Chapter 2 – MADDIE
MADDIE
The dress was the green of deep water, silk that moved like it had a mind of its own.
I stood in front of the full-length mirror and turned, watching the way it caught the light along my hip, the way the tailor's mended hem fell clean to the floor now.
I'd pinned my hair up and left a few strands loose at the nape, the way Damon used to like.
Presumably, he still did, but he didn't express much lately except his disapproval.
I had come to assume that if he said nothing, he was alright with it.
In any case, I looked like a woman who belonged on the arm of a Sterling.
I was also a woman whose husband should have been home an hour ago.
I checked my phone again. Nothing. The car was due to leave in fifteen minutes, and the drive to Ellemore was forty, and the party started at seven.
"Don't be late to your own sister's engagement party," I told the empty room. "Please, Damon. Not tonight."
I heard the garage door before I heard the car, that low mechanical groan. Then his step on the stairs, faster than usual, and the door opening, and Damon coming through it already half out of one jacket and reaching for the other on its hanger.
"I know," he said. "I know. The Tribune woman wanted a follow-up and I couldn't—" He stopped.
He stopped, and my husband looked at me for the first time in weeks, maybe months.
The second jacket hung forgotten from his fingers. His gray eyes moved over me, the dress, the hair, the line of my throat, slow, like he was reading something he hadn't expected to find written there.
"You look nice," he said. "Really nice."
My heart did something stupid. A flutter, light and unwelcome and impossible to suppress, the kind of thing I'd told myself I'd grown out of.
He didn't say things like that. Damon noticed the things I arranged, the rooms and the flowers and the seating charts, but he rarely noticed me, not like this, not with that particular focus that made me feel briefly, dizzily, like the most important fixture in the house.
"Thank you," I said, and hated how breathless it came out. "You're not bad yourself. When you actually wear both halves of the suit."
That earned a half-smile. He shrugged into the second jacket and crossed to the mirror beside me, and for a moment we stood there together in the glass, the two of us, the picture-perfect Sterlings. A matched set.
That was the word for us. Matched. Not chosen. There was a difference, and I'd spent eight years pretending I couldn't feel it.
I knew the shape of the truth even if no one had ever said it to my face.
Before our parents sat down over scotch and decided their children would marry, there'd been someone else.
Emily Cavendash. Premed, golden-blonde, the girl Damon had wanted when wanting was still a thing he was allowed to do.
She hadn't wanted him back, not then, not with medical school in front of her like an open road.
She'd chosen a program out of state and a future of her own design, and into the silence she left behind, our families had pushed me.
I was the correct answer to a question Damon had never wanted to ask.
I'd known it from the start. Known I was second.
And I'd married him anyway, because somewhere underneath the arrangement I'd believed the thing girls like me are taught to believe, that love can be grown like a garden, that proximity and patience and devotion would eventually bloom into the thing I'd traded my whole self for. The thing I'd traded my art for.
It hadn't bloomed. Not the way I'd dreamed.
But it hadn't died either. That was the truth I held onto on the bad nights.
Damon was never cruel, exactly. Just cold, just elsewhere, just married to a company he loved in a way I could never compete with.
So I'd never tried. I'd settled for making myself as smooth as silk, settling into all the spaces where there was a need, and making his life easier.
Making sure he and his family knew I belonged.
Damon had never said he loved me, no, but over the years I'd watched the ice recede in increments. A kiss that lingered a half-second. A hand at the small of my back at a gala that wasn't strictly necessary. You look nice. Really nice.
We'd never had the whirlwind. No grand passion, no fight in the rain, no version of us that the movies would bother filming.
And lately even the quiet parts had gone quieter, weeks stretching between the nights he reached for me in the dark, and when he did it was gentle and competent and over, like a man checking a box rather than a lover exploring his territory.
It wasn't bad. Damon was skilled in bed, if routine.
He always made sure I finished before he did, but sometimes it felt like he did it more as a chore, out of obligation rather than longing.
But I loved him. That was the foundation everything else was built on, however cracked it had gotten. I loved him, so it had to be enough.
It had to be.
"We should go," I said. "We're already late."
Ellemore had turned out exactly as I'd seen it in my head.
The sun was sliding low when we arrived, and the whole west wall of the ballroom had caught fire with it, amber pouring across the floor just like I'd promised Lisa it would.
The flowers spilled off the tables in cream and blush, the amaranth trailing down like something poured rather than placed, and the arch over the head table looked like a ruin that nature had decided to reclaim, sparse and wild and a hundred times better than a wall of peonies would have been.
