Page 14 of The Husband I Left

Oliver started working later. Sometimes I’d fall asleep waiting and wake up to find his side of the bed still neatly made, and a text from two in the morning that said simply: “Still at the office. Don’t wait up.”

When he did come home, he didn’t sit on the couch and drink hot chocolate with me anymore. He went straight to his home office and closed the door. I’d hear the soft click of the latch, and then nothing. Sometimes I’d knock. Sometimes he’d call “Come in,” and I’d find him at his desk, his face lit blue by his monitor, and he wouldn’t even look up at me.

“Just wrapping up,” he’d say. “I’ll be to bed soon.”

After several nights of waiting for him and watching the marshmallows melt into a sad white film, I just stopped making it.

Our mornings together went next. I’d stumble into the kitchen, bleary eyed, ready to make his coffee and find that he was already gone.

He started traveling more. Each trip was longer than the last. He always had an excuse for why he needed to be away. The Asia expansion required his personal attention; the European partners were being difficult; there was an acquisition on the table that couldn’t wait.

The weekend getaways stopped. Date nights would be cancelled with a text an hour before and a vague promise to make it up to me. The thoughtful gifts dwindled to nothing.

But what hurt the most was that he stopped reaching for me. Oliver had always been a physical man; it wasn’t just the sex. He just seemed to love touching me, and he did so constantly. His hand would rest on the small of my back when we walked. His fingers would thread through mine when we sat next to each other. The first thing he’d do when he walked through the door was pull me against him and bury his face in my hair.

One night I suddenly realized it had been weeks since he’d touched me without me initiating it first. I’d reach for his hand and he’d let me hold it, but his fingers would lie still in mine. I’d kiss him and he’d kiss me back, but it would be brief before he’d pull away. Our sex life dwindled to practically nothing.

I’d lie awake at night and wonder what I’d done.

It was right around that time that I met Victoria.

I was bringing Oliver his lunch. I pushed open the door to his office, and there was a woman perched on the corner of his desk. She was gorgeous. Tall, slim, blonde. She turned her head when I walked in, and her lips curved up into a smile.

“Oh,” she said. “You must be Genevieve.”

“Genny,” I replied automatically.

“Victoria Warren. I’m Oliver’s new assistant.” She slid off the desk, smiling and walked towards me. Her eyes dropped to the paper bag in my hand. “Did you bring Oliver lunch? That’s sweet. But I’m afraid we already ate.”

Oliver didn’t even look up from his computer. “Hey. Sorry, crazy day.”

I left the sandwich on the corner of his desk. I found out later, from the receptionist who once looked at me with skepticism, that it went into the trash.

After that, Victoria seemed to be everywhere.

She was in his office every time I came by, perched on the arm of a chair or leaning over his shoulder to point at something on his screen. So I stopped coming by. She went with him on his business trips because she’s his assistant and he needed her. At galas, she was the one at his side while he worked the room, not me. I’d watch them from across the room, Oliver’s tall dark figure moving through the crowd, Victoria glued to his side.

She even came to the penthouse. To work, Oliver said. I’d come home from class or dinner with a friend and hear them through the office door: the low murmur of his voice, then her laugh, then his. I’d stand in the hallway and feel like an intruder in my own home.

Once, I pushed the door open without knocking. They were standing by the window, Oliver with his hands in his pockets, Victoria with a glass of his scotch in hers, and they both turned to look at me with identical expressions of surprise, as if I were the one who’d wandered into the wrong room.

“Genevieve,” Oliver said. “We were just going over some numbers.”

Victoria smiled at me. “Mrs. Sinclair,” she said. “Lovely to see you.”

I backed out and closed the door and stood in the hallway with my heart hammering against my ribs, and I knew that something was very wrong.

What I couldn’t figure out was that everyone else seemed to know something about Victoria that I didn’t.

Nancy despised her. That was clear from her expression whenever Victoria’s name came up. She’d change the subject immediately, but once I asked her outright what was going on.

“Some things are beneath our attention Genevieve and I do not wish to discuss her. Oliver’s staffing decisions are his own,” was all she said, and it left me with more questions than answers.

Thomas was worse. He refused to speak to Victoria at all. At company functions, he’d nod curtly in her direction and then turn his back, conversation over before it began. Once, at a charity auction, I watched him intercept Oliver before he could introduce Victoria to a board member, steering his son away with a hand on his elbow and a murmured comment I couldn’t hear.

I even went to Oliver’s best friend, Leo, and tried to get answers. Leo was one of the few people in my husband’s social circle who actually seemed to like me, so I’d hoped he would help. But all he said was, “You really need to ask Oliver about that,” and then he walked away.

And the whispers. Oliver’s social circle had been whispering about me from the moment I married him, and I’d made a bitter kind of peace with it. But this was different. Women I barely knew would look at me with expressions somewhere between pity and curiosity. Men would clear their throats and ask me about the weather and look anywhere but at my face. It happened over and over. Conversations died the moment I got close enough to hear them. Glances slid from me to Victoria and back again.