The Wife He Let Them Humiliate (You Chose Her. Now Grovel. #16)

Chapter 1

Gordon did the zip. He always did the zip, badly, and had for twenty-four years.

"Hold still."

"I am holding still."

"You're not." He got it caught in the lining and swore at it. "Who makes a dress like this."

"Somebody who assumes a woman has a maid."

"We have a maid."

"We have a housekeeper, and Teresa goes home at six, and I'm not asking Teresa to dress me." Nicole watched him in the mirror, tongue in the corner of his mouth, fifty-one years old and defeated by a hook and eye. "You could just say you can't do it."

"I can do it."

He couldn't do it. She reached back without looking and did it herself in about four seconds, which she had also been doing for twenty-four years.

The bedroom on Chestnut Street was gray-blue and enormous and she still hadn't gotten used to the closet. Twenty-two feet of it. When they moved in she had put everything she owned into one end and left the rest empty for eight months, and it had taken a decorator, twice, to fill it.

"You're quiet," he said.

"I'm thinking about place cards."

"God help us."

"Don't." She turned around. "I redid them. The printer put the honorific before the given name on half of them and it read like a wedding, and Whitney's office said it was fine."

"It probably was fine."

"It wasn't fine, Gordon."

"Okay." He put both hands up, grinning. "It wasn't fine. You saved us. Nobody will ever know."

And that was it, really. That was the whole marriage in four seconds and she didn't notice it happening, because it had happened ten thousand times: she said a true thing about a piece of work she'd done, and he made it into a joke that was affectionate, and the affection was completely real, and the work went into the ground like water.

He kissed her shoulder. "You look beautiful."

"I look expensive."

"Both." He was already reaching for his phone. "Car's at seven."

She stood in the closet a minute after he'd gone downstairs, in a dress that cost more than her father had made in four months, and she couldn't have said what she was waiting for.

The ballroom at the Trumbull always smelled like lilies and money.

Nicole stood near the doors and counted the room the way she counted everything. Twenty-six tables. Three hundred chairs. Two bars, both slow. A gap by the windows where the photographer would want people and nobody was standing.

She fixed the gap first. That was the job.

"Mrs. Sutton." A young man in catering black, sweating through his collar. "The mayor's office moved two people to table four."

"Then move the Halloran party to eight and tell them it's closer to the podium."

"Is it?"

"It is now." She smiled at him. "Go on. You're fine."

He went. She watched him go and felt the small clean satisfaction of a problem that stayed solved.

There weren't many of those left in her life.

She had a house on Chestnut Street with a staff of four and a calendar full of rooms like this one, and somewhere in the last decade the only thing left she was actually good at had become seating charts.

Her thumb found the scar at its base. A white line, thin as thread, from a sheet-metal edge in the first year. She rubbed it without knowing she was doing it.

Twenty years. That was what the banners said. TWENTY YEARS OF THE SUTTON GROUP, in letters two feet high over the stage, with a photo of the Farnsworth Street building lit up gold.

There was no photo of the room over the print shop on Dorchester Avenue. She had asked. She had asked in October, lightly, the way you ask for something you don't intend to fight for, and the woman running the event had said what a great idea and that had been the end of it.

"You look like you're working."

Ross Danforth, sixty-four years old and rumpled in a tuxedo that had been rumpled at four other galas. He was holding two glasses of wine and gave her one without asking which she wanted. He'd been giving her the red for twenty years.

"I am working."

"Nobody hired you."

"Nobody ever did," she said, and he laughed into his glass.

Ross had been the third person the company ever employed. She'd written the letter herself, on a typewriter they'd bought used because the computer was for invoices only. She still remembered the weight of the keys.

"Do you know what they've got planned tonight?" he asked.

"Dinner, the film, the toast. Then dancing nobody does."

"Mm." He looked at the stage a second too long.

"What?"

"Nothing." He tipped his glass at her. "Save me a seat away from the mayor."

Gordon found her by the windows twenty minutes later.

Fifty-one and built like a man who used to load his own trucks, which he had, though now it only showed in how coats hung on him.

He put his hand flat on the small of her back.

He'd been doing that for twenty-four years and it still worked on her, which she found tiresome about herself.

"There she is."

"Here I am."

