Page 14 of Neglected By Her CEO Husband

Today, I was waiting for her to summarize her findings and theories into the report we were going to use to crush Brighton's smear campaign. And the independent study was only going to bring the truth home.

Mark came into my office near seven with two glasses and the bottle of Lagavulin I kept in the cabinet for closing deals. He poured without asking, set one in front of me, and lowered himself into the chair across the desk.

"I'm going to say one thing," he said. "Then I'm going to drink your good scotch and we will never speak of it again."

"This sounds expensive."

"I was there, Damon. Third year. I watched you not eat for a week when she took the fellowship out of state." He looked up. "I'm not telling you not to hire the best researcher in the country in the worst month of your career. That would be idiotic, and I'm your CFO. You pay me to keep everyone else from doing idiotic shit. But I am telling you I've been watching your face do things it hasn't done since you got married at twenty-three. Not since college."

The scotch was very good and I drank some of it to have somewhere to put my eyes.

"I'm not twenty-three anymore," I said. "And we're not in college."

"No." He stood, the one thing said, and buttoned his jacket. "You've got a great deal more to lose now."

He left the bottle. I sat with it and the city going dark in the glass and told myself Mark was a worrier, that worrying was half of what I paid him for, that a man could recognize the best hire of his life without it meaning a single thing more than that.

Emily knocked at half past nine with the toxicology appendix and two fresh coffees, and we worked.

Near eleven we reached for the same page at the same time, and her fingers landed across mine on the paper, warm, and neither of us moved for a beat longer than nothing. Then I drew my hand back and turned the page over and we both went on as if the air hadn't changed, and I told myself it hadn't.

An hour later, whether it was the sleepless night before or the half-empty scotch bottle on the desk, I did something I hadn't done in a very long time. I spoke the truth out loud. I didn't mean to, really, it just came out in the same easy silence we'd worked in back in college. As if we'd just picked up where we left off, and nothing had really changed.

I told her I was afraid the trial would find something. That my father had stood in my office the week before the launch and asked me, in that voice he used, whether I'd moved too fast, and that I'd said no and lain awake on it ever since. That the thing I'd built my whole adult life toward might have a flaw I'd been too certain to see, and that if it did, every person in that building who'd trusted me would have been right to be afraid.

I had never said any of that out loud. Not to Mark. Not to my father, God knew. Not even to Maddie, who I told about every minor detail of my professional life that she needed to know in order to conduct our shared personal one. She knew my passwords and my bank account information, all my family's birthdays and special events. But I had never told her my fears, because Maddie was the one part of my life that ran smoothly and I'd never thought to bring her the part that didn't.

Emily listened with her chin in her hand, and when I finished she said, "Then we find it first, before anyone else does, and we deal with it." Like it was simple. Like it was the two of us against a clean problem with a clean answer, the way it used to be.

We packed up past midnight. At the door she stopped with her bag on her shoulder and looked back at me, the data still spread across the desk between us.

"It's good, working like this again," she said with a faint smile. "I forgot how rare it is. Most people make you carry them."

I should have said something that shut the door instead of leaving it open a crack. Instead I said, "Get some sleep, Em," and the old nickname was out before I'd considered it. She smiled at the sound of it, the way you smile at a song you haven't heard in years. Then she was gone down the dark hall, and I stood alone in the hum of the empty floor and felt the silence settle on me like something I'd be asked to account for later.

I drove myself home past midnight. The Lexus took the dark streets and I let it, my head finally quiet for the first time all day.

The house was black when I came in. No light left on, no figure on the stairs. I stood in the front hall and realized I'd half-expected her, the way she'd always been, surfacing somewhere in the dim to tell me there was a plate in the warming drawer, and the absence of it caught at me oddly.

She hadn't confirmed the head count, either. Reese had texted me at noon asking who would, and I'd had him handle it himself, and only now, in the dark hall, did it register that Maddie had simply never answered me. In eight years she had never once not answered me.

I told myself she'd been tired. That the launch had run her down. That everything would even out in the morning, the way it always did.

I went up to bed, and it was already dark, so I slid in quietly so as not to wake her.

9

MADDIE

Bridges Gallery had its doors propped open when I got there. Ellie stood in the middle of the floor with a clipboard, waving two men in paint-stained shirts toward the far wall.

"Higher," she called. "No. Your higher, not his. He's a foot taller than you. His higher is wrong for the whole room."

She saw me, handed the clipboard to a girl with green hair without breaking stride, crossed the floor, and hugged me hard enough to lift my heels.

"You came. I had money on you canceling."

"You bet against me?"