CHAPTER TWELVE
Max
I MADE IT AS FAR AS the hotel lobby before I stopped.
Going home should have been the obvious next step.
Payton was there, and less than an hour earlier I had walked away while she tried to talk to me about our marriage.
Instead I stood in the middle of the lobby while people continued with their evening around me: a couple checking in, a bellman loading suitcases, laughter drifting from the bar.
The ordinary activity felt strangely disconnected from the realization that had just overturned everything I believed about my marriage.
I loved Payton. I had said the words aloud in Jules’s suite, and once they were out, I couldn’t understand how I had missed something so obvious for so long.
I took out my phone and opened our messages. Are you home for dinner tonight? Yes. Around seven. Okay. I’ll be there.
I stared at her last message. She had always been there.
I expected to find her across from me at breakfast, beside me at dinners we both wanted to avoid, in the car when we traveled.
At crowded events I could find her within seconds because I’d developed the habit of checking where she was.
Until tonight, I had never considered what my life would feel like without any of it.
I called her. The phone rang several times before going to voicemail.
Payton rarely went to bed before eleven, and slept even less when something bothered her.
After the way I’d left our conversation, there was little chance she was peacefully asleep.
I knew that because I knew her: how she slept, what she ordered in restaurants, which books she reread when she was upset, how quiet she got when someone hurt her feelings.
I had accumulated thousands of intimate details while insisting our marriage was little more than an arrangement that had become comfortable.
Going home immediately felt impossible while my thoughts were still tangled together. I went to the front desk and asked for a room.
Within ten minutes I was alone on the seventeenth floor, jacket over the back of a chair, the city stretching beneath the window.
For weeks I had been thinking about freedom.
Jules had made it sound simple: end the marriage Conrad arranged, and I would finally make a decision that belonged entirely to me.
I had wanted to believe her because the alternative required admitting how much of my resentment had become an excuse.
Payton had never controlled me. She had been dragged into the same arrangement, with as little say in its creation as I’d had. Yet I had spent years treating her as a living reminder of what Conrad had taken from me. The unfairness of it settled heavily in my stomach.
I sat on the edge of the bed and let the memories come.
Our first morning after the wedding, when her luggage went to the wrong suite and she walked into the kitchen wearing one of my shirts.
“Well, this is awkward,” she’d said, and I laughed before I could stop myself.
The night I carried her upstairs after she fell asleep on the couch, and she mumbled “I can walk” halfway there.
Her birthday three years ago, when I rearranged a flight home from Dallas because the thought of her celebrating without me bothered me more than I wanted to examine.
The night a storm knocked out the power and she read on my office floor for two hours because my desk lamp had, in her words, “the best light in the house,” and the room had felt calmer with her in it.
I had called that companionship. I had always been good at finding safer words.
Conrad had arranged our marriage, and I’d spent years letting that fact determine how I understood everything that came after.
Admitting I loved Payton had felt too close to conceding that my father had been right to force us together.
The logic seemed pathetic now. Something good had grown out of an ugly decision, and Conrad didn’t get credit for that.
Payton did. So did the years we’d spent building a life neither of us had asked for.
I wanted to tell her about the hotel, that Jules had kissed me and I’d pulled away, how furious I’d been when Jules spoke about Kim with contempt. Most of all I wanted to tell her what I’d finally admitted to myself.
I loved my wife.
At 1:07 a.m. I called again and let her voicemail greeting play all the way through.
When the beep came, I opened my mouth and found nothing adequate to say.
Telling Payton I loved her for the first time through a voicemail, from the hotel where my ex had kissed me, felt like one more insult.
I ended the call without leaving a message.
Sleep never came. By the time the first pale light appeared beyond the windows, I knew what I needed to do: go home, tell her everything, finally answer the question I’d abandoned in the sitting room.
There was a future where our marriage became more. As far as I was concerned, it already had.
I had no idea she’d already stopped waiting for me to figure it out.
I left the hotel a little after six, when the city was beginning to wake, delivery trucks crowding the loading zones and runners moving along the sidewalks with an energy I couldn’t understand after a night without sleep.