"Table's wrong."

"Table's fine. I fixed it."

"Course you did." He kissed the side of her head. He smelled like the same soap he'd used when they were broke. "You okay? You've got your face on."

"I've got my face on because there are three hundred people here."

"That's the face I mean." He grinned. She let him have it.

For a second it was easy. That was the part she would come back to later, over and over, picking at it like a scab. It was easy. She had stood in a beautiful room next to her husband on the night his company turned twenty and she had been happy, in the low steady way you're happy about weather.

Vera Sutton arrived at the table the way she arrived everywhere, small and unhurried and absolutely certain a chair would be found.

"Nicole. That color."

"Thank you, Vera."

"It's brave." Vera settled her napkin. "I could never."

Twenty-four years of this. Nicole had a whole shelf of responses and used none of them, because Vera never raised her voice and a raised voice in reply is the only thing anyone remembers.

Dinner was chicken. There was a film — six minutes of drone footage over buildings the company had gutted and rebuilt, a hospital in Brighton, a mill in Lowell, the parish hall in Quincy with the new roof.

She watched the parish hall go by in two seconds and thought about the night she and Gordon had eaten cold pizza in that basement at one in the morning, sitting on the floor because there was nowhere else.

Then Whitney went up to the podium and the room made the noise it always made for her.

Whitney Larkin was forty-five and the best-dressed person in any room without ever appearing to have thought about it.

She had been Gordon's partner for fifteen years.

She laughed a half-beat before her own punchlines, which everyone found charming and which meant you always knew when one was coming.

"So," Whitney said. "Twenty years."

Applause.

"Some of you have been here for all of them. Some of you came in when we could afford chairs."

The laugh. Warm. Easy.

Nicole was smiling. She wanted that on the record, later, when she went over it. She was smiling and she had her hand around her husband's wrist under the table.

"Now, tradition," Whitney said. "You all know I have to do this. Gordon, sit still."

Gordon raised both hands. The room loved it.

Whitney did the CFO first. Then the head of operations, then a man from the bank whose golf swing was apparently a matter of public concern. It was funny. Nicole laughed twice, honestly.

Then Whitney said, "And of course we have to talk about Nicole."

The room turned. Three hundred faces, in one motion, the way a field of wheat moves.

"Nicole Sutton," Whitney said, "our founder's wife."

She let it sit. She laughed her half-beat early.

"You know, people ask me what Nicole does. And I say — she does so much."

The laugh started small.

"She has the most exquisite taste. Everything you see in this room, Nicole picked. The flowers, the linens." A pause. "The place cards. Twice, because she wasn't happy with the first ones."

Bigger.

Nicole kept her face still. Her face was very good. Twenty years of Vera had made it excellent.

"And she came to us from — Quincy." Whitney said the word like a foreign city she'd once had a layover in. "Which is such a journey. Truly. From a triple-decker to Chestnut Street. And she never lets us forget it."

There it was.

It arrived in her chest, physical, like a dropped weight. Her hand was still on Gordon's wrist. She could feel his pulse.

"In the early days," Whitney said, "when it was just the two of them and a room over a print shop, Nicole answered the phones. And you have to understand, she was incredible on those phones."

The room laughed.

"Gordon built a company. Nicole built a front desk."

The room laughed harder.

And Gordon laughed.

Not politely. Not the closed-mouth thing men do when their wives are the joke and they've decided to wait it out.

He put his head back an inch and he laughed the way he laughed at things that were actually funny, the bark she'd known since she was twenty-two years old, and his wrist jumped under her hand.

Nicole looked at him.

He was still laughing. He didn't feel her looking. That was the part. He didn't feel it, because there was nothing coming from her side of the table that would make a man check.

"Now, I love her," Whitney said. "We all love her. She is the most decorative thing in this company and I mean that with my whole heart."

Applause. Some of it was for the end of the roast. Not all of it.

Nicole took her hand off her husband's wrist and put it in her lap and did not move it for the rest of the toast.

She smiled through dessert. She thanked the caterer. She found the man from the mayor's office and asked after his daughter's college applications, and she remembered the daughter's name, and the man was so pleased.

There was another hour of it. That was the part nobody would ever ask her about afterward — not the joke, the hour.