Page 28 of My Husband Problem

The shorts were bad enough with all that smooth, bare skin exposed. The dress is really so much worse. It hits high on her thighs, so all that skin is on display again. It’s bright blue, with what looks to be tiny white polkadots, and ties behind her neck and at the waist. Astrid is not a curvy woman. Her slender frame is still that of a petite gymnast. But the dress hugs her breasts and the dip of her waist, and leaves her shoulders and arms bare too.

I watch as she dons the baby sling, talking softly to Oscar as he jumps onto the table so she can scoop him up and tuck him into it. I shake my head. I don’t think she adopted a grouchy, hissy, stray tomcat to be a barrier between us, but he is clearly going to function exactly as that.

Unless I can win him over.

I have zero experience with cats, so that should go well.

The soft chattering of the ducks in the yard reminds me that the list of things I have zero experience with is actually longer than I’d realized.

“She wants the annulment,” I say into the phone without thinking.

“Are you surprised?” Iris asks. “She’s in an arranged marriage set up byyourgrandfather with a guy she never sees.”

I turn away from the window and the enticing view of my wife and her cat. I study the ducks. Wow, they’re messy as fuck. After every bite of food they take from the feeder, they dip their bills in the water, making the water dirty. Then they shake, spraying water everywhere. The ground around their feeders and water buckets is muddy and sloppy.

But I can’t stop watching them.

“I told her why I’m here,” I say to Iris, my eyes on one duck over in the grassy area, clearly picking through the blades for food. Insects, I would guess. “That I want my family back in my life. And that I want a family with her.”

“And how did she respond to that?” Iris asks with clear surprise in her tone.

“With shock.” I pause, then say, “She also kissed me.”

Iris makes a coughing-choking sound.

I feel my mouth curve up.

I don’t have many friends. That’s been on purpose. When you’re building an empire that requires high-level business deals that need to support the people you love, you have to be atleast a little suspicious of the other people at your level and avoid emotional decisions. I focus on the people I’m doing it for—my family, their friends and loved ones. I don’t need to be emotionally involved with anyone else.

And it doesn’t take a doctorate in psychology to understand that leaving home—everything I knew, the entire plan for my life for eighteen years, all of my friends, family, everything familiar—did a number on me emotionally. I believed in why I did it and still do. I don’t regret it. The reasons I did it were solid and have all come to fruition. But that doesn’t mean I don’t have a few scars, and not getting close to people again is a protective instinct.

Iris Lee is one of the few exceptions. She didn’t really care about emotional boundaries. She’s not an overly warm-and-fuzzy person herself, but she understood that I needed someone I could trust and confide in. Someone who would be brutally honest with me, and she made it her mission to be that person.

She has succeeded over and over again.

She knows me as well as anyone alive. Alfred Olsen knew me better than anyone, but he’s been gone nearly three years now. I feel his absence every day.

“Shekissedyou?”

“To shut me up. But it was still a kiss.”

“To shut you up? It’s not like you’re prone to going on and on, Declan.”

“Anyway,” I say. “I told her that I don’t want the annulment. And that I’m staying here until we’re expected in Cara.”

“Oh…that’s really good, Declan,” Iris says. “It’s about damned time you told her how you feel.”

Iris is the only person who knows that I’m in love with my wife.

“Well, she’s determined to make me also want the annulment by then.”

Iris is quiet for a moment. “You deserve to be happy too, Declan,” Iris says, her tone soft in a way it very rarely is.

“At the expense ofherhappiness?”

Iris snorts. “There is no way in hell you will let Astrid be anything less than deliriously happy.”

That is true. Which is why, no matter what I said, I am considering her request to let the annulment happen. “But what if she’s not happy married to me?”