I drove home faster than usual, convinced on some irrational level that getting there sooner might reduce the damage I’d already caused.
By the time I turned through the gates, I had rehearsed the conversation so many times every version sounded inadequate.
I had gone to the hotel considering divorce. There was no way to soften that. I had left Payton mid-conversation about our future because another woman summoned me to discuss ending our marriage. Understanding how badly I wanted my wife afterward didn’t erase what had brought me there.
I parked and looked up at the house. Everything appeared normal, foyer lights off, curtains drawn. The relief came too easily.
I unlocked the door. “Payton?”
Silence. I closed the door and headed upstairs, passing my office, exhaustion settled into my body though my thoughts refused to slow. The open bedroom door made me pause. Payton always closed it at night. I stepped inside. Neither side of the bed had been slept in.
“Payton?”
Nothing. I crossed the room and noticed the empty outlet beside her nightstand.
Her charger was gone. In the bathroom, her toothbrush and the bottles she kept beside the sink had disappeared too.
I went into the closet and found gaps among her clothes, several pairs of shoes missing, and the suitcase gone from the top shelf.
Payton had packed. Most of her clothes remained, but that offered little reassurance. She had never gone anywhere without telling me.
I called her. Voicemail. I tried again. Same result. I typed Where are you? and deleted it, since it sounded like a demand I’d lost the right to make, then sent something simpler. Payton, please call me. Nothing came back.
I noticed the books missing from her nightstand next. The first edition I’d given her for our anniversary was gone. She could have left it behind because it came from me. She hadn’t. That somehow made everything worse.
Downstairs, the housekeeper was coming out of the kitchen with fresh flowers. She stopped when she saw me. “Mr. Winslow. You’re home early.”
“Where’s Payton?”
Her expression changed immediately. “She left last night. Around midnight, I think. Your mother was here. She helped Mrs. Winslow take her things to the car.”
Anger flared before reason caught up. Victoria had probably arrived while Payton was already packing and done what anyone who loved her would.
“Did she say when she’d be back?”
“No, sir.”
I called my mother. She answered on the third ring, her tone telling me immediately she knew why I was calling.
“You were here last night.”
“Yes.”
“Where is she?”
“I promised her I wouldn’t tell you.”
“Mom, I’m her husband.”
“And she’s your wife, who asked for some space.”
“You needed to speak to her when she was sitting in your house asking about your marriage,” Mom said, and I went still. Payton had told her.
“I didn’t sleep with Jules,” I said.
My mother exhaled sharply. “Thank God.”
“I didn’t go there for that.” I stopped before saying more. Jules had kissed me, I’d pulled away, but Payton deserved to hear that from me first, not through my mother.
“I walked out while she was trying to talk to me about our marriage,” I said. “She asked if I saw a future for us, and I left.”
“I know,” Mom said quietly, and the shame settled deeper.
“I have to fix this.”
“You have six years to answer for. One conversation isn’t going to erase them.”
“I understand that.”
“Then start by respecting what she asked for.”
“I still need to speak to her.”
“You will. When she’s ready.” A pause. “She went to Kim.”
I already knew. Kim had been Payton’s safe place long before I entered her life.
“I won’t show up there,” I said.
“Good. Is she okay?” I asked, and my mother was quiet long enough that I regretted asking.
“She was heartbroken.”
“I did that.”
“Yes, Max.” There was no cruelty in her voice. That made it worse.
“There’s something on the desk in the sitting room,” Mom said. “Go look.”
She ended the call.
The sitting room was where I’d left Payton the night before, where I could still picture her across from me trying to make me answer the question I’d avoided for years. Her glass remained on the table. My chair was still angled toward hers.
Then I saw the desk near the window. A folded sheet of paper rested on it, and Payton’s wedding ring sat on top.
I stopped in the doorway. For six years I had seen that ring on her hand every day. Now it was lying on a desk, and the sight made everything the suitcase and the unanswered calls had only threatened suddenly real.
I crossed the room and picked up the ring, then reached for the letter beneath it. Payton’s handwriting was neat, as it always was.
I saw you go into Jules’s hotel suite tonight.