The Billionaire's Wife Buried at Sea

Chapter 1

The water in the Exumas was a color Scarlett had never found a name for. It wasn’t blue. It wasn’t green. It was the color of a swimming pool if God had built the pool, and it went on for miles.

She stood at the rail of the sun deck with a glass of sparkling water and let herself look at it for five whole seconds. Then she turned back to the guests.

“Linda, you’re burning,” she said. “There’s sunscreen in the basket by the stairs. The good kind. It doesn’t smell like a hospital.”

Linda Pratt laughed and touched her own red shoulder. “You think of everything.”

“I try.”

That was the job. Ryan called it hosting.

Scarlett called it knowing where everyone was at all times, who was drinking too much, who was bored, who needed to be seated next to whom at dinner so that a man with forty million dollars to invest did not end up beside a man he had once sued.

Nine years of marriage had made her good at it.

She could run a room the way she used to run a swim meet.

The Halcyon rocked gently at anchor off a small cay with a white beach and nobody on it.

Eight guests lay on loungers or stood in the shade with drinks.

Two crew members moved between them with trays.

Up on the bridge, Troy Maddox leaned out of the window and lifted a hand to her. She lifted hers back.

Troy had captained this boat for years. On the first trip she ever took on it, she had learned the names of every person on the crew, and Troy had looked at her like she’d done something strange. Later he told her that most owners’ wives didn’t bother. She had liked him ever since.

Ryan was at the far end of the deck with Glen Pratt, his hands moving as he talked.

He was good in the sun. He was good everywhere, really.

Broad through the shoulders, dark hair going gray at the temples, the kind of face that looked confident even when he wasn’t.

The investors loved him. Glen was already nodding the way men nodded when they had decided to say yes and were only waiting to be asked.

“He looks better,” someone said beside her.

Scarlett turned. Dr. Alexis Burke had come up the stairs without a sound. She wore a white linen shirt over her swimsuit and dark glasses pushed up into her hair. She held a glass of white wine by the stem.

“Better than what?” Scarlett said.

“Than last month.” Alexis smiled. She had a low, warm voice, the kind that made people lean in. “He’s sleeping almost five hours now. That’s real progress for him.”

Scarlett kept her face pleasant. “Is it.”

“You must have noticed.”

Scarlett had not noticed. Ryan came to bed after she was asleep and was gone before she woke.

Some weeks she saw more of his assistant than she saw of him.

She had not known he was sleeping badly at all until the day he mentioned, almost in passing, that he’d started seeing a concierge doctor for it.

“Of course,” Scarlett said.

“The trick with men like Ryan,” Alexis said, “is that they don’t know how to switch off. Everyone needs something from them. He needs somewhere to put it down at night.” She sipped her wine. “I’m so glad you invited me. It’s good for him to have someone here who understands the pressure.”

You didn’t invite her, a voice in Scarlett’s head said. He did.

“We’re glad you could come,” Scarlett said, and went to find more sunscreen for Linda, because it was that or throw the doctor’s wine glass into the sea.

* * *

At four o’clock Glen Pratt wanted a picture.

“All of us,” he said, waving his arms. “On the stairs. For the office wall. My partners think I’m down here working.”

Everyone laughed. The crew started moving loungers. Ryan pulled his phone from his pocket and held it out to Scarlett without looking at her. “Take it on mine. The camera’s better.”

She took it. His phone was warm from his body. She had not touched it in a long time. There had never been a rule about it. She had stopped wanting to see how full his days were.

“Everybody squeeze in,” she said. “Glen, you’re blocking Linda. Ryan, lift your chin. You look like you’re about to fire someone.”

More laughter. She took three pictures, then five. Alexis stood at the end of the second row with one hand on the rail. She was not touching Ryan. She was nowhere near him. Scarlett noticed, and didn’t like what that said about her afternoon.

“One more,” Scarlett said.

A message slid down from the top of the screen while she was framing the shot.

Alexis: Still thinking about what you said at 2. You’re not a bad man, Ryan. You’re a tired one. Be gentle with yourself today.

Scarlett took the picture. Her hands were perfectly steady. She was a little amazed by that.

“Got it,” she said.

The group broke apart. Ryan’s other phone, the satellite one, buzzed in the cabin below, and a steward came up to tell him it was his brother. Ryan swore softly, touched her arm as he passed, and went down the stairs.

