The Wife He Asked to Disappear (Marriage in Crisis, Grovel & Redemption #16)

CHAPTER ONE

MERRITT

The tie was wrong, and Whitaker knew it, and he asked me anyway.

"The silver or the navy," he said, holding both against his chest in front of the bedroom mirror, his phone still wedged between his shoulder and his ear two minutes after the call had already ended.

"Navy. The silver makes you look like you're selling something."

"I am selling something. I'm selling reassurance to four hundred donors that Bellamy Aeronautics isn't going to blow up their retirement accounts."

"Then definitely the navy. Reassurance shouldn't sparkle."

He laughed, dropped the silver tie onto the bed, and finally looked at himself properly.

Nine years of marriage had not changed the way he checked his reflection, quick and almost apologetic, a task to get through rather than a pleasure.

He knotted the navy tie in four practiced motions and turned to me for a verdict.

"Better," I said. "You look like a man who pays his taxes."

"I do pay my taxes."

"I know. That's why you look like it."

He crossed the room and kissed my forehead, his laptop already open on the dresser behind him, an email half composed on the screen.

He kissed me and typed at the same time, a skill I'd watched him refine over the better part of a decade, and I let him because I understood by now that this was simply how his attention worked.

He could hold two things at once as long as one of them was me.

"You look beautiful," he said, not looking up.

"You haven't looked at me."

"I don't need to. I already know."

It should have sounded lazy. It didn't. It sounded like a man reciting a fact he'd never bothered to question, the way he might say the sky was blue or the contract closed on Tuesday.

I smoothed the front of my dress, dark green silk that Whitaker had once told me made him forget what he was supposed to be doing at events, and decided that was compliment enough for a Thursday night.

The Bellamy Aeronautics Innovation Gala was not, technically, a gala.

It was a donor appreciation dinner with a string quartet and a step-and-repeat banner, held twice a year in a ballroom two floors below Whitaker's office, and I had attended every single one since the year before we married.

I knew the caterer's name. I knew which senator's wife collected vintage brooches and which one collected grudges.

I knew that Orson Bellamy liked to be seated where he could see the door, and that Sabine liked to be seated where the door could see her.

I had learned all of it the way I'd learned everything else in this life, by paying close attention and never once pretending I already knew.

"Ready?" Whitaker asked, closing the laptop.

"I've been ready. You're the one who spent ten minutes deciding between two identical ties."

"They're not identical. One is navy."

"The other one is also, functionally, navy."

He grinned, that particular grin that had nothing corporate in it at all, the one that belonged only to me and to the inside of our house, and offered his arm.

The ballroom, when we arrived, was already at half capacity, waiters circling with trays of the same passed appetizers Bellamy Aeronautics served every year because Orson believed consistency signaled stability to investors.

Whitaker was pulled away within ninety seconds by a man from the Department of Defense procurement office, and I let go of his arm without needing to be told, because this was choreography I'd rehearsed a hundred times.

He worked the room in one direction. I worked it in another. We met in the middle when it mattered.

I found Congressman Ableman's wife first, a woman who collected watercolor landscapes and complaints about her husband's schedule in roughly equal measure, and listened to both for the better part of ten minutes.

I found the CFO's second wife, who was younger than me and terrified of saying the wrong thing, and told her a story about my own first gala that made her laugh instead of panic.

I found three separate donors who wanted reassurance about a subcontractor dispute I knew nothing about, and gave them the only honest answer I had, which was that Whitaker Bellamy did not lose sleep over anything he hadn't already solved three times in his head.

It wasn't a lie. It had simply stopped being entirely true sometime in the last year, in ways I hadn't yet had reason to catch.

Sabine found me near the dessert table, dressed in the shade of gray she wore to every event because she believed color competed with a woman's authority rather than adding to it.

She kissed the air beside both my cheeks and looked me over with the particular thoroughness she reserved for inspecting things she hadn't selected herself.

"That color suits you," she said. "It's very forgiving."

"Thank you, Sabine."

"I only mean it photographs well. Not everything does, on everyone." She glanced past me toward a cluster of donors, already composing her exit. "Your father's town made the local paper again, I heard. Some sort of anniversary piece. Brackenridge, is it?"

"It is."

"How quaint, that they still write about places like that."

She was gone before I could decide whether to answer, off toward a woman in sapphire earrings who mattered more to her tonight, and I stood there for a moment turning the sentence over.

Places like that. I had heard variations of it for nine years, delivered so lightly that objecting to it would have made me the one being difficult, and I had learned to let it pass through me rather than land.

Whitaker appeared at my elbow ten minutes later with two glasses of wine and an expression that told me he'd witnessed at least the tail end of it.

"She say something?"

"She said my dress photographs well."

"That's not what her face was doing when she said it."