Nobody knew I'd done it. That was the strange ache of it. The whole room glowed because of choices I'd made in ten seconds on a phone call, and to everyone here it would simply be, the way beauty is supposed to be, effortless and ownerless.
Filling in the spaces in between and fading into them, just like always.
Quin found me before we'd cleared the entrance. She came in a rush of pale blue silk and dark hair, throwing her arms around my neck.
"Maddie. Maddie. Look at it. Look at all of it.
" She pulled back, blue eyes shining, gripping my hands.
"This is the most beautiful thing I've ever seen and I know it was you, don't even try to deny it, Lisa told me everything.
You're a magician. You're a witch. Thank you. God, thank you, I don't deserve you."
"You deserve all of it." I squeezed her hands. "You only get engaged once. Allegedly."
She laughed, bright and unguarded, and that laugh was worth more to me than half the people in the room knew how to give. Then she turned to her brother and jabbed a finger into his chest.
"You. You have a treasure, do you understand me? An actual treasure, and I hope you spoil her exactly the way she deserves to be spoiled."
Damon glanced at me, and something flickered across his face, gone before I could name it.
"He does," I said. I smiled when I said it, and it wasn't technically a lie.
I had the jewels. I had the cars and the closet full of things with French names, the standing appointment at the salon even celebrities couldn't get into and the black card with no ceiling.
I had every object a spoiled wife was supposed to have.
I just knew that Damon's secretary chose all of it.
That somewhere in an office a calendar reminder pinged and a thoughtful gift appeared in my name.
But Quin didn't need to know that, and the room was beautiful, and her face was alight, so I sold the not-quite-lie. "He spoils me rotten."
Across the floor I spotted Curtis, easy to find because Maria was already orbiting him with her mouth pressed into a line. He'd brought a date, a willowy girl in red who looked about twenty-three and entirely unbothered by the Sterling matriarch's appraisal.
"He could have at least brought someone appropriate," Maria murmured as she reached us, kissing the air beside my cheek. "To his own sister's engagement. Honestly, that boy."
"She's lovely, Maria."
"She's temporary." But she said it with the resignation of a woman who'd given up on her younger son years ago, and let it drop.
We took our seats at the family table as the light deepened to bronze.
Maria and Brandon across from us, Quin and her handsome young state senator down the way, Curtis and his red-dressed mystery somewhere off to the side where Maria didn't have to look at them.
Brandon clapped his son on the shoulder, and the two of them dropped immediately into the only language they truly shared.
"You see the piece in the Journal this morning?" Brandon kept his voice low, but I was close enough to catch the iron under it. "That study. Where the hell did that come from?"
"Out of nowhere." Damon reached for his water, but stopped.
"Some independent lab, supposedly. Flagging cardiac irregularities in long-term use of the compound class.
It's garbage, Dad. Thoroughly debunked in every other case use that's come up.
Our trials were clean. Three phases, every one of them typical, not a single signal of anything off. "
"Then where's it coming from?"
"Where do you think?" Damon's jaw set in that way I knew too well.
"Brighton?" Brandon asked knowingly.
Sterling Pharmaceuticals had few who could be classed as competitors, but Brighton was among them.
And it was now helmed by one of Damon's college rivals.
Edmond Brighton, the former lacrosse player who had incidentally asked me out on more than a few occasions.
From time to time, I wondered if Damon remembered that. If he cared.
"Somebody's frightened of the launch numbers," Damon muttered, slicing into a piece of his steak. "You don't drop a study like that two weeks out by accident. It's a hit job, plain and simple, and the timing's so obvious it's almost insulting."
"The press won't see it that way."
"The press will see what we tell them to see. The Tribune piece runs Sunday and it'll bury this. I've got a handle on it." He finally drank his water, set the glass down with a click. "Trust me. I've got a handle on it."
Brandon held his gaze a moment longer, then nodded, and the conversation folded itself away as the senator stood to make a toast.
But I'd been married to Damon for eight years. I knew the difference between the voice he used when he believed a thing and the voice he used when he needed to. I've got a handle on it. He'd said it twice. He only ever said things twice when the first time hadn't convinced him either.
I watched my husband lift his glass and smile for the room, golden and certain in the amber light, and beneath the silk and the flowers and the perfect glowing evening I'd built with my own two hands, I felt a quiet dread building.
Damon had been chasing some undefined, ever changing goal from the beginning of our marriage, and even when times were good, his work consumed him. Now that there was actually trouble on the horizon, was he going to drift even further away from me?