The Billionaire Husband's Neglected Wife

1. Ariah

— ? —

Ariah

The cartoon on the screen is objectively terrible - some animated dog with an inexplicable French accent who keeps falling off increasingly improbable structures - but every time he tumbles, Luca shrieks with laughter like he’s witnessing peak comedy.

Lucy, more discerning at four years old, has her thumb planted firmly in her mouth and her head heavy on my thigh, watching with the quiet intensity she brings to everything.

And Pietro is here.

That’s the part I keep circling back to, the detail that makes this Sunday morning feel stolen from someone else’s more charmed life.

My husband is sprawled across the sofa with his head in my lap, the newspaper abandoned on his chest because I keep stealing sections whenever his attention drifts.

He hasn’t checked his phone in two hours. I know because I’ve been counting like a woman with a problem, which I suppose I am.

“You’re doing it again,” he says without opening his eyes.

“Doing what?”

“Taking my paper.”

“I have no idea what you’re talking about.” I slide the business section under my thigh with what I consider remarkable subtlety. “You’re clearly hallucinating from all this relaxation. It’s been so long since you’ve experienced it, your brain doesn’t know what to do.”

He cracks one eye open, and there it is - that look.

The one that used to make my stomach flip during our first year of marriage, back when I was still figuring out how I’d ended up with a ring on my finger and a husband I barely knew and a merger that had swallowed my company whole.

The look that says he sees me, finds me amusing, and for this one suspended moment I’m the most interesting thing in his world.

“Liar,” he says, but he’s smiling. “Terrible liar. Your poker face is a disaster.”

“My poker face is excellent. You just think you’re more perceptive than you are.”

“I am extremely perceptive. It’s why I’m so successful.”

“It’s why you’re so insufferable, you mean.”

“Those aren’t mutually exclusive.”

Luca launches himself onto Pietro’s chest with an exaggerated battle cry, all sharp elbows and boundless four-year-old energy. “Papa, look! The dog fell again!”

Pietro makes a theatrical oof sound - though Luca actually is quite solid, so maybe it’s genuine - and wraps his arms around our son, pretending to be pinned. “He fell? Impossible. Show me.”

“There! See? He fell off the mountain!”

“That’s not a mountain, that’s clearly a very large hill.”

“Papa, it’s a mountain.”

“Are you sure? I think I need an expert opinion. Lucy, is that a mountain or a hill?”

Lucy removes her thumb long enough to deliver her verdict. “Mountain. Obviously.”

“Obviously,” Pietro repeats, grinning up at me. “I’ve been corrected.”

Something in my chest cracks open watching them - this easy affection, this unhurried warmth.

This is what I wanted. This is what I married into a business arrangement hoping might someday exist. Lazy mornings and cartoon dogs and my husband’s laugh rumbling through the room like something I could wrap myself in and stay warm forever.

I don’t say any of this out loud. I’ve learned not to name the good moments, because naming them seems to shatter whatever spell allows them to exist. Like pointing out a rainbow and watching it fade before anyone can turn their head.

“Mama.” Lucy tugs at my sleeve, thumb back in her mouth. “Mama, I’m hungry.”

“You just had breakfast, piccola.”

“Still hungry.”

“You had eggs and toast and half of your brother’s eggs because he wasn’t paying attention.”

“Still hungry,” she repeats, unswayed by facts.

This is Lucy’s way.

She metabolizes everything - food, emotions, information - at twice the speed of her brother.

At four years old, she already watches people the way I do, cataloging expressions and tones and the spaces between words. It delights me and terrifies me in equal measure, this small mirror I’ve somehow created.

“How about we make waffles?” I suggest, and her face lights up with a joy so pure it almost hurts to look at.

“American waffles?”

“Is there any other kind worth eating?”

Pietro groans from the sofa, still pinned under Luca. “You’re corrupting our children with your foreign breakfast foods. This is a deliberate campaign.”

“My foreign breakfast foods are delicious, and you eat more of them than the kids do. I’ve seen you, Pietro. Three in the morning, standing at the stove reheating leftovers in your underwear…”

“The children,” he says loudly, clamping his hands over Luca’s ears with exaggerated horror. “The children are present. We don’t discuss Papa’s midnight snack habits in front of the children.”

“Mama, what’s midnight snacks?” Luca asks, muffled.

“It’s when Papa gets hungry at night and eats all the good leftovers before anyone else can have them.”

