The Wife He Lost in the Spotlight (Groveling, Angst & Second Chances #2)

Chapter 1

Chapter One

CHARLOTTE

The first thing I do with my good health is burn toast.

Not badly. Not enough to set off the alarms or ruin the pan. Just enough that the kitchen fills with that dry, sharp smell, and Logan looks up from the island like he’s been waiting three weeks for a normal problem.

“Don’t move,” he says.

“I’m standing in front of a toaster, Logan.”

“That toaster has proven itself hostile.”

“It’s bread.”

“It was bread.”

I turn and give him a look over my shoulder, but the smile gets out before I can stop it.

He’s barefoot, hair still damp from the shower, wearing an old Jefferson High T-shirt stretched across shoulders that once made defensive lines look like poor planning. There’s a coffee mug in his hand, his wedding ring on the side of it, and a sleep crease still fading from his cheek.

My husband, in the morning. Mine in all the small ways that used to feel too ordinary to notice.

He comes up behind me and reaches around to unplug the toaster, his chest brushing my back.

For a second, I let myself lean. Just an inch.

He notices anyway. Logan notices everything physical: the shift of weight, the held breath, the tiny flinch I don’t mean to make when my body remembers being sick before my mind does.

“You okay?” he asks, low.

“I’m fine.”

“That’s a word people use when they’re lying politely.”

“I’m better,” I correct.

His hand settles at my waist. Warm. Careful.

Better is true. After weeks of a stupid, dragging virus that turned my bones to wet paper and made the stairs feel personal, I’m upright.

I can drink coffee again. I can answer emails without needing a nap afterward.

Yesterday, I actually managed to go to the conservatory for a bit before the exhaustion overtook me.

Logan made me soup. Bad soup, but lovingly bad. He sat on the edge of the tub while I ran a fever and pretended not to look scared. He rubbed circles into my back when I coughed until my ribs hurt. He slept lightly, one hand on me, as if I might float away if he gave the night too much trust.

Now I’m better, and somehow that makes us awkward.

There’s space where there wasn’t before.

A pause before touching. A question before a kiss.

A rustiness in the machinery of us, though the love is still there, still solid, still showing up with coffee and toast and a husband who reaches past me to rescue the kitchen from my return to domestic life.

He presses his mouth to my temple. “Welcome back, Emerson.”

I close my eyes. He only calls me that when he wants me to hear the girl I was before every article called me Mrs. Logan Delaney like my own name was a technicality.

“Thank you,” I say. “For saving me from carbohydrates.”

“I’ve built a career on crisis management.”

“You threw a football for a living.”

“With hostile men trying to fold me in half. Toast is a lateral move.”

His mouth curves against my hair, but the laugh doesn’t quite become sound. That happens more now. Almost-laughter. Almost-rest.

I turn in his arms. “You have the Kingsley meeting today?”

A shadow crosses his face so quickly someone else might miss it. Sponsorships used to energize him. Attention fit Logan like a tailored suit. Since retirement, the meetings seem to drain him in a way games never did.

“Two o’clock,” he says. “Marketing people. Concepts. Words like authenticity.”

“Terrifying.”

“I may not survive.”

“You survived four playoff runs.”

“None of those involved a mood board.”

I smile because he wants me to. Then his eyes flick past me toward the doorway that leads to the den. I know where he’s looking before I turn.

The recliner sits in the corner by the window, angled toward the blank television.

Brown leather, cracked at the arms, one side worn lower than the other from Ray Delaney’s heavy lean.

Logan’s father slept in that chair for the last month he was here because lying flat hurt too much.

After he died, people offered to help. His mother. The hospice nurse. Me.

Logan said, Not yet. So the den became not yet.

The folded blanket is still over the back.

The side table still holds Ray’s reading glasses and a coaster from some sports bar in Kansas City.

There are no ashes there, no photographs arranged like a shrine, nothing dramatic.

That would’ve been easier, maybe. Instead, it’s just a room no one uses because a chair’s still waiting for a man who’s never coming back.

Logan’s hand slips from my waist. “I’ll take care of that toast,” he says.

He says it like we were talking about toast.

My period comes at 11:17.

I know the time because I’m in the upstairs bathroom answering a comment on my blog about the Devane Conservatory’s winter orchid display when the cramp folds low and familiar through me.

For a moment I don’t move. Then I set my phone face down on the counter, sit on the closed toilet lid, and stare at the little basket of guest towels across from me.

