Neglected and Forgotten Wife of a Billionaire Husband (Her Marriage in Crisis #139)
1. Luisa
— ? —
Luisa
The gym smelled like dust and old wood and the ghost of every Saturday we’d spent here since Wade signed the lease three years ago.
I pressed my palms to the barre and stretched my calf, watching the afternoon light cut through the high windows.
The building used to be a textile factory.
Now it was ours, mine and Wade’s, every Saturday from two to five.
No phones. No work. No Buckley Marine emergency that couldn’t wait.
Just us, and the scratched hardwood, and whatever playlist I’d made that week.
Sacred. That was the word he’d used when he handed me the key.
I switched legs and tried not to think about how hollow that word sounded now.
Once, it hadn’t been hollow at all. The first Saturday after he signed the lease, he’d blindfolded me on the sidewalk with his own hands and walked me up three flights of stairs, ignoring my complaints, laughing every time I threatened his life.
When he uncovered my eyes there was a barre bolted to the wall, a secondhand sound system, and a sign he’d made himself, crooked marker on butcher paper: LU’S PLACE.
“I can’t give you your company back,” he’d said, meaning the dance company I’d walked away from, the whole version of myself I’d folded up small to fit inside his world.
“But I can give you Saturdays. Every one of them. This is sacred, Lu. Just us.” And for two years it had been.
That was the cruelty of it. He’d built me the one room in his entire gilded life that belonged only to us, and then, one canceled Saturday at a time, he’d stopped showing up to it.
A marriage going quiet doesn’t announce itself.
There’s no door slam, no screaming match, no clear before-and-after.
It’s just… dinners eaten alone because a meeting ran late.
His assistant’s voice on the phone instead of his.
The anniversary he covered with a diamond tennis bracelet because he’d missed the reservation, twice, and thought jewelry could fill the gap.
It couldn’t. I wore the bracelet exactly once and felt like a woman being paid off.
And the croissants. God.
He used to bring me one every Sunday morning from Delphine’s, chocolate with blue star sprinkles, stupidly specific, because I’d mentioned once that I loved them and Wade Buckley didn’t forget details.
He built submarines for a living. His brain cataloged everything.
For two years, every single Sunday, that croissant appeared on my nightstand like clockwork.
He hadn’t brought one in four months.
I dropped into a split and let the stretch burn. The silence in the gym pressed against my ears. I checked my phone again. 2:47. He was supposed to be here at two.
And what made me feel crazy was that he was still Wade underneath it.
Last Tuesday I’d woken up at 2 a.m. to find him in the garage, grease up to his elbows, fixing my bike chain with a headlamp strapped over his glasses.
He’d looked up at me like a raccoon caught in a trash can, completely unrepentant.
“The derailleur was clicking. It would’ve driven you insane. ”
And last week, at some charity dinner, he’d cornered me by the bar and spent twenty minutes explaining why the hull curvature on the new destroyer prototype was “geometrically perfect, Lu, I mean look at these stress distribution models-” His glasses had slid down his nose.
His eyes had gone bright and wild the way they did when a new idea had its hooks in him.
I’d watched his hands move through the air and thought: There you are. There’s my husband.
I still loved that brain. I loved the way it worked, the obsessive focus, the genuine wonder he brought to problems most people couldn’t even understand.
I just wasn’t sure that brain remembered I existed anymore.
My phone buzzed.
Wade: Can’t make Saturday. Emergency with Dolores. I’m sorry. I’ll make it up to you.
I stared at the screen until the words blurred.
Third week. Third Saturday in a row.
The emergency had a name, and the name was Dolores Vandermeer.
His ex. The girl he’d dated for two years before me, the one his father had handpicked, the daughter of Alton’s late business partner. Old money, old family, old expectations. They’d broken up before Wade and I ever met, and he’d married me, and I’d thought that settled it.
Then her mother died a year ago, and everything shifted.
Dolores was grieving and fragile. And family, according to Alton. Dolores needed Wade: rides to the cemetery, someone to handle the estate lawyers, a shoulder to cry on at 11 p.m. on a Tuesday.
And Wade went. Every time, he went.
I’d been patient and understanding. I’d told myself that grief was temporary, that helping an old friend through loss was the decent thing to do, that my husband was just being kind.
But patience was starting to taste like blood in my mouth, and I was getting tired of swallowing it.
I called him.
The phone rang twice. Three times. Then a click, and a voice that wasn’t his.
“Wade’s phone.” Warm and musical, a little breathless. “Oh, Luisa, hi! He’s in the shower, sweetie. Want me to take a message?”
The gym floor tilted.
In the shower. At her place. While she answers his phone like it’s the most natural thing in the world.
“No,” I heard myself say. “No message.”
I hung up.
I sat down right there on the hardwood, my legs folding under me, and the silence in the gym turned into a ringing in my ears that wouldn’t stop.
My hands were shaking. Why were my hands shaking?
It was nothing. He’d said it was nothing, over and over, she’s just a friend, Lu, she’s going through hell, I can’t abandon her-
In the shower.
Sweetie.
Want me to take a message?
My phone rang. Wade’s name on the screen. I watched it ring four times before I answered.
“Lu.” He was breathing hard, like he’d sprinted to get to the phone. “Lu, it’s not… her pipe burst. The one under the kitchen sink. I came over to fix it and I got soaked, completely soaked, and she offered her shower, that’s all, I swear to God-”
“Okay.”
“It’s nothing. Luisa, I need you to hear me, it’s nothing.”
“I said okay.”
A pause. I could hear him thinking, trying to gauge whether I meant it. “Are you… you’re not angry?”
I was something, but I didn’t have a word for it yet. “I understand. Pipes burst. You helped.”
“I did. That’s all I did.”
“Okay.”
“I love you,” he said, and he sounded so desperate for me to believe him that I almost did. “I’ll make Saturday up to you. I promise.”
“Sure.”
“Lu-”
“I’ve got to go. The gym’s paid for, I might as well use it.”
I hung up before he could say anything else. Then I sat there in the dusty light and tried to breathe, and told myself that I believed him, and swallowed it down whole.
***
That night, I unpacked the new espresso machine.
Wade had ordered it two weeks ago, some Italian thing with too many buttons, because he’d noticed I’d been looking at coffee makers online. That was Wade all over. He noticed everything except the ways he was breaking my heart.
I set it on the counter and smoothed my hand over the chrome. Pretty thing. Needed a name.
“I’m gonna call you Giancarlo,” I said, mostly to myself. “You look like a Giancarlo.”
Wade was in the hallway, pulling on his jacket. He paused. Looked at me. A muscle worked in his jaw.
“It gets old, Luisa.”
I blinked. “What?”
“The naming thing.” He shoved his arm through the sleeve, not meeting my eyes. “Everything has to have a name. The car, the plants, the espresso machine. It’s just-” He exhaled sharply. “It gets old.”
My chest went very quiet.
I’d named things since I was a kid. It was silly, I knew that, but it made the world feel friendlier.
The first time Wade caught me talking to my succulent, Come on, Rodrigo, drink up, he’d laughed so hard he snorted, and then he’d spent ten minutes asking me about the naming taxonomy, genuinely fascinated, because that was how his brain worked.
Now it gets old.
I set Giancarlo down carefully. Didn’t say anything.
Wade grabbed his keys from the bowl by the door. He was half out already, his mind somewhere else, somewhere that had a name, and it wasn’t mine.
“Dolores is coming to the gala with us Friday.” He said it from the doorway, like an afterthought, already turning to go. “Dad’s idea.”
The door closed before I could answer.