CHAPTER 33 Reid
Reid
He was at the door when Thomas appeared in the hallway.
“You’re staying for dinner,” Thomas told him.
It wasn’t a request.
Reid wouldn’t have refused anyway. Maya was here. He’d take any scraps of her presence.
Plates were passed, glasses filled. Jenny and Thomas and Edith were there.
Reid barely registered any of it.
His focus stayed fixed on Maya.
She reached for her glass, took a small sip, and set it back down carefully beside her plate. She looked tired. Not just physically—though that too—but somewhere deeper than that.
She had lost her charity, her reputation. Her home. Her financial security. Her community.
“Now, Reid,” Edith said pleasantly as everyone began eating.
Reid dragged his attention away from Maya and looked at her.
Edith’s tone was calm. Her eyes were merciless. “My husband tells me you’ve revised your opinion.”
Heat crawled instantly up Reid’s neck.
He looked back at Maya instead. It felt impossible to say any of this while looking at anyone else.
“Maya would never steal money from her charity,” he said quietly. “It was idiotic to think otherwise.”
Maya wasn't looking at him. Her jaw was set, her spine straight. Reid swallowed.
“I told myself I was being objective.” The word was embarrassing, the word was a joke.
He laughed once under his breath.
“I didn’t just mess up. I am messed up.”
That got Maya’s attention. Her eyes lifted to his face.
Reid held her gaze.
“I felt betrayed,” he said, “and I was ready to feel betrayed…” His throat tightened. “Because I never understood why Maya would be with me.”
The silence deepened.
Reid felt flayed open sitting there. Good.
He deserved it.
“I saw the embezzlement and decided that Maya as a thief made more sense than her loving me.”
There was no defense left in him now. No pride.
Edith put her wine glass down. “And then you discovered evidence to the contrary?”
Reid shook his head. “Maya was innocent. I knew she was innocent. Of course she was innocent. So I went back to find documentation to prove that.”
Reid laughed once, harsh and humorless.
“It was the one thing I should have known immediately. The one thing I did know without any evidence. Once I looked past my own pathetic insecurities.” He reached out and took Maya’s hand. Her ringless hand. The hand that should have been showing the world she was his wife.
She pulled it back, out of his grasp.
“Of course you didn’t steal that money,” he told her, leaving his arm outstretched, hand resting on the table where he had just touched her, so briefly. “I can’t make excuses for believing that of you. And I will spend the rest of my life being ashamed of that," Reid said.
Maya’s eyes were wide now.
“And in the meantime, you arrested her,” Edith said.
“Yes.” He didn’t look away from his wife. He never wanted to look at anything else for his whole life.
“In public.”
The memory was unbearable. “Yes.”
“And then you threw her out of her own home.”
“Yes.” His voice sounded rough to his own ears.
His thumb had brushed the bare place where her wedding ring should have been. The loss hit him with fresh violence.
Because of course she had taken it off.
He had handcuffed her.
He had called her a liar.
He had packed her belongings into a suitcase like she was something to be removed from his life.
He had assumed—stupidly, arrogantly—that she would come running back to him. That he could simply change his mind, take her back, and she would come.
As though correcting the charges corrected what he had done to her.
“I will clear your name,” he said to Maya, his voice urgent. “I will make sure—”
“That I’m not convicted?” Maya asked, sharp.
“Yes,” he said, roughly. That and more, he thought. I will make sure you’re not convicted, I will make sure you’re safe. I will make sure you’re happy.
Reid felt something inside him give way, the naivety of that earlier certainty collapsing under the weight of what he’d done, truly done, to his marriage.
Reid stood in the doorway and let the dark resolve itself around him. The shape of the bed. The dresser. The chair in the corner where Maya used to sit.
The room was exactly as he had left it.
That was the problem.
No Maya here to disrupt and enrich his life in a thousand different, unquantifiable ways.
Reid stepped into the room.
Her side of the bed was untouched. He stared at it for a long moment.
He had once woken in the middle of the night to find her turned toward him, one hand tucked beneath her cheek, her knee pressed against his thigh.
He had lain there and watched her breathe, thinking, stupidly, secretly, that he had somehow gotten away with something.
That a woman like Maya had chosen his bed, his house, him.
He closed his eyes.
He had held her hips, he had touched her hand.
He had felt the place where her wedding ring should had been. Of course she had taken it off. Of course she had. He had made a mockery of everything it meant.
To love and to cherish, that’s what he had promised her.
He had packed her clothes into a suitcase. He had stood in this room, in this house she had made a home, and reduced her life to what would fit in luggage.
And why? Because Reid was fucked up.
Because thinking she had stolen the money had been easier than believing she had loved him.
At dinner, he had told her he would clear her name. He had meant it. He would put the right name on the crime. He would make sure no prosecutor, no judge, no person in this town ever looked at Maya and saw a thief again.
But Maya’s life was not a case to be corrected.
Their marriage was not a file that could be reopened with new evidence. Her trust was not a clerical error.
He could not make her wear his ring. He could not make her sleep in this bed. He could not make her forgive him, love him, trust him, look at him without remembering metal around her wrists.
He had no right to ask for any of it.
But there were things he could do.
He could restore the offer Victoria Hale had withdrawn. He could start there.
Reid picked up his phone from the nightstand. The first available flight was at dawn.
He booked it.