There’s no big scene. No sobbing on cold tile. No fist pressed to my mouth like women do in movies when grief arrives beautifully lit. There’s only the ordinary cruelty of blood where I’d been trying to imagine a heartbeat.

I clean myself up. I wash my hands. I look at my face in the mirror and see that I’m still the same woman. Pale from being sick. Hair tied badly. A faint pressure mark on my cheek from where I rested my face on my palm at breakfast.

I go downstairs because telling him later will make it heavier.

Logan’s in the den. Not sitting in Ray’s chair. Never that. He stands beside it with one hand on the back, thumb moving over the cracked seam in the leather.

“Logan.”

He turns. Whatever he sees on my face wipes the softness out of his.

“What happened?”

I hate that question. I hate that he still asks it like he can stop the answer if he gets to it fast enough.

“I started.”

It takes him one beat. Then another. His hand tightens on the chair.

“Oh.”

The word lands between us and stays there. I want to say something useful. It’s okay. We’ll try again. Lots of couples take time. All the sentences people hand you when they don’t know what else to do. None of them come out.

Logan crosses the room and takes my hand. He doesn’t pull me into him right away. He looks at our joined fingers, at my ring, at the place where his thumb covers my knuckle.

“I’m sorry,” he says.

“You don’t have to be sorry.”

“I know.”

But he is. So am I. Not because either of us did something wrong. That's the worst part. There’s no villain in this room. No one to accuse. No one to forgive. Just another month closing its door with us still outside.

I step into him, and he holds me. Not hard. Carefully, like I’m still breakable from the fever, or like he is. His cheek rests against the top of my head. For a few seconds, we’re very quiet in the room where his father’s chair keeps its place.

The box is on the front step when I come back from checking the mail.

No shipping label. No name. No return address. Just a square white box tied with a gray ribbon, placed neatly on the mat beneath the brass D.

I stop so abruptly one of the envelopes slips from under my arm and skids across the porch.

The wind moves through the trees below the house.

Helena Bend sits bright and pretty at the bottom of the hill, all river shine and brick storefronts and roofs tucked into green.

From up here, the town looks harmless. The box does not.

I know before I touch it. My body knows.

The first message had been easy to dismiss. A strange comment under a post about a new hiking trail: You always take the left fork even though the right has better light.

Then an email. Then a direct message that mentioned the blue raincoat I wore on a morning I had not photographed myself. Last week, while I was still sick, a dark sedan idled too long across from Lucy’s café after I posted an old soup recipe and said I missed her espresso machine.

I told myself public life invites odd people. I told myself Logan had enough grief.

I pick up the box. It’s light.

Inside, beneath folded tissue, is a silver bracelet with a tiny charm shaped like a fern.

Not expensive, but specific. Too specific.

The kind of thing a person might send if they knew I’d spent half my blog’s life photographing plants at the Devane Conservatory.

If they’d read deeply. If they’d watched.

There’s a card tucked under the cotton. I don’t open it.

I put everything back exactly as it was, carry the box inside, and shove it onto the top shelf of the coat closet behind a basket of winter gloves. Then I stand there with one hand on the closet door and breathe like breathing is a task.

Lucy answers on the second ring.

“If you’re calling to tell me you relapsed into fever and require broth, I’m resigning as your emergency contact,” she says. “Your husband nearly reorganized my café by anxiety last time.”

“I need to tell you something.”

The joke leaves her voice. “Okay.”

I sit at the kitchen table. The house feels too large around me. “I got another thing.”

“Another message?”

“A box this time.”

Silence.

I press my fingers to my forehead. “There wasn’t a name on it.”

“What was in it?”

“A bracelet. Fern charm. Conservatory-adjacent. Very on brand for a man who thinks a woman’s blog is a personal invitation.”

“Charlotte.”

“I know.”

“Do you?”

I close my eyes. Lucy’s the only person in Helena Bend who can make two words sound like a hand on your shoulder and a shake by both arms.

“I haven’t told Logan.”

“Why?”

“You know why.”

“Charlotte, we've discussed this."

I look toward the den. From here I can see the edge of Ray’s chair, the worn leather arm catching afternoon light.

“He’s barely keeping his head above water some days,” I say.

“He lost Ray. He retired. He’s trying to figure out who he’s without the field, without his father calling him after every game like there’s still film to review.

I’m not handing him a faceless man on the internet who may or may not be dangerous. ”