Chapter Twelve
SATURDAY AFTERNOON, Maddox came up the stairs with Skipper at his heels and a knot in his stomach. He had three hours until dinner and no idea how to fill them without losing his nerve.
Paige had said Saturday. She'd said her father's house, the drawings, one meal, not a promise. He'd spent the rest of the week telling himself that a meal was enough. He had no right to want more, and wanting more was the exact reflex he was supposed to have unlearned.
The knot didn't care what he told himself. He'd mentally walked through what he’d say at dinner twice already while he was still at the office, doing some weekend work. That was its own kind of warning, the old instinct to engineer an outcome creeping back in through the details.
Tonight wasn't for closing a deal. He kept having to remind himself of that. Tonight, he showed up, told the truth, and let her decide. If some part of him still wanted to walk in with the perfect thing to say, that part was the problem, not the plan.
He loosened his tie on the landing, and Skipper pushed past his legs into the bedroom, claiming the rug by the window that had somehow become his in a few short weeks. At night, he slept with Maddox, but during the day, he liked the rug.
The old dog had rules now. The rug was his.
The left side of the bed was his, a fact Maddox had lost several arguments about.
The office sofa was his, the one that had cost more than a car and now wore a permanent drift of black fur that Maddox had stopped trying to prevent.
All he could do was vacuum and hope. In a few short weeks, a scarred stray had rewritten a decade of Maddox's carefully ordered house, and Maddox had let him, because letting the dog win turned out to be one of the few uncomplicated pleasures left to him.
After what had probably been a lifetime of losing, Skipper had earned every win, every soft comfort, and every moment of indulgence.
The bedroom door was already open. That was the first wrong thing. The nape of his neck prickled.
The second wrong thing was Laila, sitting on the end of his bed in almost nothing at all.
He stopped in the doorway. For a moment, his mind refused the picture, because it made no sense.
She was supposed to be gone, and he hadn’t spoken to her since she left in a rideshare car.
She shouldn’t be here because Rosa always locked the house when she left and she had left hours ago.
She only came in on Saturday mornings to stock the fridge with weekend meals and start a load of laundry.
The surreal thought that Laila was here to do laundry came and went in a flash.
She was clearly here to do him.
Laila had arranged herself against his pillows in a scrap of black lace and a smile she'd clearly practiced, one knee drawn up, her dark bob perfect, and everything about her staged for the second he walked in.
"There you are.” She purred the words like one of the shelter cats.
“I was starting to think you'd never come up. "
He froze. "How did you get in here?"
"Rosa let me in." She said it lightly, pleased with herself. "I told her I'd left my grandmother's bracelet in the guest room. She remembered me. She let me up and went home. The poor thing looked exhausted." Laila tilted her head. "I've been waiting a while. I made myself comfortable."
Skipper had stiffened by the window, watching her with his ears flat, issuing the low, unhappy sound in his chest that he made around people he didn't trust. Laila's attention moved to him and her face changed, the practiced softness dropping for half a second into open distaste.
"God, what is that thing. It's hideous." She drew her foot back like the dog might touch her. "Is that what you do now? You collect strays?” She looked down at the white comforter and clearly detected dog hairs. Her nose wrinkled. “You let that ugly thing on the bed?"
"You need to get up," Maddox said.
His tone should have warned her. Instead, she smiled and rose off the bed slowly, letting him see all of it, the lace, the long line of her, and the certainty that every man who looked at her wanted her, as though his coldness were only another move in the old game.
She crossed to him with the same ease she'd crossed a hundred rooms, pressed her palm to his chest, and looked up at him through her lashes.
"You've made your point," she said. "You wanted her to see you suffer, and she did, but now you can stop.
This was always going to happen. You and me.
Elim's gone. There's nothing standing in the way anymore, so there's no reason to keep punishing yourself with the shelter girl and her sad little life.
" She moved her thumb against his shirt.
"You can't seriously prefer her in those awful clothes to this.
Look at me, Maddox. Look at what you actually want. "
He took her wrist, lifted her hand off his chest, and stepped back. The confidence on her face developed its first crack.
"I want you to get dressed," he said. "I want you to get out of my house. I want you to never come back to it."
"Maddox—"
"You asked me to look at you, so let me look.” He took a measuring glance, feeling nothing but distaste.
“There's nothing here." He said it evenly, which made her flinch.
"I spent ten years mourning a woman who never existed.
