Chapter Four
PAIGE WAS FIFTEEN MINUTES gone from the house when she remembered the folder. The Harbor Street grant paperwork, due to the county by five, was still on the hall table where she’d set it down that morning because her head had been three days full of Laila and hadn’t had room for anything else.
She turned the car around at the light. Fifteen minutes back, two minutes inside, and she could still make the county office by the meeting time.
She let herself in through the mudroom, quiet out of the habit that house had trained into her, and she heard their voices before she reached the kitchen and stopped without deciding to.
Laila’s first, light and unhurried. Then Maddox, lower, with bald honesty she’d never heard. She had her hand on the doorframe and her mouth open to say she’d only come back for the folder. Then the words reached her and arranged themselves, and she stopped where she stood.
“Why did you marry her?”
Paige stood in the hall with her hand on the frame and waited for her husband to say because I love her.
She’d have taken that’s none of your business.
She’d have loved get out of my house. She built the next two seconds on the hope of any of them and filled them with every version of the man she’d married.
He didn’t say any of them.
She heard it all through the wall, the whole of it laid out in a voice as passionate as one he might use to discuss taxes.
His grandfather had wanted the Templeton merger.
Her father wouldn’t sell into a hostile structure.
The cleanest way in was through the family.
Through her. He’d run it like an acquisition, fast and clean, closed before she could think too hard about it. It worked. She fell. Elim died happy.
She didn’t stay for the end of it because there wasn’t going to be an end that mended the start of it. She had wanted him to hesitate. She stood four feet from him through a wall to give him every chance, and he laid the whole thing out in the tone he used to read a spreadsheet.
He hadn’t married a woman. He’d executed a strategy, and she had spent two years loving the husband he’d built for the closing.
Every memory from the last two years turned ugly in the space of a breath.
The whirlwind courtship that had swept her off her feet before she could wonder why a man with his pick of the world would choose her.
The proposal at four months. The wedding pushed forward, twice.
She’d called it passion. She’d told Kelsey it was passion.
She’d stood in front of everyone she loved and promised her life to a merger clause she thought was marriage while he stood across from her and closed the deal.
She considered storming in to make him say it to her face.
Not today, Satan.
In the moment, there was no version of that fight she wanted and no version that ended with her holding anything worth keeping. The only thing left in that house worth taking was herself.
She backed out of the hall with soft, careful steps she’d learned for frightened animals, leaving the folder where it lay, and left the rest of it too, including the photograph of her mother on the dresser and two years of her clothes hanging in a closet upstairs.
She could get her things later or buy new ones.
She wasn’t going up those stairs while he was in the house.
She was out the door, slamming the mudroom door behind her, and got into the car before the shaking started. She got it into gear and backed down the drive too fast, gravel spitting.
She didn’t look at the house in the mirror because she had never once walked through that front door and felt truly at home. She’d thought, be careful with the china and don’t touch the sofa.
She pointed the car toward the only place that had ever been home and drove.
She made it to the end of the block before she had to pull over.
Then she cried like she hadn’t let herself cry in the house, ugly and loud, with her forehead against the wheel, until it burned out of her and left her empty and dry-eyed on a side street four minutes from the home that had never been hers.
She sat there a while after the crying stopped. A woman walked a beagle past the car and lifted a hand, a neighbor she half-recognized. Paige lifted hers back on reflex and thought, with a strange level clarity, that she would never drive down this street again.
She’d been the wife in the big house on the corner. In an hour, she’d stop living as his wife, and the thought didn’t frighten her as much as it should have. It came almost as relief, and the relief scared her more than grief would have.
She wiped her face in the visor mirror. She looked older than she had that morning, but steadier than she’d been in a year.
That was the part she’d never be able to explain to anyone who asked.
The worst day of her marriage was also the first day in two years she’d stopped trying so hard to make it fit.
She started the car and drove to her father’s.