“That’s slander,” Pietro says. “Absolute slander. I leave at least a third.”

“You left me one waffle last week. One. It was the small one.”

“The small one is the best one. It’s crispier around the edges.”

I’m laughing as I extract myself from under Lucy and head toward the kitchen, and the sound surprises me.

When did I last laugh like this? When did the house last feel like something other than a beautifully appointed waiting room where I exist until my husband has time to remember I’m here?

Don’t, I tell myself. Don’t count the days. Don’t catalog the distance. Just be here, in this morning, in this kitchen, with flour on your hands and your daughter “helping” in a way that will require cleaning the entire counter afterward.

The kitchen in this house is ridiculous.

Everything in this house is ridiculous - the kind of Neapolitan old-money excess that still makes me feel like a fraud six years into living here.

Crystal chandeliers and marble floors and a formal dining room that seats thirty, and my mother-in-law had opinions about every single design choice and made sure I knew my American sensibilities weren’t welcome in the decision-making process.

But the kitchen.

The kitchen I fought for. Six-burner range and copper pots hanging from a ceiling rack and windows that look out over the bay, and when I’m here with my hands in dough or my tools spread across the island, I can almost forget that I’m supposed to be a different kind of wife than I am.

“Higher, Mama.” Lucy is on her tiptoes on the step stool, reaching for the mixing bowl. “I can reach.”

“You absolutely cannot reach, which is why I’m getting it.”

“But I want to.”

“Wanting to and being able to are different things, baby. That’s one of life’s crueler lessons.”

“What’s crueler?”

“It means more cruel. More unfair.”

She considers this while I pull down the bowl and the measuring cups. “Is it cruel that Luca got the last of the cereal with the honey?”

“Did he take it from you?”

“No, but I wanted it.”

“Then no. That’s just first-come, first-served. A different life lesson.”

“I don’t like that one either.”

“Nobody does, piccola. That’s why it’s a lesson.”

Pietro appears in the doorway with Luca slung over his shoulder like a sack of potatoes.

Our son is giggling so hard he’s hiccupping, and Pietro’s hair is mussed from whatever wrestling match happened in the living room, and he looks so much like the man I fell in love with - not the man I married, that came first, but the man who emerged slowly over months and years of learning each other.

“We’re here to help,” Pietro announces.

“You’re here to steal waffles before they’re done.”

“That too. Helping and stealing aren’t mutually exclusive.”

“You keep using that phrase. I don’t think you know what it means.”

“It means I can do two things at once.” He sets Luca down and crosses to me, and his hand finds the small of my back, and I let myself lean into him for just a moment.

Just this one moment of warmth and the smell of his cologne and the scratch of his weekend stubble against my temple when he presses a kiss there. “What can I do?”

“You can keep Luca away from the eggs. He has opinions about cracking them.”

“I want to crack the eggs!” Luca confirms. “Lucy said I can’t because of last time, but last time was different.”

“How was last time different?”

“Because last time I didn’t know there was a technique. Now I know there’s a technique. I watched a video.”

Pietro looks at me. “He watched a video?”

“On my tablet. While I was distracted.”

“What kind of video?”

“A chicken one. About eggs. The chicken explained the technique.”

“The chicken explained,” Pietro repeats, mouth twitching. “I see. Well, if a chicken explained, that changes things.”

We make waffles together, all four of us, in a kitchen that’s too big and too fancy for the mess we’re creating.

Pietro keeps Lucy entertained with a game involving the measuring spoons while I supervise Luca’s egg-cracking technique, which is marginally better than before but still results in at least one shell fragment that I have to fish out.

There’s flour on the counter and batter on Luca’s chin and Lucy has somehow gotten syrup in her hair already even though the waffles aren’t done yet.

It’s chaos. It’s wonderful. It’s everything I wanted and was afraid to ask for.

We eat at the kitchen island instead of the formal dining room, crowded together on stools with plates piled high.

Pietro makes Lucy laugh by getting syrup on his nose - deliberately, I’m pretty sure, though he’ll never admit it.

Luca tells a story about a dream he had that involves dinosaurs and Nonna’s cat and a swimming pool that’s also somehow a spaceship, and we all listen with grave attention even though none of it makes sense.

“And then the dinosaur said he didn’t want to be a dinosaur anymore,” Luca finishes. “He wanted to be a bird. So he flew away.”

“That’s scientifically accurate, actually,” Pietro says. “Dinosaurs did become birds. Or some of them did.”

