CHAPTER ELEVEN RHODES
The investigation consumed every hour I wasn’t spending failing to sleep.
Fenwick’s silence worried Bram more than open aggression would have, the silence of a man regrouping rather than retreating, and I threw the company’s entire security division at finding him, financial forensics tracing every shell company he’d touched in the past five years, surveillance teams watching his known associates in three states, a private investigator I’d hired outside the company entirely to run down leads Bram’s people hadn’t reached yet.
I told myself the speed and scale of that effort was proof of how much Maren mattered, even as the empty side of our bed each night told a colder truth about what my choices had actually cost. I’d catch myself, some mornings, reaching for my phone with her name half typed into a text before I remembered, again, that I’d sent her away and had no honest way yet to explain the whole of why.
Bram noticed the pattern before I did.
“You’ve called her four times this week,” he said, finding me in the office at nearly midnight, reviewing the same financial records for the third time in search of a detail I’d already confirmed wasn’t there. “She hasn’t picked up once.”
“She needs time.”
“Or she thinks you meant it,” Bram said. “The yes. Have you considered that she might actually believe you wanted her gone, rather than just being angry about the method?”
“I told her I loved her before she left.”
“Did you? Or did you tell her the car was ready?”
I didn’t have an answer for that, and Bram let the silence sit there for a long moment before he continued, more gently than his usual bluntness allowed.
“I’m not trying to pile onto what you’re already carrying, Rhodes.
I’m trying to get you to see something before it costs you more than it already has.
She left without her ring. In my experience, people don’t do that over a disagreement about timing.
They do that when they believe the whole thing is actually over. ”
“It’s not over. The second Fenwick’s caught, I’m flying out there myself.”
“Does she know that’s the plan?”
I opened my mouth to answer and found, again, that I didn’t have one, because the honest answer was no, that I’d told myself the plan so many times it had started to feel like something Maren already understood, when in fact it existed nowhere but inside my own head, a private certainty I’d never once spoken aloud to the one person who needed to hear it.
The Kestrel Foundation gala fell during the second week of the search, an annual event our family had sponsored for over a decade, the kind of appearance I couldn’t cancel without raising questions I wasn’t prepared to answer about where my wife had gone.
Delphine offered to attend in Maren’s place for the parts of the evening that required a Vossler beside me at the reception line, a reasonable, practical solution to a logistics problem, and I accepted it as exactly that and nothing more, too distracted by Fenwick’s continued silence to think through how the arrangement might look to anyone watching from outside the situation.
I barely registered the cameras that night, standing through two hours of photographs and handshakes with my mind still running through fence lines and financial records, wondering whether Fenwick’s silence meant he’d found another way in, another angle I hadn’t yet accounted for.
Delphine, beside me in the receiving line, noticed every flash.
I understand now that she counted each one, understood exactly what story a well-placed photograph could tell to anyone inclined to read it a certain way.
A photographer caught her leaving my house near midnight three days later, there to review a family trust document our lawyers needed signed before an approaching filing deadline, an appointment that had run long because the document itself was genuinely complicated, three generations of mineral rights disputes tangled into forty pages of legal language neither of us had the patience to parse quickly.
I didn’t think about how it would look, a woman leaving a married man’s house well after midnight.
I had stopped, somewhere in the last two weeks, thinking about how anything looked to anyone who wasn’t Fenwick, my entire field of vision narrowed down to a single threat and the wife I’d sent away from it.