Chapter Four #2
It surfaced whole and uninvited, complete down to the light in the kitchen.
Yesterday, the middle of the afternoon, Paige coming in from the shelter to find Laila alone in the kitchen, arranging cut flowers she’d bought herself into one of the good vases that had been a wedding gift.
Laila had looked up and smiled, the warm one, with teeth in it if you knew where to look.
“Can I say something to you, woman to woman?” She hadn’t waited for a yes.
“I’ve watched the two of you for three days now, and I have to be honest, because nobody else in your life is going to be.
He’s not here, Paige. Not really. You feel it.
A woman always knows when a man has gone somewhere she can’t follow. ”
She’d said it gently, like she was breaking hard news out of kindness.
“I’m not saying it to hurt you. I’m saying it because you’re young, you’re lovely, and you’re pouring yourself into a man doesn’t love you.
Sometimes, the bravest thing a woman can do is step aside before it costs her everything.
For your sake. For his. For everyone’s.”
Paige had thought, at the time, that it was the single most arrogant thing anyone had ever said to her in her own kitchen.
The other woman, three days into the house, telling her to make room.
She’d said something short and cold and walked out.
She’d spent the evening furious, trying to dismiss it as the delusion of a woman who wanted her husband and dressed up the wanting as concern.
She would have told Maddox if he’d bothered to come to bed, but he’d spent the night in his office, working. Supposedly.
She understood now that Laila had been guessing. Laila hadn’t known about the merger, Elim’s plan, the campaign, or any of it. She’d watched a man not love his wife for three days and read it right, better than Paige had let herself read it, and she’d moved on the opening.
The part that hollowed Paige out, sitting on her father’s stairs, was that the arrogant guess had been correct.
Laila had seen it in three days. Paige had missed it for two years because she’d been the one inside it, cooking the dinners and trying to rekindle the spark, telling herself it was a rough patch.
“She was right. That’s the part I can’t get past. She was a guest in my house for three days and saw it clearer than I did. ”
“You have to stop.” Kelsey turned and took her by both shoulders. “You loved him. That’s not a thing to be ashamed of. You loved him honestly, all the way. He took that and used it. The only person who did anything wrong is in a house that was never yours.”
Paige wanted to believe her. She let the words sink in as far as they would go tonight, which wasn’t all the way, and held onto the part of them she could.
David stood after a while. The shock had burned down into the hard focus underneath it, and Paige knew that focus because she’d grown up watching him do business.
He’d stopped being her heartbroken father for a moment and become the man who’d grown the family firm into the biggest in the state and kept it out of hands like Elim Caldwell’s for thirty years.
“The merger’s not closing,” David said.
“Dad, you don’t have to—”
“I’m doing it for you, yes, but I also won’t do business with people who treat my family like a line in a term sheet.” He took his glasses off and folded them. “I’d have walked away from it if I’d known, and I’m walking away from it now. Kelsey.”
Kelsey stood up, wiping her face, already shifting into the other gear the two of them shared. “I’ll pull the file tonight. We haven’t countersigned the last amendment. There’s room to withdraw, but we have to move before their people file Monday.”
“Then we start tonight.” David looked at Paige.
The business concentration went out of him again.
He was just her father, standing in the hall of the house she’d grown up in.
“You’re home. You’ll stay as long as you want, which I hope is a long time.
You don’t have to see him. Not for the paperwork, not for anything.
Whatever needs doing, Kelsey and I do it. ”
“He’ll try to talk to me,” Paige said. “When it hits him. He doesn’t lose things quietly. He never has. He’ll come here or send something. He’ll find a way in.”
“Then he’ll find me first,” David said, and there was no heat in it, which was how she knew he meant it.
Paige nodded. The adrenaline had drained out of her all at once. She could barely stay upright. “I never want to see him again.”
She heard herself say it and meant every furious word. They still cut on the way out. Meaning it and wanting it to be true weren’t the same thing, and some treacherous part of her was already grieving the husband she’d invented and never actually had.
She let that part grieve while Kelsey held her hand.
Her father went into his study and started taking apart the deal that Elim Caldwell had built his whole legacy on, one phone call at a time.
Through the study door, she heard his low, certain voice already working.
It steadied her more than any comfort would have.
Kelsey was on her own phone while pulling files. This was what her family did. They didn’t promise her it would be fine. They picked up their phones and started fixing what they could. Paige could fall apart because they were already handling the rest.