The Other Woman in His Wife's Place

1. Natalie

CHAPTER ONE

Natalie

The coffee maker finished its cycle with a hiss just as Jack announced, at full volume and for no reason anyone could determine, that Tuesdays were the worst day of the week.

"Worse than Mondays?" I asked, pulling two mugs down from the cabinet.

"Mondays you know are going to be bad. Tuesdays trick you." He said this with the gravity of a man twice his six years, then went back to arranging his waffle into a grid of syrup squares.

Across the table, Maddie didn't look up from the book propped against the fruit bowl. "He's quoting Dad."

"I am not."

"You are. Dad said that in the truck on Sunday."

Daniel came down the back stairs already dressed, tie draped loose around his neck, and dropped a kiss on top of Maddie's head without breaking stride.

"I stand by it. Tuesdays are sneaky." He reached the counter, wrapped an arm around my waist, and kissed me too, quick and easy, the kind of kiss that didn't ask for anything, just confirmed something.

He smelled like the cedar aftershave I'd bought him for Christmas four years ago and he still hadn't let himself run out of.

"You're up early," I said.

"Big week." He took the mug I handed him and drank half of it standing at the counter, the way he'd been drinking coffee since before we owned a house that had a counter worth standing at. "Cartwright Farms final walkthrough Thursday, the Whitmore bid due Friday, and then Saturday."

"Saturday," I repeated, and felt the small private thrill of it land somewhere under my ribs.

The gala. Ten years of Kessler Outdoor distilled into one black-tie evening at the Factory, culminating, if the whispers from the trade association were accurate, in Daniel walking up to accept the Mid-South Green Industry Excellence Award in front of everyone who mattered in the regional outdoor-living business.

"You have the dress?" he asked.

"I have the dress." I'd bought it three weeks ago, deep green, the color he always said did something to his brain, and hung it in the back of the closet where the kids wouldn't get chocolate on it before Saturday.

"Good. I want you there." He said it plainly, like a fact rather than a request, and that was so like him that I didn't think anything of it.

Of course he wanted me there. I had been there for the version of this company that didn't have a name yet, that operated out of the garage on Sycamore with a card table and a landline and Daniel's dad's old truck.

I had been there when there was nothing to want anyone at.

His phone buzzed against the counter. He glanced at it, exhaled through his nose, and started typing with his thumb before he'd even swallowed his coffee.

"Who's that," I asked, not really asking, just filling the space while I got Jack's second waffle out of the toaster.

"Rebecca. The rental company's saying the tent for Thursday's client event can't do the size we quoted." He kept typing. "She's already on it, just looping me in."

"At seven in the morning."

"She's efficient." He said it fondly, the way you'd say it about a dog that fetched the paper. "She'll have it fixed before I'm in the truck."

I leaned against the counter and watched him finish the message, hit send, and pocket the phone like it was nothing, because to him it was nothing, one more small transaction in a life made of small transactions. "She's basically running your life before eight a.m."

"She's running my calendar. There's a difference.

" He grinned at me over the rim of his mug, the grin that had worked on me in a Sonic parking lot when we were twenty-four and he had exactly one truck, one employee, and a business plan written on the back of a church bulletin.

"You want to run my calendar, I'll fire her tomorrow. "

"I have a calendar of my own, thanks."

"I know. It terrifies me." He checked his watch, then looked at Jack's syrup grid with something like professional respect. "Buddy, that's a nice pattern."

"It's a lawn," Jack said. "I'm doing the diagonal cut Marcus showed me."

"Marcus showed you the diagonal cut?"

"At the shop. When you took me to see the mowers."

Daniel laughed, delighted, and I watched him file it away, another small thing to tell Marcus about later, another thread connecting our son to the company the way threads had connected all of us to it for years.

Maddie finally looked up from her book long enough to roll her eyes at both of them with the specific contempt of a nine-year-old who found lawn care conversation beneath her, and I caught Daniel's eye and we both smiled, the private smile of two people who'd built something together and still occasionally couldn't believe their luck.

He kissed the top of my head on his way to the garage. "Love you. Don't forget the dress."

"I won't forget the dress, Daniel."

"I know. I just like saying it." The door shut behind him, and a minute later I heard the truck start in the driveway, that particular engine cough it had developed that he kept promising to get looked at.

I got the kids fed, dressed, and delivered, Jack to his after-care carpool and Maddie walked the two blocks to school with the Petrocelli girl from down the street, and by eight forty I was sitting in my own truck outside a stone-and-timber house in Belle Meade with a legal pad on my knee, waiting for a client who wanted to talk about regrading a slope that had been eating her patio furniture for three years.

This was the part of my life that belonged entirely to me.

Fieldstone Design had started as three clients and a laptop at my kitchen table two years ago, after Jack started kindergarten and I finally had hours in the day that weren't accounted for by someone else's need.

Now I had eleven active projects, a part-time draftsman named Owen who worked from his apartment in Murfreesboro, and enough of a reputation that people occasionally called me before they called anyone else.

I liked the reputation. I liked more that it was mine, built without anyone doing me a favor, without Daniel's name anywhere on the invoice.

Mrs. Okafor answered the door in gardening gloves and walked me around back before I'd finished saying good morning, already narrating the drainage problem with the enthusiasm of someone who had clearly researched French drains on the internet at two in the morning.

I liked her instantly. I spent forty minutes with a probe and a level and a notepad, sketched three options, and left with a signed contract and the particular satisfaction of a problem I knew exactly how to solve.

Back in the truck, I texted Whitney a photo of the slope with the caption *this is going to be gorgeous when I'm done and also I want to cry a little* and she sent back a string of exclamation points and a reminder that she still needed my final headcount for Saturday's florals.

*Two hundred and forty*, I wrote. *Apparently they added a table.*

*Of course they did. You excited?*

I thought about it while I pulled out of the Okafors' circular drive.

Excited felt like the wrong word, too light for what it actually was.

What I felt, driving toward my afternoon appointment with the sun coming through the windshield and NPR murmuring something about interest rates, was closer to pride.

Ten years ago Daniel and I had sat on the floor of an empty garage bay eating gas station tacos because we couldn't afford to celebrate the first big commercial contract any other way, and on Saturday he was going to stand up in front of three hundred people in the industry and be recognized for what we'd built.

We. I still thought of it that way, even now, even though my name hadn't been on payroll in five years.

I'd done the books until they needed a real accountant.

I'd written proposals until they needed a real estimator.

I'd smoothed over vendor disputes and hosted client dinners in our first house's cramped dining room and once drove forty-five minutes at eleven at night with a spare generator because a job site lost power the day before a client walkthrough.

None of that showed up on any org chart.

It didn't need to. It had happened, and I remembered it, and on Saturday I would put on the green dress and stand next to my husband while he was celebrated for the thing we'd made together, and that would be enough.

*Very excited*, I texted Whitney back. *Also please don't let me cry off my mascara before the speeches.*

*No promises. See you Thursday for setup?*

*Thursday.*

I put the phone in the cupholder and drove to my next appointment, already half thinking about Saturday, about the green dress, about the particular look Daniel got when he saw me dressed up, still a little disbelieving after eleven years that I'd said yes to him in that Sonic parking lot with nothing to offer but certainty.

Whatever this week held, I was looking forward to Saturday.

I had no reason yet to think of it as anything other than a night to be proud of him, and, in whatever quiet way the world allowed a wife to be proud of herself too, a night to be proud of what I had built alongside him, even if my name wasn't on the sign out front.