Chapter Two
DINNER WAS A PERFORMANCE for three, and Paige gave the worst performance of her life.
She served the short ribs because throwing them away would have meant admitting how much they had cost her, and not financially.
Laila cut a single bite, chewed it slowly, and set her fork down for the night.
“You’re so lucky, Paige. You can eat whatever you want.
I have to be so careful.” She said it with her chin propped on one hand and her gaze on Maddox, who took it for the compliment it was dressed as and missed the knife inside it entirely.
Paige had braised those short ribs for six hours. She smiled and took a large, unhurried bite of one, because she wasn’t going to be out-maneuvered at her own table by a woman not even eating the lettuce.
“Paige doesn’t have to worry about that,” Maddox said, probably meaning to be kind, but it sounded like another insult. “She’s always been low-maintenance.”
Low-maintenance. Good on gas. Ran quietly. Paige added it to the list of things she would think about later, when she wasn’t holding a serving fork she could put to other uses. Stabbing either one probably wasn’t the best way to end this horror show.
“She’d have to be.” Laila’s laugh was low and easy. “You were never patient with drama. I should know.”
There it was, the first cutting remark, dropped lightly between sips of wine. I should know. Paige kept her face still and refilled everyone’s water. She gave herself more wine. Screw them.
The full story came out in pieces over the next hour, each piece sweet, small, and offered like a gift, the kind you wanted to throw away immediately, like Aunt Edna’s fruitcake.
They had met at seventeen, at Brandyce Preparatory, where Laila had been the scholarship girl and Maddox had been Caldwell money, but they’d become friends.
Friends. Sure.
“You should have seen him at eighteen,” Laila said, warming to it, her chin in her hand. “Before all this.” She waved her hand at the house, the kitchen, and the life. “He used to write. Did you know that? Terrible poems. He’d leave them in my locker.”
“He doesn’t write anymore,” Paige said.
“No.” Laila’s smile stayed sweet. “I don’t imagine he does.”
Maddox said nothing. He sat at the head of his own table and let a woman narrate his youth to his wife. He refilled his glass. Paige watched him not stop any of it.
His grandfather had never approved, Laila went on, and here her voice dropped into something confidential, pitched to make Paige lean in.
“He objected to your friendship?” Paige glanced at her husband, who had the grace to suddenly look faintly uncomfortable.
“Our friendship.” Laila repeated the word as though it were a small, funny thing, and drew it out a beat, savoring it, having clearly told this story before and knowing exactly where the good parts were. “That’s one way to put it.”
“How would you put it when Maddox said you were old friends,” Paige said.
“I’d put it honestly.” Laila’s eyes were bright and wet at the edges, already halfway to a grief she was clearly enjoying.
“Maddox wanted to marry me. We were twenty. He had a ring, if you can believe it, some awful little thing he’d bought with his own money instead of the family’s, which of course, was the point.
” She smiled at Maddox down the length of the table.
“You never could do anything the easy way.”
Maddox looked at his plate. He didn’t confirm or deny it, and the silence where his denial should have been was the loudest thing at the table.
“Elim found out,” Laila went on. “He sat me down himself. Not Maddox. Me. He was very kind about it, which was the cruel part. He explained that a Caldwell marries a certain kind of woman, and I was not that kind. If Maddox went through with it, there would be nothing left for him. No company. No inheritance. Nothing.”
She paused there, and the pause was the performance, drawn out long enough that Paige watched her decide to let a single tear go. “The girl or the money. That was the choice he gave a twenty-year-old.”
“He gave you the choice,” Paige said. “Not Maddox.”
“Because Maddox would have chosen wrong.” Laila said it gently, like a kindness. “He’d have thrown all of it away for me and hated me for it inside of ten years. I couldn’t be the thing that cost him his whole life. I loved him too much for that.”
Paige resisted the urge to top off her wine glass again, wanting something to get through the drivel. She settled for water.
“I let him go,” Laila said, softly now, looking directly at Paige without blinking. “I disappeared. It nearly killed me. You understand though. You’d do anything for someone you love. Even leave.”
Paige set down the water pitcher before her hand could shake with it. Every word was aimed at her and dressed up as a confession she hadn’t asked to hear.
“I’m sure it was very hard,” Paige said, because someone had to say something and Maddox clearly wasn’t going to.
“Elim’s gone now, of course. Three months.” Laila smiled, satisfied, and turned her glass a slow quarter-turn on the cloth. “Life is strange, isn’t it? How it circles back around?”
Paige didn’t look at Maddox. She was afraid of what she would find, and more afraid of what she wouldn’t.
Laila carried her wine to the living room without being asked and folded herself onto the white sofa, one arm along the back, entirely at home, as if she’d been paying the mortgage on it.
She hadn’t asked where the coasters were.
