The Wife He Was Too Embarrassed to Introduce (Marriage in Crisis, Grovel & Redemption #23)

CHAPTER ONE

LAUREL

The alarm went off at six fifteen, and Pierce's arm was already around my waist before I'd found the button to silence it, his face pressed into the back of my neck, half asleep and warm.

"Five more minutes," he said, the words muffled against my skin.

"You said that ten minutes ago."

"I was wrong then too."

I let him keep me there a while longer, because eight years into a marriage you learn which mornings are worth being late for, and this one, with the light coming gray and soft through the curtains and his heartbeat slow and even against my back, qualified.

Downstairs the coffee maker had already started on its timer, and somewhere in the house our new coffee table books sat perfectly squared away, a small habit of order that had crept into our life sometime in the last few years without me quite noticing when.

"I have surgery at eight," I said finally, prying his arm loose. "Mrs. Okafor's cat is getting his teeth done."

"Give him my regards."

"He'll be unconscious. My regards won't mean much to him."

"Tell him anyway. I like to think he'll appreciate the gesture on some level.

" Pierce sat up, hair sticking up in three directions, and the sight of him like that, rumpled and unguarded, still did something to me even now.

Eight years and he could still make my stomach do a small, embarrassing flip just by looking at me the way he looked at me most mornings, half amused, entirely fond.

We got ready in the same bathroom the way we had for years, elbowing for sink space, him shaving while I did my hair, a routine so worn in it barely needed words anymore.

He kissed the side of my head on his way out of the bathroom, said something about a call with the tower's structural engineer, and disappeared downstairs.

I found him in the kitchen a few minutes later, tablet propped against the coffee maker, scrolling through something with the particular focus he got when he was deep in work before he'd even had breakfast. I came up behind him to grab a mug and caught, before he swiped it away, the corner of an email with a return address I didn't recognize and a subject line that read, in part, ALLIANCE SPRING GALA, SAVE THE DATE.

"What's that?"

"Nothing. Work thing." He swiped the tablet dark and reached for his own coffee, easy, unbothered. "You want the last of the good creamer or should I finish it?"

"Finish it. What work thing?"

"Just an industry gala the Alliance does every year.

Boring stuff. Speeches, a silent auction nobody bids on until the last five minutes, men in bad tuxedos talking about interest rates.

" He said it lightly, already moving on, pulling his jacket off the back of the chair. "You'd hate every second of it."

"I don't know. I've been known to enjoy a bad tuxedo."

"Trust me. It's not worth the babysitter money, if we had a kid, which we don't, so it's really not worth the boredom money, which we do have." He kissed me again, quicker this time, on his way to the door. "I'll be home by seven. I'm making the chicken thing tonight, the one with the lemon."

"The one you burned last time."

"The one I'm going to redeem myself with tonight.

" He grabbed his keys off the hook by the door, and for a second he looked at me the way he used to look at me back when neither of us had any money and every good moment felt like a small miracle we'd stumbled into together.

"Love you. Try not to traumatize any cats today. "

"No promises."

The door shut behind him, and I stood in the kitchen a moment longer with my coffee, replaying the exchange without meaning to.

It wasn't the gala itself that snagged, exactly.

Pierce turned down more invitations than he accepted these days, and most of the ones he did accept were exactly as dull as he'd described this one, full of men comparing cap rates and women comparing charities.

I'd sat through enough of them over the years to know he wasn't wrong about the substance.

It was the word. You'd hate every second of it. Not we'd hate it. Not we'd be bored out of our minds together, at least we'd have each other to make it bearable. Just you, offered up flat and final, like a decision that had already been made somewhere I hadn't been consulted.

I told myself I was reading too much into four words over coffee, and mostly I believed it.

---

The clinic was its usual controlled chaos by the time I got there, Dr. Alvarez already elbow deep in a dachshund's ear infection, our receptionist Marisol fielding three calls at once about a Great Dane's diet and a parakeet's broken wing.

Mrs. Okafor's cat, a fat orange tom named Biscuit, glared at me with the particular loathing only cats seem capable of as I got him prepped for anesthesia.

"You're distracted today," Marisol said, catching me between appointments, leaning against the counter with her arms crossed. "You gave Mrs. Chen's poodle the wrong weight on his chart twice."

"I did not."

"You did. I fixed it before Dr. Alvarez saw. You're welcome." She studied me with the particular attention of someone who'd worked beside me for six years and knew my moods better than most people in my life. "What's going on?"

"Nothing. Pierce mentioned some work gala this morning. It's not a big deal."

"You've got the face you get when it's a big deal you've decided not to make a big deal of."

"I don't have a face."

"You have several faces, Laurel, and I've catalogued most of them.

" She softened, bumping my shoulder with hers.

"For what it's worth, my husband still doesn't invite me to half his work things either.