He left his phone in her hand.

* * *

Their cabin was at the front of the main deck, with a wide bed and a window that showed nothing but water. Scarlett locked the door. She sat on the edge of the bed in her swimsuit and cover-up and opened the message.

The thread went back a long way.

She scrolled to the top of it. The first message was from early March. Dr. Burke here. This is my personal number. Call anytime, and I mean anytime. Insomnia is lonely.

After that it was mostly calls. The phone listed them in gray. Night after night. 1:12 a.m. 1:40 a.m. 2:05 a.m. Forty minutes. An hour. An hour and a half. Some nights twice.

In between the calls were messages.

Ryan: Can’t sleep again. You up?

Alexis: Always, for you.

Ryan: I said more to you tonight than I’ve said to anyone in years.

Ryan: I don’t know how to talk at home anymore. Everything I say comes out wrong.

Alexis: You don’t have to perform with me.

Ryan: You’re the only one I can say this stuff to.

Ryan: Thank you for tonight. I mean it. I don’t know what I’d do without these calls.

Scarlett read every word. She read it the way she used to swim a long set, one length at a time, not thinking about how many were left.

There was nothing physical. No hotel. No pictures. No I miss your mouth. She looked for it, and a sick part of her almost wished she’d find it, because that would have been simple. That would have been a thing she understood.

This was worse. This was her husband, at one in the morning, in the house they shared, lying awake in some other room and giving another woman the parts of himself he had stopped giving her.

The fears. The doubts. The quiet, tired voice she hadn’t heard in years.

He hadn’t lost those parts. He had decided she wasn’t the one who got them.

I don’t know how to talk at home anymore.

She thought of all the nights she had lain awake wondering where he was. She had thought he was working. She had thought he was on a call with Tokyo. She had been so careful not to complain.

Her face was hot. Her chest was tight. She realized she was crying only because a drop hit the screen.

She wiped it off with her thumb.

Then she did something that surprised her.

She took her own phone from the pocket of her cover-up, in its scuffed green case, and she photographed the thread.

Screen by screen. Every call log. Every message.

Her hands still didn’t shake. She took more than thirty pictures before she reached the bottom, and she checked each one to make sure it was clear.

She did not know why she was doing it. Some calm, cold swimmer’s part of her had taken over, the part that counted strokes when her lungs burned. It said: You will need this. Nobody believes the wife.

When she was done she closed the thread, went back to the photos of the investors on the stairs, and set Ryan’s phone face down on the dresser the way she’d found it in his hand.

She washed her face. She put on sunscreen.

She looked at herself in the mirror, at the tall woman with the swimmer’s shoulders and the dark blonde hair pulled back, and she thought: Not in front of them.

Not in front of Glen Pratt and his money.

You will get through dinner. You will get through tonight.

Tomorrow you will decide what to do with the rest of your life.

Her eyes in the mirror were furious. She put her sunglasses on.

* * *

Ryan came back to the cabin at six to change for dinner. He was whistling.

“Luke is losing his mind over the bayfront permits,” he said, pulling his shirt over his head. “I told him it can wait till Monday. It can wait till Monday, right?”

“You’re asking me?”

“I’m asking the room.” He grinned at her. For a second he looked like the man she’d married, the one who used to show up at her swim clinics with coffee and sit on the bleachers in a suit. “Did you get a good one of Glen? He’s going to hang it in his lobby. He’s in.”

“He’s in?”

“He told me on the stairs. Don’t say anything at dinner. Let him announce it.”

“I won’t say anything,” Scarlett said.

He picked up his phone from the dresser and checked it. She watched his face. She watched it soften slightly around the eyes. He typed something short. He put the phone in his pocket.

“You okay?” he said. “You’re quiet.”

Ask me, she thought. Ask me one more time. Look at me for longer than two seconds and ask me.

“I’m fine,” she said. “Too much sun.”

“Drink some water.” He kissed the side of her head on his way into the bathroom. He smelled like salt and his expensive shampoo. She stood still until the shower started.

* * *

The crew set dinner on the aft deck under strings of small lights.

The yacht had pulled up anchor at sunset and was running south through the dark toward the next cay, where they’d wake up in the morning.

The engines hummed under the floor. Behind the stern, the wake spread out white and then faded into black.