The Wife He Told Them He Regretted Marrying (Marriage in Crisis, Grovel & Redemption #27)

Chapter One — Grace

The kitchen smelled like garlic and rosemary and the particular chaos of a Sunday when Magnus decided he wanted to cook alongside me instead of just eating what I made.

He'd started doing this more since he turned thirty-eight, like some internal clock had gone off and told him a man his age ought to know how to braise something.

He still couldn't dice an onion without narrating the process out loud, like the onion needed reassurance.

"You're supposed to cut with the tips of your fingers tucked," I said, watching him hold the knife like it might bite him back.

"I know how to cut an onion, Grace."

"Your fingers disagree."

"My fingers are fine. My fingers have been fine for thirty-eight years."

He was terrible at this. He knew he was terrible at this.

That never stopped him from hovering at my elbow on Sunday afternoons, stealing bites off the cutting board like a man who hadn't eaten in days, getting in my way at the stove with the specific uselessness of someone who wanted to help and had no idea how.

"That's for the salad," I said, swatting his hand away from the cucumber.

"I'm quality control."

"You're a menace."

He grinned, unbothered, and leaned in to kiss the side of my neck before I could duck away, one hand braced on the counter behind me, the other still holding the knife like an idiot.

Twelve years in, and he still knew exactly where to put his mouth to make me lose my train of thought mid-sentence, still smelled like the same aftershave he'd worn since before we were married because I'd bought him a case of it for his thirtieth birthday and he'd never let himself run out.

"Careful," I said. "You're holding a knife."

"I'm very coordinated."

"You once stabbed yourself trying to open a box of crackers."

"That was one time."

"It was memorable."

He laughed, low and easy, the sound filling up the kitchen the way it always did on weekends, when the version of him that showed up loosened at the edges, the meetings and the spreadsheets peeled off somewhere between the office and the driveway.

This was the version of him I'd married.

Not the one from the trade magazines with his arms crossed in front of a warehouse, tie tight, expression carefully neutral for the photographer.

The one who once, back when Murphy Freight Solutions was three trucks and a warehouse he could barely afford to lease, loaded a truck himself at two in the morning because a driver called in sick and a client in Greensboro couldn't wait until Monday.

"Table's set," Tiffany announced, breezing in through the back door without knocking, the way she'd done since we bought the house eight years ago.

She dropped a bottle of wine on the counter and surveyed the stove with the critical eye of a woman who had eaten at this table more times than she could count.

"Smells like you're actually cooking tonight instead of ordering and hiding the containers in the recycling. "

"I do that one time," I said.

"You do that every time Magnus travels. I found the Thai place's menu memorized in your phone's autocomplete."

"That's an invasion of privacy."

"That's just how autocomplete works, Grace."

Magnus laughed and handed her a glass of the wine she'd brought, the two of them falling into an easy rhythm that had built up over years of Sunday dinners, of Tiffany showing up early enough to help and staying late enough that we usually ended up doing dishes together while Magnus finished whatever project he'd started and abandoned on the porch.

She was the kind of friend who felt like furniture in the good way, permanent and load-bearing.

"How's the studio?" Magnus asked her, pulling plates down from the cabinet.

"Busy. We're about to lose our minds over the Ashford proposal." Tiffany glanced at me. "Grace has slept maybe four hours a night this week."

"I've slept plenty."

"You fell asleep on the couch reading swatch samples on Tuesday."

"That's not the same as not sleeping. That's sleeping efficiently."

Magnus reached over and tucked a piece of hair behind my ear, the gesture so automatic it barely registered as affection, just a small correction of the world the way you'd straighten a picture frame.

"You should let Priscilla handle more of the production stuff.

You don't have to build everything yourself. "

"You should let Marcus handle more of the production stuff. You don't have to build everything yourself."

"Marcus already handles plenty."

"Then let him handle a little more. You don't have to carry every part of the studio yourself."

"Then you should let future Priscilla handle it. Present Priscilla can handle knowing it's coming."

We ate on the back porch because the evening was warm enough and the bugs hadn't found us yet, citronella candles burning low along the railing, the ordinary domestic hum of a life that had accumulated slowly over more than a decade.

Magnus told a story about a supplier meeting that had somehow devolved into an argument about golf handicaps between two men who'd clearly never actually played golf together, and Tiffany laughed so hard she nearly knocked over her wine, and I sat there thinking, not for the first time, that this was what twelve years bought you.

Not fireworks, not the breathless certainty of the first year when everything felt like a discovery.

This. A porch. Two people who knew each other's habits down to the smallest gesture. A friend who felt like family.

"You've got the Delacroix retreat coming up, don't you?" Tiffany asked, refilling her glass.

"Two weeks," Magnus said, with the specific weariness of a man who would rather do a warehouse inventory audit than another executive retreat.

"Four days of team building exercises designed by someone who has never actually managed a team.

Last year they made us build a raft out of PVC pipe and pool noodles to demonstrate collaborative leadership. "

"Did the raft float?" I asked.

"For about eleven seconds. Garrett went in fully clothed."