Luca’s eyes go wide. “Really?”

“Really. Ask your mother - she knows about things that transform into other things.”

“Because of the jewelry?” Lucy asks, looking at me. “You turn rocks into pretty things?”

“Something like that,” I say, surprised she remembers. I haven’t worked in months, not really - there’s never time, or I can’t find the energy, or I tell myself I’ll get back to it after some milestone that never seems to arrive. “I turn stones and metal into jewelry. Give them new shapes.”

“Like the dinosaur,” Luca says, satisfied. “Mama is like a dinosaur.”

“Thank you, baby. That’s… definitely a compliment.”

Pietro catches my eye across the island, and there’s something complicated in his expression - pride, maybe, or wistfulness, or some combination of the two. He knows what I gave up, what the merger cost me, even if we never talk about it directly.

Maison d’Emery was mine. I built it from nothing when I was twenty-four, from a rented apartment and a secondhand jeweler’s bench and a stubbornness that bordered on delusion. I had a name, a reputation, a vision that people recognized as distinctly mine.

And then I had a merger that was supposed to save my struggling company. And a husband who came with it. And somewhere along the way, the name and the reputation got absorbed into Grimaldi Holdings, and now I’m just the wife who used to make jewelry.

Later, after the dishes are cleared and the twins have returned to their cartoon, I find myself standing at the kitchen window looking out at the bay.

Pietro comes up behind me, wrapping his arms around my waist, resting his chin on my shoulder.

“This was nice,” he says quietly. “We should do this more.”

“You’d have to be home to do it.”

The words come out sharper than I intend, and I feel him stiffen slightly behind me. But he doesn’t pull away.

“I know. I’m sorry. The launch prep has been…” He stops, sighs. “That’s not an excuse. I know it’s not.”

“It’s fine,” I say, even though it isn’t. “The launch is important.”

“You’re important too.”

I want to ask him if he means it. I want to ask when he last thought about me during a workday, whether I cross his mind at all when he’s buried in meetings and calls and the endless machinery of running an empire.

But asking would break something, this fragile peace we’ve constructed out of a single morning, and I’m not ready to risk it.

“The launch prep starts tomorrow, right?” I ask instead. “The push to the gala?”

“Yes.” He shifts behind me, and I can feel the change in his energy - the relaxation draining away, the tension creeping back in. “It’s going to be intense. Mother’s been finalizing the partner arrangements - the person who’ll co-front the public campaign with me.”

“I didn’t know there was a co-front role.”

“It’s new. Mother thought…” He pauses, choosing words. “She thought it would be good to have someone with the right connections. Old family friends, the kind of profile that plays well in certain circles. A woman named Serena Salerno. Her mother and mine were close when we were children.”

Something in me goes quietly still.

“I don’t think I’ve met her.”

“You haven’t. She’s been abroad mostly, but she’s back now, and Mother thought she’d be perfect for the visibility work.” He squeezes me gently, pressing a kiss to my hair. “It’s just business. The launch needs a face, and she fits the image we’re going for.”

Just business. The launch needs a face.

I had a face once. I had a name. Now I watch those things exist in other people, on other people, and I’m standing at my kitchen window wondering when I stopped being someone who mattered.

“That sounds sensible,” I say, because what else is there to say?

Pietro turns me gently in his arms, tilting my chin up to look at him. “You’re upset.”

“I’m not.”

“You are. I can tell. What did I say?”

“Nothing. It’s nothing. I’m just…” I search for words that won’t crack this morning open. “I’m glad you were here today. That’s all. I missed you.”

His expression softens, and he kisses my forehead with a tenderness that makes my chest ache. “I missed you too. And I promise, after the launch, things will be different. I’ll be home more. We’ll have more mornings like this.”

I want to believe him. I want so badly to believe him.

“Okay,” I say. “After the launch.”

He smiles, and he means it, and I love him even though loving him often feels like holding water in my hands - beautiful and necessary and constantly slipping through my fingers.

In the living room, Luca shrieks with laughter as the cartoon dog falls off something again, and Lucy watches with those dark, knowing eyes, and my husband pulls me close and promises me a future I’m not sure either of us can deliver.

But Serena Salerno.

The name sits in my mind like a stone dropped in still water. I don’t know her. I’ve never heard of her. But I know Donna Rosaria, my mother-in-law, and I know that every move she makes is calculated, every relationship strategic.

If she’s installing someone at Pietro’s side, there’s a reason.

There’s always a reason.