You made this from scratch. I can tell.” He’s looking at the roast now, at the potatoes gone cold and gray, at the green beans sitting limp in their dish. “Is this your grandmother’s recipe? The one with the garlic and rosemary?”

My grandmother’s recipe. Not my mother’s.

My grandmother, who taught me to cook when I was twelve, who let me stand on a step stool and stir the gravy, who died three years ago and left me her cast iron skillet and almost nothing else because everything else went to my mother, who I haven’t spoken to in five years.

“Yeah,” I say. “You always liked it.”

He closes his eyes. His jaw works, that little muscle twitching under his skin, and I know he’s angry at himself. I used to find that attractive, that intensity, that coiled energy. Now it just makes me tired.

After a moment he slides the velvet box across the table toward me.

“Open it.”

I already know it’s going to be expensive.

It always is. Last year it was a tennis bracelet, diamonds set in platinum, so heavy on my wrist it felt like a weight I hadn’t asked to carry.

The year before, earrings that cost more than my car.

I’ve stopped wearing most of it because I don’t know who that woman is, the one dripping in jewels, the one who’s supposed to be grateful for gifts she never asked for.

The box is heavy in my hands. I crack it open and the light catches.

A necklace. Diamonds and emeralds arranged in an intricate pattern, green stones the exact color of his eyes. It’s stunning. It’s the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen, and looking at it makes me want to throw up.

“Corey.”

“The emeralds reminded me of…” He trails off, his hand still on my knee. “Do you like it? I had it custom made. The jeweler worked on it for three months.”

“It’s beautiful.”

“But?”

I close the box. I do it gently, carefully, setting it on the table between us. He flinches.

“I don’t need jewelry,” I say. “I’ve never needed jewelry. I just wanted you home for dinner.”

“I know. I tried…”

“You didn’t try.” I keep my voice even, keep the tremor out of it by sheer force of will. “You scheduled that call for today. Our anniversary. You knew it would run long, they always run long, and you scheduled it anyway.”

“I didn’t have a choice. The timing…”

“There’s always a reason, Corey. There’s always something more important than being here. Than being with me.”

He pulls his hand off my knee. The loss of contact is immediate, a warmth disappearing from my skin. This is how it always goes. I say something true and he retreats, and I’m left reaching across a gap that gets wider every year.

“I’m sorry,” he says again. The words come out flat. Automatic. He’s said them so many times they don’t mean anything anymore, just sounds he makes to fill the silence.

“I know you are.”

We sit there in the dying candlelight, two people who used to be so good at this.

I think about the first time he said he loved me, in the back of his beat-up Honda, rain hammering the roof so loud we had to shout to hear each other.

I was seventeen. He was nineteen. He held my face in his cold hands and told me I was the only person who’d ever made him feel like he was worth something, and I believed every single word.

I still believe him. That’s the problem. I know he loves me. I’ve never doubted that. But love isn’t enough when you’re eating dinner alone at a table set for two, when your husband’s idea of showing up is throwing money at you and hoping it fills the hole where his presence should be.

“I wanted to tell you something,” he says finally. His voice is different now, softer and less certain. “I had this whole thing planned. I was going to say it over dinner, with the candles and the wine and everything, but then the call happened, and…”

“Tell me now.”

He turns in his chair to face me fully. In the dim light, with the shadows softening his features, he almost looks like the boy I fell in love with.

The scholarship kid who ate alone in the cafeteria, shoulders hunched, waiting for someone to tell him he didn’t belong.

The boy who looked at me like I’d hung the moon when all I did was sit down across from him and refuse to leave.

“I love you,” he says. “I know I don’t show it enough.

I know I’m never here, and when I am here I’m distracted, and you deserve so much better than what I’ve been giving you.

But you’re the only real thing in my life.

Everything else, the company, the money, all of it, it’s just noise.

You’re the only thing that matters. You’ve always been the only thing that matters. ”

My throat tightens. “Corey…”

“I’m going to do better. I swear. Once things calm down at work, I’ll delegate more.

We’ll take that trip to Italy you’ve been wanting.

Two weeks, no phones, no laptops, just us.