Of course she hadn’t. Paige stood in the doorway with the last plates in her hands and couldn’t stop looking at the woman on the cushions.
She had put a dog on that sofa once. Nine months into the marriage, a hound mix from the shelter, a foster for a long weekend, sweet, clumsy, and desperate for a lap.
Paige had brought him home half as a favor and half as a test she hadn’t admitted she was running.
He’d gotten up on the white sofa within the hour, one muddy paw and then all four, thrilled with himself.
Maddox had come around the corner and stopped.
Whatever crossed his face then was cold, shut, and unfamiliar, an expression she couldn’t read on the man she’d married.
The first thing out of his mouth hadn’t been a laugh, a groan, or a question about the dog.
It had been about the upholstery. He’d looked at the fabric, not the animal.
Paige had sat with Barney on her lap and understood that when he’d said someday, sure, we’ll get a dog, he had never once meant it.
The foster went back on Monday, thankfully to a permanent home soon after. She never brought up another.
That was the first time she’d let herself wonder if she’d married a stranger. Could their marriage last? She had spent a year and a half refusing to ask the question again.
Laila’s manicure trailing along the back of that sofa asked it for her, and she had no answer left that let Maddox off.
She got through the rest of it. She cleared the plates.
She declined the help Laila offered once and didn’t offer twice, then stood at the sink running water she didn’t need over dishes that were already clean.
When Laila finally said her goodnights and went up to the guest room, the guest room with the fresh sheets, Paige turned off the water, dried her hands, and went to find her husband.
He was in the study with a drink he hadn’t touched.
“Is it true?” she asked.
Maddox didn’t pretend not to understand. That was almost the worst part, that he didn’t even try. “Paige...”
“Is it true? The two of you. All of it? More than old friends.” She didn’t filter out the mockery in the words.
“It was a long time ago.”
She took a step closer. “That’s not a no.”
He set the glass down. “Yes. We were together, years ago. It ended. My grandfather had opinions, Laila made a choice, and it was over long before you and I ever met.” He rubbed the bridge of his nose. “It doesn’t have anything to do with us.”
“She’s sleeping in my house.”
He actually rolled his eyes. “For a few weeks. She’s between things, she needed somewhere to land, and I—” He stopped. She watched him choose the next words, and she hated that she could see him choosing. “I owed her a kindness. That’s all it is.”
“You didn’t ask me.”
“No. I should have asked you. I’m asking you now.”
“You’re not asking me anything. She’s already upstairs.”
He didn’t have an answer for that, so he did the thing he always did, which was to reach for the practical, fixable version of the problem that could be solved with a plan.
“Once the merger closes, I’ll have room to breathe.
It’s weeks away. Things get better after that, I promise you, this whole stretch has been—”
“I can’t hear that again.” She heard her own voice crack and let it.
“You don’t get to tell me it gets better after the deal.
You’ve been telling me that for two years.
First it was the structuring thing, then it was the refinance, and now it’s this.
” She pressed the heel of her hand under one eye, hard, and forced back tears, because she wasn’t going to cry in front of gom tonight.
“The man I married talked to me. I don’t know where he went.
I’ve been waiting for him to come back so long I forgot I was waiting. ”
For a moment his expression softened, close to regret, or close enough that a year ago, she might have mistaken it for love. He crossed the room and took her hands. His were warm, and he looked at her with what she wanted so badly to believe was the man she’d married.
“I’ll do better,” he said. “I mean it. I’ve been letting it all slide while you’ve carried all the domestic stuff, and that’s not fair to you. Let me get through this deal, and I’ll make it right. All of it. I promise.”
She looked up at him. She wanted it. God, she wanted to believe him with a thirst that hurt, wanted one promise from him that he would actually keep.
She saw, under the warmth, the thing she had been refusing to see for over a year. He was already somewhere else, already back with the numbers. He was saying the words because the words ended the conversation, and ending the conversation was the goal.
The moment she nodded, he would be back in the study with the Templeton-Caldwell merger numbers, and she would be alone in the kitchen. He believed every word while he said it, and he still wouldn’t do a single thing. That was worse than a lie. He meant it, but nothing would change.
“Okay,” she said, because she was too tired to fight him when he already thought he’d won.
He kissed her, aiming for her mouth. She turned her head so it landed awkwardly on her cheek instead. He didn’t notice as he said something about an early call. He turned back toward the study, and she watched him go, and the study door latched behind him.
He believed the conversation was over and solved.
Paige stood alone in the kitchen. Down the hall, a thin line of light showed under the guest room door. Laila was still awake, settling in.
Two years she had spent waiting for the man she married to walk back through some door and be himself again. He had chosen his work, then his grandfather’s ghost, and now another woman’s comfort, every time over her.
She squared her shoulders and went upstairs to bed. She was done waiting for him to come back.