It's not always a conspiracy. Sometimes work events are just genuinely boring and men are trying to spare us. "

"That's probably it," I said, and meant it, mostly, and went to finish prepping Biscuit for surgery, and did not think about the gala again until well past lunch, when I found myself, in an idle moment between appointments, pulling up the Alliance's website on my phone without entirely deciding to.

Before that, though, the morning kept us both busy enough that the gala genuinely did slip my mind for a while.

A three-legged rescue dog came in for a follow-up, adapting beautifully to his prosthetic, and I spent a happy twenty minutes fussing over him while his new owner, an elderly man named Mr. Pruitt, told me at length about the dog's escape artist tendencies.

Dr. Alvarez poked her head in twice to laugh at the dog's enthusiasm for the treats I kept sneaking him, and for a stretch of the morning, the kitchen conversation with Pierce felt as distant and unimportant as it probably actually was.

The gala page loaded slow on the clinic's spotty wifi.

A photo of a ballroom I didn't recognize, string lights and a jazz quartet setup that looked expensive in the way things get expensive once you've spent enough years around people who care about the difference between expensive and merely nice.

A date three weeks out. A dress code, black tie.

And near the bottom, in small print I almost missed, a line about ticket tiers, one of which read, plainly: Partners and guests welcome.

I looked at that line longer than it deserved.

Then I closed the browser and went to check on Biscuit, who was coming out of anesthesia in exactly the foul mood I'd predicted, and told myself that partners welcome didn't mean partners expected, that plenty of men left their spouses home from these things for reasons that had nothing to do with anything, that I was building a house out of four words and a line of fine print because I had a slow afternoon and too much time to think.

By the time Pierce got home that evening, smelling like lemon and slightly burnt chicken skin despite his promise of redemption, I'd mostly talked myself down.

He came through the door already talking, shrugging out of his jacket and loosening his tie in the same motion, telling me about a call that had run long and a contractor who kept trying to cut corners on the tower's foundation work.

"Grierson's old firm, if you can believe it," he said, setting his laptop bag on the counter. "Turns out the man who told me I'd never get financing for Wilkinson is now trying to get a subcontract on my building. Small world."

"Did you give it to him?"

"God, no. I let him sit in my lobby for twenty minutes before I told him no myself. Pettiest twenty minutes of my year, and I regret nothing."

I laughed, and for a moment the gala and its fine print and its ambiguous pronoun receded to somewhere harmless in the back of my mind.

We ate at the kitchen island the way we always did, his hand finding my knee under the counter at some point without either of us commenting on it, and he told me more about the structural engineer's concerns over the tower's east wing, and I told him about Biscuit's dramatic recovery from anesthesia, complete with an attempt to bite Dr. Alvarez on the way out the door, and it felt, for most of the meal, like every other Tuesday we'd had in the last eight years.

It was only later, doing dishes while he cleared the table, that I asked, as lightly as I could manage, "So who usually goes to this Alliance thing? Is it a whole-office outing or just the higher-ups?"

"Mostly board members and a few key clients. Whitfield goes every year, obviously, since he practically runs the thing." Pierce scraped a plate into the trash, not looking at me, which I noticed only because I was looking for it. "It's not really a fun crowd. Lots of shop talk."

"You said that this morning."

"Because it's true." He set the plate in the sink, dried his hands on the towel hanging from the oven door, and came up behind me, arms circling my waist, chin resting on my shoulder in a way that used to make every worry in my head go quiet and mostly still did.

"Why the sudden interest in a boring gala?

You're not actually angling to go stand around and listen to men discuss cap rates for three hours, are you? "

"Maybe I like watching you in a tux."

"I can put a tux on right now if that's the actual ask here.

" He kissed the side of my neck, and I laughed despite myself, and let the question go for the second time that day, because it was easier than pushing, and because some stubborn, hopeful part of me still believed that if I let it go long enough, there'd turn out to be nothing underneath it worth finding.

I didn't bring it up again that night. But I noticed, climbing into bed later with Pierce already half asleep beside me, that he'd never actually answered whether spouses came to the gala at all. He'd told me who went. He hadn't told me who didn't.

I lay there for a while listening to his breathing even out, one hand resting lightly on his chest, and thought about all the galas and dinners and launch parties I had gone to over the years, back when he used to ask before I'd even had time to wonder if I was invited.

I thought about the deep green dress still hanging in the back of our closet, worn soft now from all the times I'd almost thrown it out and hadn't.

Somewhere along the way the asking had stopped, and I couldn't point to the exact night it happened, only that it had, quietly, the way most erosions do.

I thought, too, about the early years, the small apartment we'd shared before the house, before Wilkinson Street had turned into an actual, functioning block of businesses instead of a stubborn idea Pierce carried around like a second job.

Back then, everything had been ours, jointly, entirely, no separate spheres where one of us operated and the other waited to be invited in.

I wondered when exactly his world had split into two categories, the parts I still belonged to and the parts that had quietly become his alone, and whether he'd noticed the split happening any more than I had.

It was such a small omission I almost let myself forget it by morning.