Stranded By My Space Billionaire Husband (Wives Betrayed #10)

CHAPTER 1

EVE

Simon is screaming into my shoulder, an angry little trumpet of a boy, eight pounds of pure rage and reflux. Sasha is in the bassinet doing her pre-cry warm-up, these small kitten noises that mean I have maybe ninety seconds before she joins the choir.

I have two babies, two arms, and one breast pump mocking me from the corner.

Mason’s side of the bed is cold. Cold cold. Sheets pulled tight, pillow untouched, a whole museum exhibit of a man who never came to bed at all, which tracks, because at midnight he kissed my forehead and said he’d take the four o’clock feed so I could get one honest stretch of sleep.

One stretch. That was the whole ask. Four hours, the basic minimum a normal human mammal needs to stay sane.

I lift Simon higher against me and start the bounce-walk, the special gait of the permanently sleep-deprived, and sure enough, Sasha opens up. Full siren. My daughter is five pounds eleven ounces and louder than the smoke alarm.

“Okay,” I tell them. “Okay, okay, we are a team. We are a very tired, extremely underpaid team.”

I check the monitor on Mason’s nightstand out of habit. His phone’s gone.

With a baby on my shoulder and the other scooped football-style against my hip, a maneuver that took me three weeks and one lactation consultant to master, I make my way downstairs.

The house is dark except for the glow leaking under the study door, along with voices. Lots of voices. Mason’s, and then the clipped conference-speaker chorus of engineers, and over all of it, bright and delighted with itself, Jessica Mort.

I stand in the hallway with my two screaming newborns and listen to my husband run a crisis call with the woman who has made a second career out of finding me inadequate.

The door isn’t fully closed. I nudge it with my elbow.

Mason is at his desk in a T-shirt and sweats, hair standing up, and even at four in the morning he looks like the cover of a magazine about men who own rockets. Screens cover the wall behind him. On the biggest one, Jessica, polished and camera-ready at whatever hour it is wherever she is.

Everyone goes quiet when they see me. A tiny redheaded woman in a milk-stained robe with an infant on each arm tends to shift the tone of a meeting.

“Eve.” Mason is already on his feet. “Hey. I’m sorry, the call started at two, thermal numbers came in wrong, I was going to—”

“Take the four o’clock feed,” I say. “It’s currently four-oh-seven.”

His face does the wince, the apology already loading. He means it. That’s the worst part. He always, always means it.

On the screen, Jessica leans toward her camera. “Oh, look at this. The whole family.” Her smile is all teeth. “The twins are learning early that Daddy belongs to Odyssey.”

A couple of the engineers laugh. The polite kind of laugh you give the CEO of the company you’re trying to merge with.

“Jessica,” Mason says, like someone asking a colleague to please stop.

Sasha picks that moment to spit up down my robe. Perfect. A standing ovation.

“I’m sorry,” Mason says again, to me now, already reaching for a baby. “Give me twenty minutes. Thirty, tops. I’ll come up and take them both, I swear.”

I look at him, my gorgeous, brilliant husband, the man who cried so hard in the delivery room the nurses thought he was the patient, and I believe that he believes it.

“I’ve got them,” I say. “You have a launch vehicle on fire, apparently. Metaphorically. God, hopefully metaphorically.”

“Nothing’s on fire,” says an engineer, and then, quieter, “yet.”

I take the babies back upstairs.

By the time Mason appears in the nursery doorway, the sun is coming up and both twins are fed, changed, and sleeping the sleep of the smug.

Simon took five ounces and only returned one of them to me, which in this house is a banner day.

Sasha ate like a tiny dignified bird, slow and suspicious, but she ate, and I wrote the number in the feeding log with the solemnity of a monk copying scripture.

Mason stands there taking it in, the two bassinets, the burp cloths on every surface, me sitting on the floor between them because standing has become theoretical.

“You did all of it,” he says.

“Five weeks of practice.”

“Eve.” He crouches next to me. “I’m sorry.

The thermal protection numbers on the second stage came back wrong, and if the ablation model is off, the whole test schedule—” He stops.

Rubs his face. “And none of that is your problem at four in the morning. I know. I promised you the feed and I didn’t take it. I’m sorry.”

“I know,” I say. Because he is. He truly is.

“Tonight,” he says. “Tonight I’m taking every feed. Both babies. You sleep until you’re bored of it.”

“After the launch,” I say.

He winces. “The test is Tuesday.”

“Mason. The test is always Tuesday.”

He doesn’t have an answer for that, because there isn’t one. There’s a launch, and then there’s the next launch, and then the one after that. I’ve been married to the one after that for three years.

He kisses me, kisses each twin on their absurdly tiny heads, and goes to shower, and I sit on the nursery floor listening to the water run and think about how love can be real and insufficient at the same time, like a beautiful house with no heat.

The doorbell rings at ten.

Rosa, our housekeeper, brings the box up to the nursery because I am pinned under a sleeping Simon and moving is not an option.

It’s enormous, white and gold, tied with a ribbon.

The card on top says MORT DYNAMICS in embossed letters, and under that, in handwriting so elegant it could frame it, For Eve — a few things for the babies, and a few things for you.

Congratulations on your beautiful new chapter. — Jessica.

“Ooh,” Rosa says. “Fancy.”