I took the wine. "You saw her face from across the room?"

"I always see her face. It's a survival skill.

" He handed me the glass and stood close enough that his shoulder pressed against mine, a small unnecessary point of contact that had nothing to do with the crowd and everything to do with making a point.

"For what it's worth, your father's town is where you learned to talk to people like they're actual people instead of donor tiers.

I'd take that over Sabine's forty years of finishing school any day. "

"You don't have to say that."

"I'm not saying it because I have to. I'm saying it because it's true and she needs to hear it eventually, even if it's only through the wall between our house and hers." He tapped his glass against mine. "You are the best thing about these nights, Mer. I mean that."

I believed him completely, the way I believed the sun would rise, without needing to check.

We stayed until nearly eleven, and by the time we got home, my feet ached from four hours in heels and Whitaker's tie had come loose the way it always did by the end of an evening, hanging crooked and forgotten around his open collar.

He kicked off his shoes in the front hall, the way he'd done every single night for nine years despite my asking him at least a hundred times to leave them by the door instead of wherever his feet happened to be when the urge struck him, and I stepped over them out of habit without even looking down.

In the kitchen, he opened the refrigerator and stood in front of it the way he always did after an event, not actually hungry, just needing a minute of nothing in particular before the night fully ended.

"There's nothing in there that wasn't in there this morning," I said, unclasping one earring and then the other, setting them on the counter.

"I live in hope."

"You live in denial. We haven't had real food in this house in four days."

"We had the good crackers on Tuesday."

"The good crackers don't count as food, Whit.

" I leaned against the counter and watched him finally close the refrigerator door, empty-handed, exactly as I'd known he would be.

"Congressman Ableman's wife asked if we're doing the Cape again this summer.

I told her I didn't know, since somebody hasn't looked at a calendar past next Thursday in about six weeks. "

"I'll look at a calendar. I promise. Right after this quarter ends, and the one after that, and the one after that.

" He said it lightly, the joke worn smooth from years of use between us, and reached out to catch my hand as I passed him on my way toward the stairs, pulling me back just long enough to press a kiss to the side of my head.

"I mean it, though. The Cape. I want a week where my phone doesn't work and neither does the coffee maker. "

"You'd survive four hours without a coffee maker before you called someone about it."

"Watch me."

"I will. From a beach chair, laughing."

He laughed at that, the real laugh rather than the one he used at events, and for a moment, standing in our kitchen at eleven at night with my shoes already off and his tie hanging loose around his open collar, nothing about our life felt like anything other than exactly what it was supposed to be after nine years of building it together.

We were on the stairs a few minutes later, me ahead of him, still laughing about the CFO's second wife and the story about my first gala, when his phone rang.

He almost didn't answer it. I watched him glance at the screen, register the name, and hesitate for exactly one second before he did.

"Crispin. It's late." A pause. His face changed in a way I recognized immediately, the same shift I'd seen a handful of times over the years, when something arrived that couldn't wait until morning. "Say that again."

I stopped on the stairs and turned back.

"When did this hit?" Whitaker asked. "Who has it. Is it just the trade press or is it..." Another pause, longer this time. "Fenner. Of course it's Fenner."

He looked up at me then, and for a moment the whole evening, the wine and the wrong tie and Sabine's careful cruelty, all of it fell away behind something harder settling into his features.

"I have to take this downstairs," he said. "It might be a while."

"Is it bad?"

"I don't know yet. Go to bed. I'll fill you in when I know more."

I didn't go to bed. I sat on the top step in my green dress with my shoes finally off, listening to the low urgent rhythm of his voice rising up through the floor from his study, unable to make out the words but able to hear, clearly, that something had shifted in the register of his life that had nothing to do with donor tiers or forgiving colors or anything either of us had planned for that night.

When he finally came up an hour later, his jacket was gone and his sleeves were rolled and he looked ten years older than the man who had asked me to pick between two ties.

"Fenner," he said, sitting heavily on the edge of the bed. "Some transactions with a shell company. A reporter's been sitting on it for weeks, apparently, building the story. It goes live tomorrow morning."

"How bad."

"Bad enough that Tamsin's flying in tonight instead of Monday." He rubbed his face with both hands. "We'll handle it."

"We will," I said, and meant it the way I meant everything I said to him, without qualification, without a version of myself held in reserve.

I curled against his side on top of the covers, still in my dress, and he wrapped his arm around me automatically, his eyes already somewhere else, already three moves into a chess game that hadn't started yet.

I didn't know, that night, that I had just watched the last completely uncomplicated evening of my marriage end on a staircase in my bare feet.

I only knew that his heart was still beating slow and familiar under my ear, and that whatever came next, we would face it the way we faced everything.

I believed we would face it together.