Chapter Five
THE HOUSE HAD BEEN wrong since her car left the drive the day before, and by morning, it had stopped feeling temporary.
Maddox came down at six into a kitchen with no coffee in it and stood there with his hand on the cold, empty pot. Paige made the coffee. Paige had always made the coffee, or arranged for it, and he’d never once registered the making of it until there was none.
He’d spent the night in a bed that held only him, running the sound of the mudroom door and the sight of her car swinging into the street on a loop, and he hadn’t slept.
He went up and checked the bedroom, which was worse. Her side of the closet was still full, with every dress and coat where she’d left it. The photograph of her mother still stood on the dresser. Her shampoo was in the shower, her paperbacks were stacked on the nightstand alongside her lip balm.
She hadn’t packed. She hadn’t taken a single thing that was hers.
She’d heard him and walked out of the house with nothing, and the nothing told him more than an emptied closet ever could have.
A wife leaving a bad marriage takes her things.
Paige had walked out of a burning building with nothing but herself.
His phone rang, and his pulse accelerated when he saw David’s name. His father-in-law could help him fix this. “David. good, I’ve been meaning to call. We should—”
“We’re not closing,” David said.
Maddox stopped with his tie half-knotted. “I’m sorry?”
“The merger. Caldwell and Templeton. It’s not happening.
My people are pulling the amendments this morning, and my lawyers will have the withdrawal to yours by end of day.
” David’s voice was hard, level, and entirely calm.
That calm told Maddox more than shouting would have.
“Two years ago, I walked my daughter down the aisle, shook your hand, and called you my son. I know what you did with that now. I know why you married her. She’s sitting in my kitchen because she heard you explain it yourself. ”
The tie slid loose in Maddox’s fingers. “David—”
“I’m not interested in an explanation.” He didn’t raise his voice.
He never had to. “I trusted you with my daughter, just as I trusted you across a table, and you took both because a dead man told you to, so no, I don’t care about your reasons.
You’ll stay away from Paige, and everything from here goes through her lawyers, not her.
” He paused. “You’ve cost me a merger I had come around to wanting.
That’s business, and I’ll survive it. What you did to my girl isn’t business, and you’re going to spend a long time understanding the difference. ”
The line went dead.
Maddox stood in his bedroom with the phone still in his hand and waited for it to crush him.
The merger was gone. The merger his grandfather had spent the last decade of his life on, the thing Elim had gripped his wrist and made him swear to close, the deal Maddox had bent every hour of two years toward.
It had died in a ninety-second phone call.
He braced for it. He could see it coming and set himself against it.
The wave of shock and grief didn’t come. Losing the merger stirred almost nothing in him at all.
That stopped him because it made no sense by any logic he trusted. He set down the phone and tried to make himself care about the deal. The caring wasn’t there. Where it should have been, there was only cold apathy.
It was backward, and the backwardness was the thing he couldn’t get past. He’d have given anything for this merger a week ago. He’d built his whole year on it, canceled dinners for it, and chosen it over Paige a hundred small times without once feeling he’d chosen wrong.
The marriage... If he’d been honest with himself in any quiet moment across two years, he’d always assumed it would end.
He’d married her as a means to get the deal.
Somewhere in the back of his planning, he’d penciled in the divorce as a someday item.
It would be amicable, inevitable, and the natural end of a deal that had served its purpose.
It might hurt her, but he’d expected to feel nothing besides a twinge of guilt.
He’d have expected to grieve the merger and shrug off the wife. Instead, the dead merger lay on his desk and moved him about as much as a canceled lunch, and the empty side of the bed was going to take him apart.
There was nothing he could do about it, and that was the part he couldn’t get around. He couldn’t negotiate his way out of this one. There was no offer he could make her, no smart move, and no version of it where he won her back by being good at winning.
He went down to the study to work, because work was the thing he reached for when something hurt, and he didn’t want to look at it. There wasn’t much left to do on a dead deal, but there was the wind-down of two years of structure, and he made himself do it.
He called Varlin. He told legal to stand down the closing and start the reversal, notified the bankers, and drafted the note to the board.
He was good at this, the clean dismantling of a thing that wasn’t going to happen.
He’d always been good at it, and being good at it had filled every hour he hadn’t wanted to spend thinking.
This was the first morning the work didn’t hold. He kept surfacing back to the same fact. She was gone, and that was the one thing he had no idea how to fix.
Laila drifted through the study twice while he worked, once to ask if he’d eaten and once with no reason he could see, moving through the wreck of his morning like a woman settling into a house she meant to keep.
She’d made herself coffee in Paige’s kitchen with Paige’s machine. She’d put on music, low, something from years ago he half remembered but didn’t want to. The second time, she rested a hand on the back of his chair and said his name in the old, soft way.
He stood, crossed to the window on the excuse of the view, and waited until she got bored enough to leave. He couldn’t have said yet why her sympathy made his skin crawl. He only knew that every time she came near him, the loss of Paige got louder, not quieter.
By afternoon, the quiet had gotten to him, and for the first time since the funeral, he didn’t know how to process his emotions. He called his mother.
He hadn’t called her for help since he was a boy. Somewhere after his father, Harry, died he’d learned to solve his own problems, to close his own deals, and need no one, because needing people was a lever, and Elim had taught him that every lever gets pulled eventually.
He’d built a life engineered so that nothing could be taken from him because he’d let himself want nothing he couldn’t buy back. It had worked right up until a woman in a shelter T-shirt walked out the door with the one thing he couldn’t purchase.
Now he stood in his study at three in the afternoon and dialed his mother’s number like a child, because she was the only person left who might tell him the truth and love him anyway.
Jayne picked up on the second ring, and her hello was warm. “Is it my birthday already?” she teased, since he only regularly called for certain occasions.
He stood at the study window with the dead covenants glowing on the screen behind him and made himself say, “Paige left.” The words were cold, but that was the only way he could get them out. “She’s gone to her father’s. It’s bad, Mom. I don’t think she’s coming back.”
There was silence on the line. Then she asked carefully, in a voice she used for a question she already half knew the answer to, “What did you do, Maddox?”
There it was, the one thing he couldn’t tell her.
He had told Laila the whole of it in his own kitchen without a catch in his voice, laid it out like a business plan, but his mother asked one plain question, and his throat closed on the answer.
He couldn’t tell her that Elim had pointed him at a woman, and he’d run her down like an acquisition. “It’s complicated.”
“It always is, with this family.” She let out a breath, and there was no lecture in it, only his mother deciding what to do.
“I’ll come. I can be on the afternoon boat and to you by evening.
Don’t do anything stupid before I get there, and don’t you dare tell me not to come. I’m already looking for my keys.”
“Mom—”
“I know. I’ll be there by dark.” Her voice gentled. “Whatever it is, we’ll look at it together. We always have.” She rang off to catch her ferry before he could tell her not to bother, which was exactly why she’d done it that way.
He set the phone down on the desk and stood in the silence a long time. His mother was coming. His wife was gone. The merger his grandfather had spent a decade chasing was a stack of withdrawn amendments, and Laila was somewhere in his house humming to herself.
He’d started the day with everything Elim had built him to want, and by afternoon, he’d learned that none of it mattered like it should.
He didn’t have a word yet for what was wrong with him. He only knew the house wouldn’t stop feeling wrong, and no deal he’d ever closed had taught him the first thing about how to fix it.