Page 3 of Neglected By Her CEO Husband

"Meeting." He turned back to the mirror, threading the first stud through his cuff. "Journalist. Some woman from the Tribune doing a piece on the anxiety line before launch. Mark thinks we should get ahead of the messaging."

"Tonight?" I couldn't hide the disappointment in my voice. It was supposed to be the first night in two weeks he was home for dinner.

"It has to be tonight. The piece runs next week."

I watched him in the glass, the way his jaw set when he talked about work, the way he came alive for it in a manner he never quite managed for me.

"So," I said, careful to keep it light. "Should I expect to enjoy dinner with my husband sometime this decade? Or are we strictly a passing-in-the-hallway arrangement now?"

His hands stilled on the cuff. In the mirror, his eyes found mine, and the warmth had drained out of them, replaced by something flat and tired.

"Don't be childish, Maddie." It was the measured voice he used on board members who'd overstepped. "You know what this is right now. The launch is the biggest thing this company has done in a decade. There are thousands of jobs riding on it. That's important. I'd think you of all people could understand that I don't have time for dinner theatrics this month."

It landed exactly where he'd aimed it. Childish. Theatrics. As if wanting to eat across a table from my own husband were a tantrum.

I felt the words rise. I plan your dinners, I host your investors, I'm planning your sister's engagement party, and you think I'm the one who doesn't take your work seriously enough? They settled back down, though, the way they always did, swallowed and digested and tucked away with all the others. I'd gotten very good at it. You could fit a marriage's worth of unspoken things in a body if you packed them all in carefully.

"Of course, Damon," I said. "I understand."

"Good." He fixed the second cufflink, satisfied, the matter closed. He shrugged into his jacket, checked his reflection, and was already somewhere else, already in the car, already at the table with the journalist, already gone.

Sometimes I wondered if I stayed with him the way he stayed with me when we were apart, but I knew better than to ask that question. Knew I wouldn't like the answer.

He pressed a kiss to the top of my head on his way past, the way you'd pat an obedient dog before leaving.

"Don't wait up," he said, and then the door, and then the stairs, and then the low purr of the Lexus pulling out of the drive.

I stood alone in the bedroom with the gold gone from the windows and the porcelain dish empty under the watch winder.

Next month was our anniversary. Eight years.

I hoped that he'd remember. But this time, I wasn't going to remind him.

2

MADDIE

The dress was the green of deep water, silk that moved like it had a mind of its own. I stood in front of the full-length mirror and turned, watching the way it caught the light along my hip, the way the tailor's mended hem fell clean to the floor now. I'd pinned my hair up and left a few strands loose at the nape, the way Damon used to like. Presumably, he still did, but he didn't express much lately except his disapproval. I had come to assume that if he said nothing, he was alright with it.

In any case, I looked like a woman who belonged on the arm of a Sterling.

I was also a woman whose husband should have been home an hour ago.

I checked my phone again. Nothing. The car was due to leave in fifteen minutes, and the drive to Ellemore was forty, and the party started at seven.

"Don't be late to your own sister's engagement party," I told the empty room. "Please, Damon. Not tonight."

I heard the garage door before I heard the car, that low mechanical groan. Then his step on the stairs, faster than usual, and the door opening, and Damon coming through it already half out of one jacket and reaching for the other on its hanger.

"I know," he said. "I know. The Tribune woman wanted a follow-up and I couldn't—" He stopped.

He stopped, and my husband looked at me for the first time in weeks, maybe months.

The second jacket hung forgotten from his fingers. His gray eyes moved over me, the dress, the hair, the line of my throat, slow, like he was reading something he hadn't expected to find written there.

"You look nice," he said. "Really nice."

My heart did something stupid. A flutter, light and unwelcome and impossible to suppress, the kind of thing I'd told myself I'd grown out of. He didn't say things like that. Damon noticed the things I arranged, the rooms and the flowers and the seating charts, but he rarely noticed me, not like this, not with that particular focus that made me feel briefly, dizzily, like the most important fixture in the house.