Page 30 of Neglected By Her CEO Husband

We'll do whatever we can. On the record. A foot from a reporter's recorder, in the dead center of a lawsuit that hadn't been filed yet but was already loading in a chamber somewhere. I opened my mouth to smooth it.

Emily got there first, and Emily was far too good to do it anywhere it could be printed.

She laid a warm hand on Maddie's arm, the picture of two women who adored each other. "Maddie has the kindest heart of anyone in this company," she told Diane, smiling, and it landed as a compliment to everyone but the handful of us standing close enough to feel the floor under it. Then she turned to my wife, gentle, the voice you'd use with a child who'd wandered into the wrong room. "But you mustn't tie yourself in knots over the legal side, sweetheart. That's what the rest of us are here for. Let me steal your husband for two minutes. There's a small fire only he can put out."

It was flawless. Diane heard graciousness. The reporter heard nothing worth a line. Only Maddie heard the whole of it, the pat on the head, the rest of us, her husband lifted out of her hands and into Emily's, every bit of it wrapped in a smile no one in the room could have objected to.

And then Emily did what I still see when I close my eyes. She leaned in to me, close, the easy closeness of a hundred late nights, her mouth near my ear, and under the cover of the same smile she was still giving the room, she said, low, just for me, "She's a liability, and every person here can see it. Get her off the floor before she hands that man a headline. Control your wife, Damon. Or I'm going to have to."

No one but the three of us heard it. Everyone saw it. The CEO and his head of research with their heads bent together at the bar, that old easy closeness, while his wife stood a foot away holding a glass and not being inside it. I felt the cluster register the picture even with the words sealed off from prying ears. Diane's eyes went to Maddie once and came back.

Maddie was looking at me.

She'd gone still. The public smile was holding by a single thread, and she was waiting. I knew exactly what she was waiting for. She was waiting for me to step back from Emily, to put eighteen inches of daylight between us where the room could see it, to turn to my wife and say one sentence that made her a person in this again instead of the problem being solved over her head. It would have cost me nothing. A hand on her arm instead of Emily's hand on hers. The room was already braced to follow whichever way I leaned.

I wanted to believe I weighed it. I didn't. Four days without sleep, a reporter recording, two thousand jobs in the walls around me, Emily's breath still warm at my ear telling me my wife was a liability everyone could see, and the truth was that in that second I believed her. I looked at Maddie, warm and lovely and entirely unarmed for the war we were losing, and some cold part of me thought, she's right, she shouldn't be on this floor. She was a liability.

I didn't step toward my wife. I turned the quarter turn back toward Emily and the fire, and I said, in the warm easy voice, "Would you all give us a moment? Emily and I need to make a call."

I felt Maddie wait one more beat. One beat longer than there was any reason to, the last of the thread holding, in case I turned back, in case her husband arrived late. He didn't.

She set her champagne flute down on the bar. Full. Untouched. "Excuse me," she said to Diane, perfectly pleasant, the hostess to the last. Then she looked at me, and she said, very quietly, under the band and the held breath of the cluster, just for me, "I kept waiting for you to take my side. I was still waiting just now." A breath. "Thank you for being clear."

She turned and walked toward the doors with her head up, and three hundred people found somewhere else to look.

I almost went after her. I took half a step. Then the writer had a hand on my sleeve, and Diane's husband had opinions about the share price, and Emily was already at my shoulder, calm, turning the conversation, handing me the next three people I had to focus on. The livestream light was still burning red, and the room, God help me, was finally calm.

She'd be in the car. I'd find her in ten minutes, the second Meadows was steady. Ten minutes against two thousand jobs. Ten minutes wouldn't matter.

20

MADDIE

Imade it through the lobby and out the revolving door before my hands started to shake.

The valet asked for my ticket. I had it in my hand, the little paper stub, and I stood there looking at it and could not make myself hand it over, because handing it over meant standing on this curb until Damon's car came around, and getting in beside him, and riding home in the dark.

I knew with a clarity that frightened me that if I got into a car with him tonight I would find some way to make this smaller than it was by morning. I always had. It was the thing I was best at, after running his parties. Making the unbearable manageable. Filing the worst of it somewhere it wouldn't show.

So I told the valet never mind, and I walked.

It was cold, and I was in heels and the navy dress with no coat, and I walked anyway, four long blocks before I let myself stop and call a cab, and somewhere in those four blocks I quit protecting myself from the size of it and just looked.

The softest heart in the building. Half of why I married him. Leave the wording to the lawyers, love.

What I kept coming back to was that he hadn't thought about it. There had been no moment where he weighed me against Emily and chose her. There was no choosing in it at all. The room got dangerous, and he reached for the person he trusted, and the person he trusted was her, and I was the soft thing you pat on the head and steer out of the way with a hand at the base of the spine.

Eight years of running his life. Eight years of knowing every name in that ballroom, of being the entire reason those people felt held by the Sterlings. And in the one minute it counted, in public, he handed my dignity to a reporter to keep a share price from twitching.

Ellie had told me to watch what he reached for when something went wrong. I'd thought she meant the gifts. She'd meant exactly this. Something had gone wrong, and he'd reached for Emily.

The earrings. The car with the bow. The Belgian linen he'd bought by the yard and never once watched me touch. A month of spending, and the first time the spending was tested against an actual choice, the choice cost him nothing, because to him it wasn't one.

The little flicker of hope I'd carried home in the dark two weeks ago, the small stupid one I'd refused to put out, went out somewhere around the third block. I didn't kill it. It just stopped, the way a flame stops when the oil burns down.

The house was dark when the cab finally let me out. I didn't turn on more than I needed. I went up to the bedroom we'd shared again for three good weeks, and I got the good bag down from the top of the closet, the one I packed for his trips, and for the first time in eight years I packed it for myself.

I left the emeralds on the dresser, lined up in their box where he'd be sure to see them. I left the envelope with the car keys on the hook by the door. I didn't want to be the woman those things had been bought for. I packed my own clothes, and the old jewelry I'd had before him, the small pieces with less resale value and all the meaning. Then I went down the hall to the studio.