8. Rex
— ? —
Rex
The ring on my pillow was the first thing I saw, and the note was the second.
I’d come home early. Some instinct, maybe, or just the strange silence that had hung over the house all week finally getting to me. The meetings could wait. The contracts could wait. Something told me I needed to be home, and I’d learned a long time ago to trust that voice.
I should have trusted it sooner.
The bedroom was too quiet.
The ring caught the light first. That familiar glitter that had lived on her hand for a year, now sitting cold and abandoned on white cotton.
I picked up the note.
I want a divorce. I don’t want anything from this. Just leave me alone. Everyone wins.
I waited for it to make sense. Waiting for some explanation to appear between the lines, some clue I’d missed, some way to understand how I’d woken up this morning with my wife in my bed and come home to an empty house and a piece of paper that felt like a knife in my chest.
I called her phone and a message popped up on my screen. This number has blocked you.
She’d blocked me.
I tried my office line, then the house phone, then a calling app I downloaded right there on the edge of the bed.
Every one of them was blocked. My wife had packed her bags, left her ring, and shut every door I could have used to reach her, all while I was sitting in an office negotiating a deal that suddenly didn’t matter at all.
I sat down on her side of the bed. The sheets still smelled like her shampoo, that vanilla-coconut combination I’d never been able to find in stores.
I’d asked her about it once, and she’d laughed and told me it was three different products mixed together in a specific ratio that she’d figured out in college.
I’d never thought to memorize the ratio.
I pressed my face into her pillow and breathed in deep, and something cracked open in my chest that I hadn’t even known was holding together.
What did I do?
The question echoed in the empty room. I knew the answer, or parts of it.
The dinner at my aunt’s house. My mother’s constant scheming.
Annie’s presence, which I’d written off as harmless when it clearly wasn’t.
All the times Freya had tried to tell me something was wrong and I’d told her she was being silly.
Silly.
I’d actually said that. I’d looked at my wife, who was trying to tell me she felt invisible and humiliated and alone, and I’d called her silly.
But what else? There should be more.
Then I remembered my Uncle Max leaning back in his chair, asking me if I regretted marrying her. Me, cornered and stupid, saying Some days? Yeah. Maybe I do.
But I’d meant that I regretted how I married her. That she deserved a husband who chose her, not a contract with her father’s signature on it. I’d been about to say exactly that when Max laughed and changed the subject, and the moment passed. And left them to interpret it however they want.
Ten minutes later, Freya had looked at me by the fountain like something inside her had died.
She’d heard me. She’d been right outside that window, and she’d heard me say I regretted her.
I didn’t realize I was crying until the tears hit her pillow. I hadn’t cried since I was a boy. Now I couldn’t stop. I curled up on her side of our bed with my fists in the sheets and let it wreck me, until my chest ached and my throat was raw and the light outside had shifted from gold to orange.
When I could finally breathe again, I sat up and scrolled through my contacts, looking for anyone who might know where she’d gone.
Her father’s number stared up at me. Earl Evans, the man who’d sold me his daughter to pay off his gambling debts.
I’d never liked him. Freya didn’t like him either, not really, but he was her only family left.
I hit call before I could talk myself out of it.
He answered on the fifth ring, his voice thick and slurred. Drunk. Of course he was drunk. It was four in the afternoon and Earl Evans was already three sheets to the wind.
“Rex Waller.” He drew out my name like an accusation. “To what do I owe the pleasure?”
“I’m looking for Freya. She left. I need to know where she went.”
A long pause. Then a laugh, bitter and ugly. “She finally wised up, huh? Good for her. Always said that girl was smarter than she let on.”
“Earl, please. If you know where she is…”
“I don’t know where she is. And even if I did, I wouldn’t tell you.” His voice hardened, some of the drunken slur falling away. “You know why I sold you my daughter, boy? You think it was for the money?”
“Wasn’t it?”
“The money was a nice bonus. But I’d already lost everything.
The money you paid me lasted about six months before the creditors picked it clean.
” He laughed again. “No, I sold you my daughter because I was losing everything I had, and the only way I could think to make sure she’d be taken care of was to marry her to someone who could give her the life she deserved. The way… the way her mother wanted.”
I didn’t say anything. Couldn’t think of anything to say.
“I told you to take care of her.” Earl’s voice cracked.
“That was the deal. I gave you my little girl and you were supposed to take care of her. That’s all I wanted.
All I ever wanted. If I simply wanted the fucking money, I could have just left her out of this.
These people can shoot me dead for my debts for all I care but my daughter needs your protection, she needs… ”
I heard sobbing and the line went dead.
I sat there holding my phone, Earl’s words rattling around in my skull. Take care of her. That was the deal.
And I had, hadn’t I? I’d given her everything.
The house, the ranch, the clothes, the security.
I’d made sure she never wanted for anything material.
I’d held her when she cried about her mother, rubbed her shoulders when she was tense, eaten cold grilled cheese sandwiches because she’d made them and that made them perfect.
But I’d never told her I loved her.
The realization hit me like a truck. More than a year of marriage, and I had never once said those three words.
I’d felt them for months, maybe longer. That night on the balcony when I’d made her promises I meant with every fiber of my being.
The night she’d fallen off Penny and I’d driven to the hospital thinking I might lose her and feeling like my whole world was ending.
A thousand quiet moments where I’d looked at her and felt something so big I didn’t have words for it.
But I’d never said it.
Because I was scared. Because she’d married me for her family and I’d convinced myself she couldn’t possibly feel the same way.
And because if I said it and she didn’t say it back, I’d have to face the truth that this arrangement I’d stumbled into was the best thing that had ever happened to me and I was the only one who felt that way.
So I’d stayed silent. Shown her instead of telling her, or so I’d thought. And now she was gone, and I was sitting on her side of the bed breathing in her shampoo and realizing that showing wasn’t enough. It had never been enough.
She’d needed the words. And I’d been too much of a coward to give them to her.
I stood up and walked to the window. The ranch spread out below, golden in the late afternoon light.
Penny stood at the pasture fence with her head over the rail, watching the house for a rider who wasn’t coming.
Downstairs, Freya’s boots were still by the back door, and her coffee mug was still in the sink from this morning. Everywhere I looked, she was missing.
Beyond the pastures sat the lake where we’d celebrated our anniversary just over a week ago, and all around it, the land that had belonged to her family for generations, the land I’d bought along with her hand in marriage.
“I love you,” I told the empty room. “God, Freya, I love you. I love you so much it terrifies me, and I’ve loved you for longer than I wanted to admit, and I should have told you every single day.”
The words came easy now that she wasn’t here to hear them.
I pulled out my phone and called my head of security. He answered on the first ring.
“Find my wife.” My voice was the one that ended careers and closed billion-dollar deals. Cold and hard and absolutely certain. “I don’t care what it costs. I don’t care who you have to call. Find her and tell me where she is.”
“Yes, sir.”
I hung up and looked at the ring still sitting on my pillow. Such a small thing. Such an enormous weight.
I picked it up and slipped it into my pocket, next to my heart.
Somehow, I was going to get her back. I didn’t know how yet.
I didn’t know if she’d even let me try. But I was going to find her, and I was going to tell her all the things I should have said a year ago, and I was going to spend the rest of my life making up for every moment I’d made her feel alone.
Or I was going to die trying.