“Jessica Mort has never done anything nice in her life without a knife in it somewhere,” I say. “Open it carefully. Check for a severed horse head.”

She laughs, unties the ribbon, and starts unpacking.

Flowers, gorgeous ones. Two tiny cashmere blankets, monogrammed with S and S, which is so extravagantly thoughtful it makes my teeth hurt.

Silver rattles. A bottle of champagne, non-alcoholic, with a little tag that says for when you’re ready to celebrate you again.

Then Rosa reaches the bottom of the box and goes quiet.

“What?” I say.

She lifts out a book. Then another. Then three more. She reads the first title out loud in the flat voice of someone reading a grocery list. “Finding Yourself After Motherhood.”

“Next.”

“When Your Husband’s Career Comes First.”

I look at her. She looks at me.

“Next,” I say.

“Reclaiming Confidence After Baby. The New Mother’s Guide to Letting Go.” She picks up the last one and her mouth presses into a line. “Building a Life Beyond Your Marriage.”

Simon sleeps on. The flowers smell incredible. The whole nursery smells like a florist married a boutique and had expensive children.

“Under the books,” Rosa says grimly, “there is another card.”

Handwritten. Jessica’s fountain pen, Jessica’s ink, Jessica’s knife.

Eve, darling — motherhood is such a dramatic adjustment. I thought these might help. Everyone says the first year is about learning to let go. All my love — J.

Rosa sets the card down carefully, face up, Exhibit A.

I should be angry. I want to be angry. Mostly I’m tired, and under the tired there’s this small cold humiliation that Jessica Mort, who has met my children precisely never, who sends monogrammed cashmere like an angel and then buries insults under it like a cat burying treasure, has correctly identified the exact profile of my life.

The books aren’t random. They’re a diagnosis.

She’s looked at my marriage and written out the treatment plan.

Mason comes home at nine that night. I hand him the card. I watch him read it.

His jaw tightens. “Jesus. That’s—” He shakes his head. “She’s provoking you. This is what she does. She pokes, and if you react, you’re unstable, and if you don’t react, she escalates. It’s a game to her.”

“It is not a game to me.”

“I know, honey. I’ll talk to her.”

“Why is she so comfortable?” I ask. He looks up from the card. “That’s what I keep coming back to. Jessica Mort sends your wife books about surviving an absent husband, to our house, with her name on them. She’s not even hiding it. Why does she feel safe doing that, Mason?”

“Because she’s Jessica. She’s like this with everyone.”

“She’s not like this with you.”

He’s quiet for a second. The study light is still on downstairs. His phone buzzes on the counter. His eyes flick to it and back.

“I’ll talk to her,” he says again. “Tomorrow. But Eve, don’t give her what she wants. Don’t let her in your head. The merger talks are at a really delicate stage and she is looking for leverage anywhere she can find it.”

“So she gets to attack me, and I get to show restraint?”

“That’s not—” He stops. Exhales. “Yeah. That’s a fair way to put it. And it sucks. But it’s temporary.”

“Until when?”

He picks up his phone. The screen lights his face from below, and I watch my husband read something about his rocket, and I watch him leave while he’s still standing in front of me.

“Until after the launch,” he says.

He says it gently.

He says it like a promise.

In the morning, before I’ve even finished my first coffee, he’s dressed and gone. There’s a note on the counter in his terrible doctor handwriting — taking both feeds tonight, cross my heart — and Rosa watches me read it over the rim of her mug.

The gift box sits on the dining table. Somebody, Rosa presumably, has put the flowers in water, arranged them beautifully, and moved the books into a stack off to the side, spines out, quarantined. When Your Husband’s Career Comes First, face up at seven in the morning.

“Did he see them?” Rosa asks. “The books?”

“He saw the card.”

“Mm.” She takes a sip. “And?”

“And he’s going to talk to her.” I pick up the top book. There’s a woman on the cover in white linen, standing on a beach, arms open, embracing her new unencumbered life. Nobody with a newborn has worn white linen since the invention of the newborn.

“Mm,” Rosa says again.

Mason goes to mission control straight from the driveway. I know because I get the calendar notification — shared family calendar, his little act of faith that technology can be in two places at once even if he can’t. ODYSSEY — THERMAL REVIEW, all day, the block stretching out past dinner.

Jessica will be there. He’ll talk to her, or he won’t, and either way she’ll know the books landed, because that’s why she sent them. The gift isn’t the books. The gift is that I had to show them to my own husband and wait to find out what he’d do.

He texts at noon: Spoke to J. She says it was sincere, she picked the titles herself, she meant well. Eye-roll emoji.

His own wife’s humiliation, punctuated with a cartoon face.

I text back: Sure. And pythons hug.

He sends back a laugh-cry emoji. I put the phone face down and go back to the feeding log, which is the only document in this house where the numbers never lie to me.

Simon wakes at two, angrier than ever, and I spend an hour walking him upright while he drills his complaints directly into my collarbone.

Sasha wakes at three and eats with the grim reluctance of someone auditing a job she’s not sure she wants.

By five I have managed to eat half a granola bar, standing up, over the sink, which is basically fine dining now.

This is my new chapter, per Jessica.

Mason gets home at nine. He says it gently, the same promise, always gently. He has said it a hundred times, and every single time he has meant it, and every single time there has been another launch behind it, all the way out to the edge of the sky.