The Wife He Left Alone In The Dark (You Chose Her. Now Grovel. #34)

Talia Lassiter closed her family’s inn eight years ago because her husband promised they would reopen it together once his firm settled down. It never did. The keys are still on her ring.

For seven weeks, Seth Lassiter has eaten dinner most nights with the woman who runs his deal team. He has never slept with her. He has simply given her every evening, every confidence, and every piece of himself that used to belong to his wife.

Then an ice storm takes the county’s power for five nights. The generator dies, and Talia is alone in a freezing house. Seth asks someone to check on her. The woman he trusts to do it tells him the house was checked and his wife is fine. It is a lie. And Seth does not go and look.

On the third night, Talia walks two miles through the dark for kerosene and sees her husband through a restaurant window, warm and easy, sitting across from the woman who told him she was fine. She doesn’t go in. On the way home, she goes into hypothermia and is found near dawn.

She wakes in the hospital. She does not go home. Instead, Talia unlocks the Tierney House, lights its ranges, and feeds the village through the rest of the outage. Then she keeps feeding them.

By spring, the whole county eats in her dining room.

And if the man who owns half the shoreline wants to see his wife, he comes and stands in it like everyone else.

Seth is parked outside at five every morning, and he keeps coming back.

But Talia has a full house now. A business of her own.

A life that runs perfectly well without him.