THE WIFE HE HID (The Forgotten Wives Circle #7)

CHAPTER ONE

The Woman From the Diner

POV: Jackson ? Seven years earlier

The Range Rover died on a two-lane highway between two cornfields, and it died quietly, without a single warning light until it was already over.

Jackson Scott tried the ignition twice. Nothing. He checked his phone. One bar, then none.

Roadside assistance, when he finally reached them, offered a tow truck in two to three hours and mentioned a town about a mile up the road.

Harlow. He had a board dinner in Chicago at eight, seventeen emails flagged urgent, and a father who would want to know why the future of Scott Hospitality Group had spent his Thursday in soybean country.

He started walking.

Harlow announced itself with a water tower, a feed store, and a diner whose blue neon sign read THE BLUEBIRD, the second B flickering like it had a nervous condition. A bell jangled over the door. The air conditioning hit him like forgiveness.

"Sit anywhere that isn't on fire," a voice called from behind the counter. "Which is all of them. We're having a good day."

The voice belonged to a waitress. Dark hair losing a war with its knot, a pen behind one ear, a name tag reading SHARON pinned slightly crooked to a blue uniform.

She was refilling an old man's coffee without looking at the cup.

She was looking at Jackson instead, and there was nothing in her face he recognized.

No deference. No calculation. Just open, frank amusement, as if he'd walked onstage without knowing his lines.

He took a booth by the window. She arrived with a menu and a glass of ice water he hadn't asked for.

"Let me guess. Car trouble."

"Is it that obvious?"

"Nobody wearing that suit comes to Harlow on purpose. Also you keep checking the window like your car might walk past." She set down the menu. "What'd she do to you?"

"She?"

"The car. All cars that break down dramatically are women. It's the flair for timing."

Despite the dinner, the emails, the two to three hours, the corner of his mouth moved. "She died on the shoulder a mile back. Very quietly. Very dignified."

"The worst kind. The loud ones, you see it coming." She pulled the pen from behind her ear. "Coffee and food. And before you say you're fine, I can hear your stomach from here. It's embarrassing for both of us."

He looked up at her. She looked back, pen poised, one eyebrow raised, entirely unimpressed by whatever it was that made hotel managers straighten and board members go quiet. He could not remember the last time he'd had no idea what to say.

"What's good?"

"Everything. I'm legally required to say that. What's actually good is the meatloaf, but you look suspicious of meatloaf."

"I have no position on meatloaf."

"Everyone has a position on meatloaf. It's like pineapple on pizza. There's no neutral."

"Then I'm pro-meatloaf. Apparently."

"Welcome to the right side of history." She scribbled on her pad. "Pie after. Don't argue. It's peach, Dolores made it this morning, and if you leave this town without trying it you'll spend the rest of your life wondering what could have been."

She walked away before he could answer. Jackson noticed he was smiling at a laminated menu, and stopped, and turned his phone face down on the table. He could not remember the last time he'd done that voluntarily either.

The meatloaf, infuriatingly, was excellent.

He was halfway through it when the bell jangled and an elderly woman came in alone. Small, unhurried steps. A cardigan despite the heat. She stood inside the door as if the room were deep water.

Jackson watched Sharon see her. Watched something cross her face, there and gone.

"Mrs. Ellery." Sharon crossed the floor and took her arm like it was the most natural thing in the world, no fuss, no pity in it. "You're just in time. I saved your booth."

There was no saved booth. Jackson had watched three parties rotate through that booth since he sat down. The old woman let herself be led to it anyway.

"I don't know what I want," Mrs. Ellery said. Her voice was thin. "Walter always ordered. Forty-one years and I never once looked at the menu in this place." She laughed, and the laugh went wrong halfway through, and she pressed her fingers to her mouth.

The two farmers in the corner found their coffee very interesting. The old man at the counter turned a page of his crossword that he had already turned.

Sharon slid into the booth across from her.

She didn't say she was sorry. She didn't say Walter was in a better place, or that it would get easier, or any of the things people say when they want grief to hurry up and finish. She said, "He always got the open-faced turkey and then ate half your fries."

"He did." Mrs. Ellery's hands steadied on the table. "He always said mine tasted better."

