The Wife He Let His Family Humiliate (Marriage in Crisis, Grovel & Redemption #25)

Chapter 1 Darcy

Ten days before Edmund Westcott turned seventy, I arrived at the house on Monument Avenue with a leather folder of revised seating charts and a separate folder of family photographs I had spent three nights sorting through.

I'd found a shot of Edmund at twenty-eight, laughing on a boat dock with a fish half his size, and another of Claudette in a yellow dress at what looked like a garden wedding, young enough that I almost didn't recognize her.

I thought the display would mean something to her.

I'd built the whole idea around the hope that it would.

The housekeeper let me in and told me Mrs. Westcott was in the small sitting room. I heard Claudette before I saw her, her voice pitched into that bright, carrying register she used for people she wanted to be overheard being warm to.

"There she is," Claudette said, and for one unguarded second I thought she meant me. Then I came around the doorway and saw Felicity Duvall standing by the window in a cream linen jacket, and understood.

"Darcy," Claudette said, turning, her smile fading.

"Good, you're here. I need you to call the florist again.

They've confirmed peonies and I specifically said garden roses.

And the podium needs to move six inches to the left of where the venue manager had it.

Surely you can do something about the aisle clearance.

It's blocking the sight line from the Ashworths' table. "

"I can do that." I set the folder down on the console table. "I also brought the photographs. I thought we could set up a table near the bar, a timeline of Edmund through the decades. I found one of him fishing that I think you'll love, from when he was young, at the lake house."

Claudette had already turned back to Felicity. "That's sweet," she said, over her shoulder, not really listening. "Leave them with the housekeeper and she'll find somewhere for them."

Felicity gave me a smile that didn't reach past her mouth.

She'd always been careful that way, warm enough that no one could call her rude, cool enough that I always knew exactly where I stood, which was outside a conversation that had been going on since before I met Tyler.

"Darcy. The gala plans sound wonderful. Claudette's been telling me how organized you are. "

"Felicity's going to help me think through the toasts," Claudette said. "She has such an instinct for these things. She practically grew up at events like this."

I had planned twelve of these events in the last twelve years.

I had negotiated with three different catering companies after two nearly dropped out at the last minute, kept a running spreadsheet of every Westcott relative's dietary restriction and seating feud, and once replaced an entire candle display with battery-operated lights to meet the fire marshal's requirements at Edmund's sixty-fifth birthday.

None of that seemed to register as an instinct worth naming.

I was good with the practical things, Claudette liked to say, with little interest in how much those practical things required.

"I'll call the florist," I said, and picked up the planning folder. I left the photographs on the console, separate from the papers I would need all afternoon. The housekeeper already had enough to do without being made responsible for something Claudette hadn't bothered to look at.

I spent the next hour on the phone with the florist, who insisted the garden roses had never been confirmed and that peonies were, in fact, in the original order, and I found the email thread that proved otherwise and forwarded it without comment.

By the time I finished, Claudette and Felicity were in the dining room with a legal pad, and I could hear Claudette reading names aloud.

The Ashworths. The Pruitts. the governor, if his office confirmed.

Every name that mattered enough to be introduced to Edmund personally at the top of the receiving line, apparently, with Felicity positioned to help make those introductions warm and personal, because she understood the families involved.

I stayed in the hallway out of sight. Claudette had dismissed me this way before, often enough that I should have expected it. I still wished she had opened the folder. I'd spent three evenings sorting those photographs because I wanted Edmund to have something personal at his party.

The housekeeper found me a few minutes later with a stack of RSVP cards that needed sorting by table, and I took them gratefully, glad to have something to do with my hands.

We worked at the kitchen table together while Claudette and Felicity's voices drifted in from the dining room, rising and falling, the occasional laugh cutting sharp and clear through the doorway.

The housekeeper had worked for the Westcotts for nine years.

She never said much about the family, but she set a cup of coffee in front of me without being asked, and I was grateful she had noticed I could use it.

Joanna arrived around noon with three garment bags over her arm and a list of complaints about her dress alterations that she delivered to me instead of to the seamstress who'd made the mistake.

"Can you call her? I don't have the patience today.

Just tell her the hem's still wrong and I need it fixed by Friday. "

"I can call her," I said, and did, standing in the kitchen with the phone against my ear while Joanna disappeared upstairs to try on the dress again, leaving the correction to me the way she left most corrections to me.

The seamstress promised she'd have it ready by Thursday.

I wrote it on my list, under the florist, under the podium, under a dozen other small tasks that would disappear the moment they were done and leave no mark on anyone's memory of the night except that everything had simply worked.

By two o'clock I'd confirmed the valet company, resolved the podium argument by getting the venue coordinator to angle the podium toward the tables while preserving the required aisle clearance, and rewritten the run-of-show twice because Claudette kept changing her mind about when the toasts should happen relative to dinner.

