Page 24 of Neglected By Her CEO Husband

The woman he hadn't deemed good enough. "Too focused on her own career," he'd said. "You'll see. A woman like that is no Mrs. Sterling."

So he'd pushed me instead toward Maddie. Sweet, competent, devoted Maddie who had given me everything I'd ever asked and even more things I hadn't thought to ask for yet. She just knew intuitively what needed to be done. She had always anticipated my needs, my wants.

For the first time in eight years, she had stopped anticipating, and I told myself I would ask the why of it all later. When I had time. Right now, all I had was possibility.

Emily was at the center of it with me, because she'd found the flaw. She sat closer. She stayed later. At the after-hours sessions she started bringing a bottle and two glasses instead of two coffees. One night she read over my shoulder with her hand on the back of my neck and left it there longer than reading took, and I didn't move away. It was the wine, and the win. That was all it was.

She'd gone back to saying we. We did this. We turned it around. As if the years between had skipped a track.

The night the coverage turned, half the team went to the steakhouse on Card Street to celebrate, and somewhere past the second bottle the table thinned out until it was me and Emily and the wreckage of dinner.

She ordered me the rib eye without asking, the way she used to, and remembered I take my coffee black, and laughed at the old jokes that still landed, and told me she'd never stopped reading my name in the trades all those years, keeping a kind of score from a distance. It was easy. It was the easiest evening I'd had in a year, and on the curb afterward she stood a beat too close and I stood there and let her, and a cab came before either of us did anything about it.

Mark caught me late the following afternoon. He'd been gone most of the week on a crisis management trip for the company, dealing with investors in London. He had a gift bag in one hand and his coat over his arm. Emily was on the couch with her shoes off and a glass of the good Scotch, marking up the board deck.

"Look who's back," I said, clapping him on the shoulder. "What's this? Souvenirs from London?"

"For you and Maddie." Mark set the bag on my desk. "Taylor picked it. She'd skin me if I forgot." He grinned. "Happy anniversary. Eight years. So what'd you two do for the big one? Taylor's dying to know."

I looked at the bag. I looked at the date in the corner of my screen that I'd been reading all week without once seeing.

The fourteenth had come and gone more than a week back.

I'd been home that night. I remembered being home that night. I remembered the read, and the shower, and going back in, and I remembered Maddie standing in the studio doorway with paint on her hands in a dress I'd looked at just long enough to tell her she looked nice.

It was our anniversary. She'd stood there with paint on her hands and a question on her face, waiting to find out if I knew, and I'd told her she looked nice and gone back to the office.

Eight years. The bag on my desk was from Mark's wife, and there was nothing on the desk from me, because it hadn't occurred to me that there should be. The date had gone by like any other day, and I'd spent it on a stock price.

The surge of panic and "how did this happen" was met by the realization that I'd fired Patricia, who was the one who'd always kept the dates, and while I had trained her replacement on everything else, I hadn't thought of that. Because I hadn't remembered.

Somehow, I doubted that was going to be a suitable excuse for Maddie.

Emily had gone still on the couch. She'd heard every word of it, and she was watching me, waiting to see which way I'd go. I didn't look at her long enough to work out what she was thinking.

Mark's grin was fading. "Damon."

"I have to go." I was already up and reaching for my keys. "I have to go home."

Emily sat up. "Now? We've got the deck, the call's at eight, we said we'd run it tonight." She put her hand flat on the board papers, like she could hold the evening down with it. "Damon. It's one night. Whatever it is keeps till morning. You can't run the company out of your kitchen."

"It's my anniversary, Emily." I heard it the second it was out. "It was. Last week. I forgot my own anniversary."

She didn't answer right away. When she did, her voice had cooled a degree. "Then send flowers tomorrow. It's already done. Driving home tonight won't undo it."

She was right, but I left anyway.

The house was dark when I pulled in. I went room to room with the gift bag still hanging off my hand like an idiot. The kitchen. Our bedroom. The guest room she'd been sleeping in. All of it empty.

The studio light was off. I opened the door anyway. Canvases stacked everywhere, more than I'd known she'd made. The whole room smelled of paint. A window painting on the easel stopped me where I stood. It was good. It was better than good, and I hadn't known she could do that. Or I'd known once and let myself forget.

But no Maddie.

I stood there with the gift bag and looked at her work properly, which I hadn't done in years. Windows, mostly. A dozen versions of windows, light coming through glass at every hour of the day. I hadn't known she'd been making these. I hadn't known she'd been making anything. I'd built her a room with the best light in the house and never once asked what she did in it. I'd paid for every canvas in here without seeing one.

She wasn't home. It was nine o'clock and my wife wasn't home and I had no idea where she was, and the last thought I'd had about where she might be was that she'd be wherever I left her.

I texted her. Where are you? I'm home. Then, because the first one read insane coming from me, a second. I'm sorry about our anniversary. We need to talk.