Chapter 2 The Woman in Silver #2
Missed Call: Maren.
The list kept filling.
Callum's body went still.
Seventeen missed calls.
Several voicemails.
One text from the townhouse security desk.
Mrs. Strathe was taken by ambulance. Lenox Hill. Could not reach you.
For a moment, the room did not go black or blur. It simply lost relevance. The music, the marble, Isolde's silver dress, Octavia's hand still on his sleeve. All of it became set dressing in a world that had narrowed to one line of text.
The line reduced the world to a corridor and a siren.
He called Maren.
The first ring seemed to last a full minute.
"Callum?" Isolde whispered.
He moved away from her.
Second ring.
Third.
Fourth.
Maren answered.
Behind him, someone laughed too loudly near the champagne tower. A photographer called his name. Octavia said something low and sharp that he did not catch.
"Maren," he said. "I saw your calls."
It came out wrong.
He knew it as soon as the words left his mouth. Too controlled. Too late. A statement when it should have been fear.
He stepped through a side door into the museum corridor, away from the cameras. "What happened?"
Silence.
The silence was not empty. Worse: it breathed. Hospital silence. The kind with machines inside it.
When Maren finally spoke, her voice sounded unfamiliar.
"Nothing."
Cold passed through him.
"What do you mean, nothing?"
Another silence.
"I mean it's too late."
The call ended.
Callum held on to the screen.
He did not move at first.
everything in him organized around action.
He called his driver. "Bring the car to the service entrance now."
"Mr. Strathe, traffic on Fifth is-"
"Now."
He ended that call and dialed Lenox Hill, already walking.
Isolde stepped into his path at the end of the corridor. Her face had gone pale.
"Callum, what happened?"
"Move."
The word was soft. That made it worse.
She moved.
Octavia followed him into the corridor, heels striking marble with precise little cracks.
"Callum, you cannot simply vanish. The press is outside the west entrance, and Isolde is already-"
He turned.
His mother stopped.
Callum had seen Octavia stare down hostile shareholders, drunk ambassadors, and a priest who had mispronounced Strathe during his father's funeral. He had rarely seen her uncertain.
"My wife was taken to the hospital," he said.
Octavia's gaze flicked to his phone, then back to his face. "What happened?"
"I don't know."
"Then lower your voice until you do."
There it was again. The old rule returned: contain first, feel later, if feeling remained convenient.
Callum looked at the woman who had taught him how to survive rooms like this and understood, with a violence that surprised him, that survival was not the same thing as love.
"No," he said.
Octavia's expression hardened.
He did not wait for whatever she would say next.
By the time he reached the service entrance, rain had started.
The driver was not there yet.
Callum stood beneath the museum awning, phone pressed to his ear while hospital reception transferred him twice and then told him, politely, that they could not release information without patient consent.
Patient consent.
He almost said, I am her husband.
The words stopped in his throat.
In his marriage, the words no longer felt like a right. They felt like a claim he might have failed to earn.
His driver pulled up. Callum got in before the car fully stopped.
"Lenox Hill," he said.
The city was rain-slick and bright, every traffic light a red accusation. Callum called Maren again.
No answer.
Again.
No answer.
He opened the voicemail from 8:37.
Callum. I need you to call me back. Please. I think something's wrong.
Nothing else followed.
Sixteen words.
He listened to them once.
Again.
a third time, because repetition was the only punishment available to him in the back of the car while Manhattan refused to move.
Please.
Maren did not say please like that.
Maren said please when she was laughing, cheeks flushed, tugging him down by his tie so he could taste the sauce from her spoon—and then from her mouth, slow and deep, until the kitchen filled with the sound of her soft, needy little gasps.
Please when she asked him not to work through another Sunday, voice husky as she straddled his lap on the couch, grinding against the growing hardness in his trousers while her fingers worked his belt open.
Please when his hand slid beneath her sweater in the hallway, palm hot against her bare skin, fingers brushing the underside of her breast as she pretended to scold him because the housekeeper was still somewhere in the house—her breath catching, thighs pressing together, already wet and aching while he pinched her nipple and whispered exactly what he was going to do to her the second they were alone.
Never like this. Never this small, this scared.
His phone buzzed.
A message from Isolde.
I am so sorry about the phone. Please tell me she is all right.
Callum read until the words lost shape.
he deleted the message without answering.
The car crawled forward three feet.
Rain struck the windows in hard silver lines.
Callum pressed Maren's voicemail to his ear again and heard, beneath her voice, what he had not heard the first time.
Pain.
His wife had been in pain.
And he had been standing under museum lights with another woman's hand on his arm.
No calculation came to save him.