Chapter Three
MADDOX WAS ON HIS FOURTH call before seven and not one of them was going where he needed it to. He took them in the study with the door shut, the city starting its workday outside the window. He ended one call and took the next, pushing each problem onto whoever could solve it, one issue at a time.
The deal was three weeks from close, and every one of those weeks was a wall he had to climb before breakfast. His grandfather had built the whole thing on the Templeton merger.
Elim had wanted it for a decade, had talked about it from the hospital bed at the end, and had made Maddox swear he’d land it.
Templeton Construction and Caldwell together, the old man had said, gripping his wrist with a strength that shouldn’t have been left in him. That’s the thing that outlasts us. You can’t let it slip.
He wasn’t going to let it slip. He owed the old man that much. He owed him more than that.
Laila had been in the house three days now, and the house had gotten worse each one of them.
He’d noticed it and set it aside, a warning light on a dashboard he’d registered and deferred.
The two women weren’t getting along. Paige had turned quiet and careful, folded in on herself in a way he’d never seen from her, while Laila got brighter to fill the room Paige left empty.
The friction between them thickened every morning until the kitchen had an atmosphere he didn’t want to enter.
He’d told himself it was natural. Two women, one house, with an old friend who talked too much.
It would sort itself out once the deal closed, Laila moved, on, and the pressure came off all of them.
He put it on the list of what to deal with after the merger.
“Varlin, walk me through the covenant again.” He had the London banker on hold, Varlin on the cell, and a legal pad going gray with his own handwriting.
“If Templeton’s board wants the anti-dilution language in before signing, fine, give it to them, but not at the price they quoted Tuesday.
That number was a courtesy, and the courtesy expired. ”
Varlin said, “Templeton wants you to call him.”.
David, his father-in-law, wanted to talk to Maddox directly. “Tell him I’ll call the minute this one thing is settled.” Maddox pinched the bridge of his nose. “I don’t mix family and business. He of all people should know that by now.”
That was the reason he gave, and it was even half true.
The other half he didn’t say out loud. David Templeton had a way of looking at a man across a table like he was reading the fine print on him, and Maddox had never once sat in that gaze without the sense that his father-in-law could see straight through to whatever he was actually thinking.
Right now, with the merger in his hands and his marriage unsettled, whatever David might see wasn’t something Maddox wanted him to detect.
It was easier to hide behind the covenants.
David had spent thirty years turning an old family firm into the largest civil outfit in the state, and he negotiated slowly, being suspicious and impossible to rush, guarding a name three generations deep against anyone who might strip it for parts.
Elim had admired him for it. His grandfather had wanted this merger like other men wanted grandchildren.
In a sense, it was the same wish, the family name carried forward into something that outlasted the body. “I need the redline by noon. I’ll handle Templeton myself.”
He ended the call and registered, only then, that the house had fallen silent around him. No music out of the kitchen, no water in the pipes, or any of the small domestic noise Paige made before she left in the mornings. She was already out for the day.
She spent her days at the shelter, most mornings and half her afternoons, and somewhere in the last year, he’d stopped keeping track of which hours were which.
He should have known where his wife was on an ordinary morning.
He didn’t but refused to feel guilty or spend another minute on the question.
He turned back to the merger, telling himself he’d deal with marital problems after the merger.
LAILA FOUND HIM AT nine, in the kitchen, already polished for a day that had no structure as far as he knew. Rosa had come back for the morning shift, or Paige had made the coffee before she left. He didn’t know which.
“You look as though you slept at your desk,” she said, and poured herself coffee from the pot he hadn’t made.
“I slept fine.”
“You didn’t.” She smiled at him over the cup. It was a smile he knew from a long time ago, and it should have meant something. Mostly, it made him tired.
“You always work yourself sick when you’re avoiding something. I remember.”
“There’s nothing to avoid. There’s a deal to close.”
“Of course.” She was quiet for a moment. “Your wife seems unhappy.”
“My wife is fine.”
“Maddox.” Laila set down the cup. “I’ve been in this house three days, and I can feel it. She looks at you like she’s already grieving you. It’s not my business, but if you want my honest read, that woman has one foot out the door, and you’re too buried in your grandfather’s deal to see it.”
He should have told her it wasn’t her read to give. He said nothing, because the part about the unhappiness was true and the rest of it annoyed him. Laila didn’t know his marriage.
Paige wasn’t leaving. Paige was steady, the one calm thing in a life that had been nothing but sharp edges since the funeral, and whatever was wrong between them was a thing he could fix later, after the close, when there was room to do it right.
There was the other thing too, the one he kept trying not consider. Laila had been in his house three days and already moved through it like she owned it, like she’d come to collect something owed.
She refilled his coffee and sat in the chair Paige sat in. She’d said I remember twice now, softly while reaching for the boy he’d been with her years ago, and each time, the irritation sharpened, and he wanted her gone from the room.
He put that down to bad timing too. Everything was bad timing three weeks from a close. He would sort her out along with the rest of it. “I appreciate the concern,” he said, in the voice he used to end meetings. “Coffee’s good. Thank you, Laila.”
She took the dismissal without losing the smile, unbothered, and that annoyed him more than an argument would have. She should have let it go there. Instead she carried her coffee to the window, and when she spoke again, the sympathy had worn through to something plainer underneath.
“I’ll say one more thing, and then I’ll leave you to your deals.
You don’t look at her.” She stared at him.
“A man looks at the woman he loves. You look through her, at whatever’s next on the list. I’ve had three days to watch you do it.
” She tilted her head, unhurried, certain.
“So tell me, and I’ll drop it. Why did you marry her?
” The question came easily, almost bored sounding, the tone of an answer she assumed she already had and only wanted spoken aloud.
He should have shut it down. On any other morning, he would have.
This morning, he’d slept two hours, the covenant was bleeding time, his grandfather was three months dead and still running the calendar from the grave, and the one person in the house who’d known him before any of it was standing in his kitchen asking the single question he had never once said out loud.
Tiredness gave the answer up before his judgment could stop it.
The chair scraped tile as he stood. “My grandfather wanted the Templeton merger. He’d wanted it for years. David wouldn’t sell into a hostile structure, so Elim decided the cleanest way in was through the family.” He paused. “Through Paige.”
“So he pointed you at her.”
He inclined his head once. “He decided she was easier to manage than her older sister, Kelsey.” He said it without shame or hesitation, and some distant part of him marked how little it cost to say, and how smoothly the truth came once he let it out.
“I’d lost you. I didn’t care who I married.
Elim wanted the Templeton name married into ours, and I was too gutted to argue, so I did what I know how to do.
I ran it like an acquisition. Fast, efficient, and closed before she could think too hard about it. ”
She shook her head. “It worked.”
“Of course. She fell, Elim got his merger, and he died happy three months ago knowing the deal was as good as signed.” He set down the cup. “It’s nearly closed now. Another few weeks, and it’s done.”
“Then you’ll be free.”
Before he could even figure out how to respond to that besides feeling a wave of wrongness, he heard a sound from the front of the house. It was the click of the mudroom door he’d heard countless mornings and never once listened to, closed harder than usual.
He turned. The hall was empty, but a shelter bag that hadn’t been there an hour ago was dropped on the floor where it had slipped from a shoulder, and past it, through a living room window, he saw Paige’s car was already backing out, too fast, gravel spitting under the tires.
He was moving before he’d decided to move. He reached the door in time to watch the car swing hard into the street and go. He realized she had come home for something and had heard every terrible word.
Behind him, in the kitchen, Laila said nothing at all. He was relieved by that as he tried to absorb what he’d done in a moment of weakness.