"Did he at least try to swim, or did he just accept his fate?"

"He tried to swim. In his work boots. It was the least dignified thing I've witnessed in a professional setting, and I include the time Perry got his tie caught in a paper shredder."

"You have the most chaotic coworkers of anyone I know."

"They're logistics professionals. Chaos is basically our whole industry, just organized enough to look responsible from the outside."

"You'll come back complaining about everyone's swing," I said. "You always do."

"I already know Garrett's swing is terrible. I don't need four days of forced proximity to confirm it. I've seen it at three different charity tournaments."

"You know him too well."

He reached over and took my hand on the table, absent, easy, the kind of gesture that wasn't for show because there was no one here to perform for except Tiffany, who'd seen us do this a thousand times before.

"You know me too well," he said. "That's the actual problem.

I can't even complain about golf without you predicting the whole bit in advance. "

"It's not a bit if it's true."

"Everything's a bit if you deliver it well enough."

"So, sad news for the porch swing," Magnus said, pushing his chair back and testing it with his foot. "Verdict's in. It's not going to survive another winter."

"You've been saying that for two years."

"This time I mean it. It creaked in a way that sounded personal."

"We are not buying another one of those overpriced teak sets you found last spring. Four hundred dollars for something that's going to look exactly like this one in five years."

"It was a beautiful swing, Grace."

"It was a beautiful swing we did not need."

"I still think about it sometimes."

"You think about a porch swing?"

"I think about a lot of things. Some of them are porch swings.

" He grinned, unbothered, the same easy stubbornness he brought to every minor disagreement in our marriage, the kind that never actually turned into a fight because neither of them cared enough about the outcome to make it one.

"I'll build a new one instead. Save us the four hundred dollars and give me a project. "

"You built the deck railing crooked."

"That was one specific section of railing, and it's been fine for six years."

"It leans, Magnus."

"Character," he said, and Tiffany laughed so hard she had to set her glass down, and the disagreement dissolved the way all their small ones did, into something closer to a routine than an actual argument, worn smooth by twelve years of running the same grooves.

Tiffany brought up, later, the story of how we'd met, prompting Magnus into the version he always told at parties, embellished slightly more each time, about a delayed flight out of Charlotte and a vending machine that had eaten both our dollars before either of us got a snack.

"You made me split a bag of pretzels with you," I said. "Like we were rationing supplies."

"You looked hungry."

"I looked annoyed. Those are different expressions."

"On you they're similar enough that I took a chance."

"You asked for my number before the plane even boarded."

"I was efficient. You've always appreciated efficiency."

"I appreciated that you didn't waste my time," I said, and meant it, remembering the particular certainty of that night, twenty-four years old and stranded in an airport with a stranger who made me laugh twice in the span of an hour, a certainty I'd never once had reason to doubt since.

After dinner, while Magnus went to grab another bottle from the garage fridge, Tiffany helped me clear plates, stacking them in that specific order she always used, biggest on bottom, and out of nowhere she said, "You two make twelve years look suspiciously easy."

I laughed, scraping leftover rice into a container. "It's not easy. It just doesn't look hard from the outside. We fight about the thermostat constantly. He thinks sixty-eight is a reasonable temperature for a human body to function at."

"Sixty-eight is fine."

"Sixty-eight is a war crime."

Tiffany smiled, but there was something more serious underneath it when she said, "Still.

It's nice to see. Most people I know are on their second marriages by now or wishing they were.

My cousin's on husband number three, and every one of them started out looking exactly like this.

Happy on a porch, finishing each other's jokes. "

"We're not most people," I said, and meant it, without a shred of doubt behind the sentence.

I thought about that later, doing dishes while Magnus dried, his sleeves pushed up, humming something off-key that I couldn't place.

I thought about how many of my friends had watched their marriages go quietly sour over the years, how many had confessed over wine that they weren't sure they'd end up with the same person again if they had it to do over, how the language of regret had become so normal among people our age that nobody even flinched at it anymore.

I never once thought that about Magnus. I didn't think it about myself either.

We'd built this, slowly, imperfectly, together, brick by unglamorous brick, and whatever cracks existed in other people's marriages, I believed ours had been reinforced by exactly the years that were supposed to wear a thing down.

"What are you thinking about?" Magnus asked, catching me staring at nothing, a wet plate forgotten in my hands.

"Nothing. Just that this was a good night."

He kissed my temple, easy, unremarkable, the kind of kiss that happens a thousand times in a marriage and means nothing and everything at once. "Every night's a good night when Tiffany brings the good wine."

"I heard that," Tiffany called from the living room, where she was gathering her purse and keys.

"You were meant to," Magnus called back.

She laughed, hugged us both at the door, and drove off into the warm evening, and Magnus locked up behind her with the specific unhurried care of a man with nowhere else he needed to be.

I went to bed that night with his arm slung over my waist, his breathing slowing into the deep, even rhythm I'd fallen asleep to for over a decade, and no idea that somewhere across town, at a dinner I hadn't been invited to, a version of my husband already existed that I had never met.