"They do taste better. It's science." Sharon flagged the kitchen window with two fingers, some shorthand Dolores clearly knew. "So here's what we'll do. One open-faced turkey. And I'll bring you fries of your own, and if half of them go missing, we'll know he's keeping an eye on you."

The old woman looked at her for a long moment. Then she nodded, and her shoulders came down from around her ears, and she took off the cardigan, and stayed.

Sharon got up, squeezed her hand once, and went back to work as if nothing had happened.

When she rang up the meal an hour later, Jackson saw her slide bills from her own tip jar into the register, quick and practiced, before telling Mrs. Ellery that Walter had left a credit on the house account years ago and it was about time somebody used it.

Jackson sat very still in his booth.

He had built four hotels. He had approved mission statements full of words like authentic warmth that cost more per syllable than this diner made in a month.

He spent his life among people who performed care for a living, himself included, and he was good at it, and he knew the exact weight of the performance.

There was no performance here. There was just a woman in a blue uniform giving the real thing away for free, and lying about it so no one would feel indebted.

Something turned over in his chest like an engine catching, and he understood, with a clarity that unsettled him, that he was going to remember this afternoon for a very long time.

When the crowd thinned, Sharon came back with his pie and, to his surprise, a slice of her own. She slid into the booth across from him.

"Break time. You're my excuse. Look interesting."

"How do I do that?"

"Tell me the most boring thing about yourself, but say it like a secret."

Jackson thought. Then he leaned in and lowered his voice. "I read hotel inspection reports for pleasure."

Sharon stared at him. Then she laughed, sudden and unguarded, loud enough that the old man at the counter glanced over and smiled without knowing why.

"That's the saddest thing I've ever heard, and Earl once told me he alphabetizes his seed catalogs."

"There's drama in inspection reports. Betrayal. A minibar that's been lying about its inventory for years."

"Stop. I'm at work. People will think I'm having fun." She pointed her fork at him. "Your turn's over. Ask me one."

"Most boring thing about you. Said like a secret."

She leaned in. Her eyes were brown and warm and entirely too easy to look at.

"I've lived in this town my whole life," she said quietly, "and I have never once been bored."

It wasn't said like a boring fact. It was said like a challenge, as if she'd caught him at some point that afternoon feeling sorry for her, for the small town and the crooked name tag and the flickering neon, and was returning the sympathy unopened.

Jackson held her gaze. "I believe you."

"Good. Because I feel sorrier for you, honestly. You turned your phone face down two hours ago and you've checked it eleven times anyway."

"You counted?"

"Slow shift. You were the entertainment. Who's on the other end of that phone that's got you so trained?"

Everyone, he almost said. My father. A board. A building with my last name on it in letters taller than this diner.

"Work," he said.

"Mm." She let it sit, and he had the uncomfortable sense she'd heard everything he hadn't said. Then she stole a peach slice off his plate with the casual entitlement of someone who had decided, unilaterally, that they were now friends.

The seniors' bus came through at five, and for twenty minutes the Bluebird was chaos, and Jackson, who had nowhere to be for two more hours, found himself doing something he had not done since he was a teenager, which was help.

It started because a woman dropped her purse and the contents went everywhere, and Jackson was closest, and he was on his knees under a table retrieving a runaway lipstick before he'd decided to be.

Then Sharon was short a hand and he was standing near the coffee station, and she looked at him, and looked at the full pot, and said, "You've got two hands and a guilty conscience about that phone, make yourself useful," and handed him the decaf, and told him the rule, orange handle is decaf, regular is regular, don't mix them up or Mr. Petrie's heart does a thing.

So Jackson Scott, who owned four hotels and had never once carried coffee in any of them, worked a diner rush in a two-thousand-dollar suit with his sleeves shoved up, and he was terrible at it, and it was the best twenty minutes he'd had in a year.

He got orders wrong. He called out the wrong table numbers.

He nearly gave Mr. Petrie the regular and Sharon intercepted him with a hip-check that would have drawn a foul, and the whole counter of seniors watched the well-dressed stranger fumble their coffee and decided, collectively, to adopt him, the way small rooms do.

Somebody told him he'd make a fine waiter if he practiced.

Somebody else asked if he was Sharon's fella and Sharon said "he's a customer, Ruth, leave him alone," but she was laughing when she said it, and she didn't correct the word past that.