The Templeton grounds were the same as they always were, with the big, old main house lit up in every window because her father liked light, electric bill be damned, and off to the side, the guesthouse where Kelsey lived, close enough to David to matter and far enough to have her own space.
Paige stopped the car and sat a moment, looking at the house she’d grown up in, the wanting to go inside and the not wanting to say the words out loud fighting each other, until the guesthouse door opened.
Kelsey crossed the grass in an old college sweatshirt with a dish towel still over her shoulder, took one look at Paige’s face through the windshield, and stopped needing to be told anything at all.
“You’re coming inside,” Kelsey said, and opened the car door herself when Paige didn’t move to. She led her to the main house.
Inside smelled like her father’s terrible coffee and the lemon oil the housekeeper used on Fridays. David Templeton came out of the study in his reading glasses with a contract in his hand.
He stopped when he saw her, and he set the contract down on the hall table without looking at where it landed. “Paige?” He sounded alarmed. She must look bad.
“Hi, Dad.” Her voice was raspy.
“What did he do?”
She meant to give them the short version. She meant to be composed about it, to lay it out clearly and let them be angry on her behalf while she stayed above it.
Instead, the whole thing came apart in the front hall.
She told them all of it, about the anniversary, Laila, the guest room, and the worst of it, the conversation in the kitchen.
By the time she got to he ran it like an acquisition, her father had caught the banister and lowered himself onto the bottom stair.
“All that for the merger,” David said.
She nodded miserably.
“He married you for the merger.” He said it slowly, and she watched him understand it in stages, each part worse than the last. “Elim Caldwell pointed that boy at my daughter to get me to agree to this merger.”
“Dad—”
“I sat across from Elim Caldwell for two years.” Dad’s voice vibrated with anger.
“I shook his hand at your wedding. I gave a toast.” He looked at his own hands.
“I thought my daughter had fallen in love with a good man and gotten lucky that he happened to be useful. I had it backwards. He was useful for his grandfather only, and you were collateral damage.”
Kelsey sat down next to Paige on the stairs and took her hand, holding it hard. She was crying too now, quiet, furious tears. “I told you to keep trying. God, Paige. Every time you called me, I said you should give it more time and let the pressure of the merger pass. I urged you to stay there.”
She shook her head. “You didn’t know.”
“I told you it was normal. Despite never being married, I told you all marriages go through it.” Kelsey wiped her face with the heel of her hand. “I’m going to be sick.”
“You gave me the advice everyone gives,” Paige said. “It’s what you say to a marriage worth saving. Neither of us knew there was nothing to save.” She squeezed her sister’s hand. “You don’t get to take the blame for this. That spot’s taken.”
Kelsey laughed, wet and broken, and pressed her forehead to Paige’s shoulder for a second. Then she straightened, because Turners fell apart in shifts, and it was David’s turn now.
“You didn’t know,” Paige said again. She meant it and held her sister’s hand.
The three of them sat in the hall together.
The family had always done its hardest talking on those stairs, close together, and nobody bothered to move to a room with actual chairs.
They’d sat here in a row the night the hospital called about her mother’s car going off the road in the rain.
They’d come back to the same steps after the funeral.
Over the years, the bottom steps of the Templeton house had become the place the family went when the world came apart.
She’d had a marble staircase for two years, and no one to sit on it with.
“I kept thinking I was failing at it,” she said.
“The marriage. I kept thinking if I just tried harder, cooked the right dinner, or wore the right thing, I’d get him back.
I planned date nights he canceled. I thought it was me.
” Her voice cracked, and she let it. “It was never going to work because there was never anything there to fix. I was tending to a building with nobody inside.”
“I can’t believe he’d bring his woman into your home.” Dad sounded furious.
“It never felt like my home.” She exhaled raggedly. “She told me to leave, you know.” It came out
before she’d decided to say it. “Laila. Yesterday afternoon.”
Kelsey went very still. “She what?”