I built a whole idea of love out of you and kept it at the center of me like it meant something. It meant nothing."
Laila tried twice to answer and produced nothing.
"You want the comparison, so I'll give you the comparison.
Paige in jeans and that battered shelter T-shirt, the one washed so many times you can't read the logo, with dog hair on her sleeve and chicken grease on her hands, is more beautiful than you have ever been in your life.
She's more beautiful right now, wherever she is, not thinking about either of us, than you have managed to be in however long you spent arranging yourself on my bed.
" He shook his head slowly. "I married her as a strategy, not realizing she was best thing that ever walked into my life. "
The lace and the pose had stopped working. Her shoulders drew in, and the practiced invitation drained out of her expression, replaced by an ugliness he'd never once seen on her in ten years. The careful beauty fell away all at once and left a small, furious thing underneath.
"You'll regret this," she said, and her voice had lost all its music. "You know what I gave up for you. I left with nothing—"
"Actually," a voice said from across the room, "You didn’t."
Maddox turned and froze again when the closet door stood open, and Paige stepped out of it.
She was in her jeans and the shelter T-shirt, exactly the one he'd just described.
She had a garment bag over one arm and an expression he couldn't read at all.
Cold went through him before the heat climbed his neck.
He had no idea how long she'd been there, or where the listening had begun.
Every word he'd said was suddenly out in the open air of the room, said in front of her.
He hadn't known, and he couldn't take a single one back or dress a single one up.
"Paige," he said. "I didn't touch her—"
"I know you didn't." She looked at him for a moment with an expression he was afraid to name. Then she turned to Laila, and the softness went out of her. "He should hear this since you brought up what you gave up."
Laila had grabbed her dress off the chair and was holding it against herself, all the staging gone. She was just a woman caught somewhere she shouldn't be.
"You didn't give up anything," Paige said.
"Elim paid you to leave. Jayne found the check when she settled his estate.
He kept it all those years, filed away, because a man like Elim never threw out anything he might use.
It was insurance in case you ever came back.
He bought you out, the same as he tried to buy out Jayne, but you took the money and spent ten years calling it a broken heart.
" Her tone was scathing. "You weren't the great love he tore away from Maddox. You got paid then came back when the man who paid you died, because you thought no one knew what you’d done with Elim out of the way. "
"Maddox." Laila turned to him, the dress still clutched against her.
"I was twenty-one. I had nothing, and he sat me in that study and made it sound like I was doing it for you, protecting you.
He said I'd ruin you if I stayed. I believed him.
Whatever I took, I took because he made me think leaving was the only way to love you.
" Her voice climbed. "It was still real. What we had was real. You know it was."
He looked at her without anything left in it. "You had ten years to say that. Instead, you waited until Grandfather was dead and I was married, and you talked your way into my house to try again. You didn't come back for me, Laila. You came back for the money I now control."
The room was very quiet. Skipper's low growl had stopped.
Laila stood there with her dress clutched to her chest, opening her mouth but saying nothing as he watched ten years of his own private mythology come apart in front of him.
The strange thing, the thing that steadied him, was that it changed nothing.
He'd already chosen. He'd chosen before Paige stepped out of the closet, before he knew anyone was listening, or that Laila had taken money to leave.
"You can dress in the guest room," he said quietly. "Take whatever you brought and get out."
Laila looked between the two of them, understood at last that neither would defend her, and gathered the rest of her things.
She went, but neither of them watched her go.
Her heels sounded down the hall, then down the stairs.
The front door opened and shut. The house fell quiet in a way it hadn't been since she'd first walked into it weeks ago with her sympathy and her faux sweet cruelty.
Maddox stood in the middle of the bedroom and didn't know what to do with his hands.
Ten years of a story he'd organized himself around had just walked out the door in a black dress, and he ought to have grieved the loss of it, but he didn't. What moved through him instead was relief, shame at how long it had taken, and fear of losing the woman still standing across the room with a garment bag over her arm.
"I meant it," he said. "All of it. Not because you were listening. I didn't know you were listening."
"I know." Paige set down the garment bag on the chair Laila had draped her dress over. "That's the only reason it counts."
Skipper crossed the room and leaned his whole weight against Paige's legs, and she scratched his torn ear without seeming to notice she was doing it.
Maddox stood three feet away, stripped of every excuse he'd ever used, and realized the dinner was still ahead of them, and that somehow, against everything, she hadn't called it off. Yet.