We’ll rent a villa in Tuscany and drink wine and you can drag me to every museum you want to see. I’ll even pretend to like the art.”

“You always say that.”

“I know. But I mean it this time. Things are going to change. I’m going to…”

He trails off. His eyes are losing focus, that heavy-lidded look he gets when the exhaustion finally catches up with him. His head droops forward.

“Corey?”

“Sorry. I’m just…” He blinks hard, fighting it. “I’ve been up since four. The time difference with the overseas teams…”

He doesn’t finish the sentence. His chin drops to his chest and his breathing goes slow and even, and just like that, he’s asleep. Mid-promise, mid-sentence, passed out in the dining room chair with his hand still reaching toward me across the table.

I stare at him.

This is it. This is my marriage. A husband who loves me so much he can’t stay awake long enough to say so. A beautiful necklace I didn’t ask for. A cold dinner and burned-down candles and another anniversary I’ll spend alone.

I get up slowly, careful not to wake him.

I find a blanket in the living room, the soft gray one we bought together when we first moved in, back when I still thought filling this house with beautiful things would make it feel like home.

I drape it over his shoulders, tuck it around him.

He stirs slightly, mumbles my name, but he doesn’t wake.

I blow out the candles. The smoke rises toward the ceiling and disappears.

The roast goes in the trash. I stand there looking at it, this thing I spent hours making, this meal that was supposed to mean something. Then I scrape his plate in after it and close the lid.

I load the dishes into the sink. I wipe down the counters.

I move through the motions of cleaning up a romantic dinner for one, and the whole time I’m thinking about that villa in Tuscany.

About all the places we were going to go, all the things we were going to do, all the promises he’s made that evaporated the minute his phone rang.

I stand in the doorway between the kitchen and the dining room, watching my husband sleep in a chair that costs more than most people’s cars. The velvet box sits on the table next to him, closed, untouched.

Tomorrow he’ll ask why I’m not wearing the necklace.

I’ll make up some excuse about wanting to save it for a special occasion.

He’ll nod and accept it because he doesn’t know what else to do, because presents are the only language he knows how to speak anymore, and neither of us will mention that our anniversary dinner ended with him unconscious and me alone in the kitchen crying into a dish towel.

We’re so good at pretending. We’ve had five years of practice.

I turn off the dining room light and head for the stairs. My phone buzzes in my pocket.

I pull it out, expecting a notification from the restaurant reservation I had to cancel, or maybe a spam email about winning a cruise I didn’t enter.

It’s Glenn.

John’s back in the hospital. It’s bad this time.

I stop on the stairs, my hand tightening on the railing.

John. Glenn’s John. His husband of three years, together for eight, a secret Glenn keeps so close that almost no one knows it exists.

I know because Glenn told me after his third glass of wine at the office Christmas party two years ago, his voice barely above a whisper, his eyes wet.

“I can’t tell anyone else. They wouldn’t understand. But I had to tell someone.”

I’ve kept his secret ever since. I’ve watched him light up when John drops off lunch at the office, watched him carefully introduce John as his “friend” to donors who wouldn’t donate if they knew the truth, watched him navigate a world that would rather he didn’t exist.

John’s been sick on and off for two years now. A congenital heart condition that never got caught until it was already doing damage. He’s been in and out of hospitals, good months and bad months, and Glenn has been slowly falling apart trying to hold it together.

I type back: How bad?

The three dots appear. Disappear. Appear again.

They’re talking about hospice.

The stairs blur in front of me. I sit down hard, my legs suddenly unable to hold me up, my phone clutched in both hands.

Hospice. They’re talking about hospice, which means they’ve stopped talking about treatment, which means John is dying and Glenn is losing the love of his life and nobody even knows because nobody’s allowed to know.

I’m here, I text back. Whatever you need. Anything. I mean it.

A pause. Then: I know. Thank you.

I sit there on the stairs, in the dark, listening to my husband breathe in the other room. Five years of marriage. Twelve years of love. A house full of expensive furniture and empty promises, and somewhere across town, my best friend is watching his husband die.

I’ve never felt more alone in my life.