Somewhere in the middle of it, the venue's catering director called in a small panic over a delivery discrepancy, sixty covers of salmon confirmed instead of the ninety we needed, and I talked her through a fix in under ten minutes, the same clear-headed calm I used to bring to my own events years earlier, before any of this had become simply something I did for the family instead of a skill anyone paid me for.

It was a small thing, ninety fish instead of sixty, but solving it gave me a flicker of the old satisfaction, clean and uncomplicated, that I hadn't felt in longer than I wanted to admit.

Joanna called again around three, this time about seating, specifically whether she could be moved away from a cousin she'd fallen out with over something neither of them would explain to me, and I spent fifteen minutes redrawing a chart that had already been redrawn twice that morning, careful not to bump anyone Claudette had specifically requested near the head table.

I ate a granola bar standing up at the kitchen island because there hadn't been a natural moment to sit down, and when I finally left the house at four, my folder was twice as thick as it had been that morning and the photographs remained on the console where I had left them, untouched.

Tyler called that evening while I was reheating leftover pasta and going through vendor confirmations on my laptop, one earbud in.

"How's the gala coming?" he asked. I could hear the quiet of his office at that hour, the low hum of the building after most people had gone home.

"It's coming." I told him about the florist, made it a small funny story instead of what it was, heard him laugh at the right places. "Your mother wants Felicity doing the introductions for the important guests."

"That sounds like Mom." A pause, papers shifting somewhere on his end. "Is that a problem?"

"I don't know. It felt a little strange, being told I'm good with the practical things while Felicity gets handed the guest list." I twisted a piece of pasta around my fork and didn't eat it.

"I found photographs of your dad today. From when he was young.

I thought we could do a little display, something personal, and your mom told me to just leave them with the housekeeper. "

"She's probably just distracted. There's a lot to manage right now." A drawer closing on his end, the sound of him packing up. "You know how she gets before these things."

"I know how she gets. I guess I was hoping this one might be different, since it's your dad's seventieth and not just another benefit."

"You are good with the practical things.

That's not an insult, Darce, that's the whole reason the party's going to work.

" He sounded pleased, certain he had reassured me.

"Nobody remembers who did the introductions.

They remember whether the food was good and whether their car came on time.

You're the reason any of this happens at all. "

I let that sit for a second, turning my fork through the pasta. It wasn't wrong, exactly. It also wasn't what I'd been trying to say. "I guess I just wanted to be part of the visible half too. Not just the machinery underneath it."

"You are part of it. You'll be right there.

" Another pause, and then his voice softened into something more familiar, more like the man I'd married.

"I miss you. I've got maybe forty minutes of this left and then I'm coming home.

Don't wait up if you're tired, but I was hoping we could just watch something and not talk about my mother's seating chart for one night. "

It was such a small, ordinary thing to want, an evening without his mother threaded through it, that I felt the argument I'd been building lose its urgency. "Yeah. Okay. I'll find something."

"I love you," he said, easy, certain, the way he always said it, without hesitation.

"Love you too."

I hung up and sat with the phone in my hand for a moment, the pasta going cold, and told myself that this was what marriage looked like most nights.

Not every conversation had to be a referendum on twelve years.

Some nights you just wanted to watch something with your husband and not think about anyone's mother.

By the time he got home I'd picked something forgettable and mindless, and he came in loosening his tie, kissed the top of my head on his way to the refrigerator, said something about a supplier delay that had eaten his afternoon.

He found the leftover pasta and ate it cold, standing at the counter the way he'd done since we were newlyweds in a one-bedroom apartment with a table too small for real meals, a habit that had survived every renovation and every larger kitchen we'd owned since.

It was one of the things I still loved about him, that under the suits and the board meetings there was a man who ate cold pasta out of the pot with a fork he'd taken straight from the drawer.

We settled on the couch and he pulled my feet into his lap without asking, working his thumb into the arch the way he knew I liked after a day on my feet, and for a while it was easy between us in the way it used to always be easy, before the family calendar had gotten so crowded there was barely room left for the two of us in it.

He laughed at the show in the places where I laughed, and somewhere in the second episode he fell asleep with his head tipped back against the cushion, and I sat there a long while without moving, watching the light change on the screen, thinking about a fishing photograph sitting in a folder in the front hall of his parents' house.

I thought about waking him, finishing the conversation properly, telling him what it had felt like to stand in that hallway and watch his mother's face light up for someone else.

But he looked tired in a way that had nothing to do with me, and the thought of turning this particular evening into an argument felt like more than I wanted to spend it on.

I told myself I would bring it up again.

Not tonight. There would be another evening for it, quieter, better timed, when his mother wasn't between us before I'd even opened my mouth.

I turned off the television, and eventually he stirred enough to follow me upstairs, and if I lay awake a while after he'd fallen back asleep, turning the day over and looking for the place where I should have said more, I didn't mention that either.