Page 15 of The Husband I Left

Everyone knew something. My mother-in-law knew. My father-in-law knew. Half of Boston seemed to know.

Everyone in my life knew what was going on except me.

* * *

Right around the time my marriage was imploding, Evan came home, and I had never been so happy to see anyone in my life.

Evan and I have been best friends since middle school. There has never been a single romantic spark between us, and there never will be. He’s my brother in everything but blood. He’d been living in California for several years, chasing a career in the film industry, but his mom’s health had become shakier in the last year, so he decided to pack it up and move back to Boston.

He called me from the airport. “I’m home, baby! Well, not home home, I’m at Logan and uh… think you could pick me up?”

I literally screamed for joy, nearly giving Mrs. Stewart a heart attack. At the airport, he scooped me up into a giant hug and swung me around and around, and all I could do was hold on and laugh.

We fell back into our rhythm immediately. I hadn’t realized how desperately I needed a friendly face in my life until I had one again. Evan is loud and ridiculous, and larger than life. He’s six foot two and golden, and he flirts with absolutely everyone. He does impressions. He sings in public. And he made me laugh in ways that I had forgotten I was capable of.

With Evan back, my life suddenly didn’t feel so empty. He reminded me how to have fun, whether we were at a dive bar together where nobody cared about my last name or how I was dressed, or whether we were having a movie night at his apartment. He came to Sunday dinners at my parents’ house, where my parents welcomed him like a long lost son finally returned home, and my nieces treated him like a celebrity because he’d once been in a mouthwash commercial.

With Evan, I wasn’t Genevieve Sinclair. I was just Genny. He handed her back to me as if he’d been keeping her safe for me and just waiting until the time was right.

I spent more and more time out of the penthouse. Days would go by where the only time Oliver and I occupied the same space was when we were asleep. I’d come home to find the lights off and Oliver’s office door closed, a strip of yellow light beneath it the only evidence he was in the building at all.

And Oliver didn’t notice. Or if he did, he didn’t care.

The Oliver I married would have noticed. That Oliver looked at other men who looked at me with a possessiveness that should have been alarming, but that I found incredibly hot. That man would have had a lot to say about his wife spending every other night out with another man.

The Oliver I lived with now didn’t seem to care. This Oliver didn’t ask. This Oliver came home late and went to his office and emerged only long enough to shower and brush his teeth and fall into bed, and if he registered that I was gone more than I was present, he gave no sign of it.

That, more than anything, told me how far we’d fallen.

So one night, I didn’t go out. I waited for him to come home.

He was late as usual. He headed straight for his office, which had become his new normal. I followed him in and shut the door behind me. He looked up in surprise.

“Are you sleeping with her?” I asked.

Oliver looked at me for a long moment, and all the warmth drained out of his face.

“Victoria,” he said flatly.

“Yes, Victoria. Who else?”

“Victoria is my assistant, Genevieve. That’s all she is. She’s very good at her job, and her job requires her to be with me a great deal. I’m sorry if that’s upsetting to you, but it’s the reality of my work.”

“Why is she always with you? Your previous assistant didn’t spend this much time with you. And why won’t your father speak to her—”

“My father has his own opinions about a great many things. You’re imagining things. Honestly, Genevieve, this is beneath you.”

My face burned, and for a moment, I was just the waitress sprawled on the floor of Bill’s Sporthouse, looking up at a man who raised an eyebrow and said, “Impressive reflexes.”

Then Oliver sighed and slumped back in his chair, rubbing his hand over his face, and suddenly he just looked tired.

“You have every reason to be upset with me,” he said. “I know I haven’t been a very good husband lately. I hate how busy everything has been. I didn’t want to say anything until it was all settled, but—“ He opened his desk drawer and pulled out a folder, and handed it to me.

I opened it. It was an itinerary. Athens. Santorini. Mykonos. The dates started just three days after I graduated in a month.

“Two weeks,” Oliver said. “The honeymoon we never had time for.”

I stared down at the pictures of whitewashed buildings and impossibly blue water, and my eyes started to sting.