The Alpha's Borrowed Wife

Chapter 4

Wren

“Do you want me to pack for you?”

I always packed for him. It was one of the small ugly pleasures of my marriage, rolling his shirts as his mother never taught him to, tucking the good tie in flat so it wouldn’t crease, putting the charger in the front pocket where he would find it without calling me to ask.

“Already done it.” He said it into the fridge, looking for the beer that was on the shelf in front of him. “Didn’t want to put it on you since it was last minute.”

In all our time together he had never once done it himself.

“Okay,” I said.

He kissed my temple on his way past with the bottle. “What did I do to deserve you.”

I sat at the counter while he took a call in the other room, and I watched his jacket hanging on the hook by the door and told myself not to. Then I got up and did it anyway.

There was a hair on the collar. I had to hold the fabric under the lamp to see it. It was long, and it was that particular red that comes out of a bottle and costs three hundred dollars, and Marisol had been going to the same woman for it since we were nineteen.

I stood in my own hallway with it wound around my finger.

He could scrub himself down to nothing on the drive home. He could not do a single thing about a hair.

That was what I had. Not a trace, because there was no trace on that coat and there had not been one in months, and that was the entire point of it. Eight inches of red thread held under a lamp by a woman squinting as though she were trying to get it through a needle.

Adrien laughed at whatever was being said on the phone. It was his real laugh, the loud one.

I put the hair in the pocket of my cardigan and went to run the water for dishes that were already clean.

***

That night I turned toward him in the dark and put my hand flat on his stomach, and slid it down, and he caught my wrist.

Gently. He was always gentle.

“Sweetheart.” The word came out sanded soft with sleep. “I’m wrecked. Early flight.”

“You’re driving.”

“Early start either way.” He brought my knuckles to his mouth. “Soon as this closes, I swear to God, you won’t be able to walk. You’ll be begging me to go back to work.”

Three months ago I would have laughed.

“Okay,” I said.

“Love you more than anything.”

“I know.”

He put his mouth to my forehead and rolled over, and inside a minute his breathing had gone long and even, and I lay there beside him with my eyes open and did the arithmetic I had been refusing all evening.

Months of it. One anniversary. Eight months. Eight months meant that on the night he cried at that restaurant and told me I was the only good decision he had ever made, he had already been inside my best friend.

I thought about waking him. I got as far as saying his name in my head.

And then I thought, if you’re wrong, you will have called him a liar out loud, and you will never be able to take it back, and he will look at you like the clerk did on the registry steps.

So I lay still and listened to him sleep and wondered how a man could do that so beautifully.

***

He came around to my side of the bed before it was light and pressed his lips into my hair.

I kept my eyes shut. I have never been good at much and I was excellent at that.

“Be good,” he said. “I’ll be back before you’ve had time to miss me.”

He stood in the bedroom doorway long enough that I nearly opened them. Then the car turned over in the drive. It went down our street and around the corner and away, and I lay in the middle of a bed that was still warm on one side and stayed there a long while.

I called the bindery early and told Nell I had a migraine. I had worked there for years without ever calling in, and she was so kind about it that I had to hang up.

Then I lay back down, on his side, and did not get up again for a long time.

***

Sometime past midday I called Marisol.

She picked up on the second ring, breathless and delighted, how she answered for me and for nobody else.

“There she is. I was going to call you tonight.”

“Where are you?”

“Mom’s.” A rustle, a door, the sound of somebody moving into a quieter room. “She’s got me repotting things. She’ll keep me the rest of the week and I’m going to lose my mind. How are you? You sound flat.”

“Tired.”

“You’re always tired. You work like a dog for people who don’t deserve you.” A pause, and then that warmth she could turn on like a tap, the one I had leaned into since we were girls. “Wren. You know I love you, right? Like, actually. Not how people just say it.”

My chest did a slow, sick turn.

“I know,” I said.

“Good.” I could hear her smiling. “Oh, and tell Adrien to go easy on the coast road. It’s fog season up there. It’s awful this time of year.”

I sat very still on the edge of my bed with the phone against my ear.

I hadn’t told her he was going anywhere.

“Wren?”

“I’ll tell him,” I said.

“Ring me tomorrow. Promise.”

The line went dead, and I stayed where I was with the phone in my lap and my thumb over the screen, and there was nothing in that call I could point to and name a lie. Not one word of it. She had sounded like my friend because she is my friend. She had asked how I was and she had meant it. Whatever else was true, that had been true.

That was the worst of it.

I made myself stand up. I washed my face. I put on the gray dress and then took it off and put on the black one, and neither choice made any sense to me, only that I did not want to be the kind of woman a man drives to a lodge to watch her husband from a tree line.

I was standing at the window with my coat on long before he was due.

The light was going when headlights swung into the drive.

He didn’t get out. He didn’t sound the horn. He just sat there with the engine running and both hands on the wheel, looking straight ahead through the windshield, giving me every second I needed to change my mind.

I went out. I got in.

“Once you see it,” he said, “you don’t get to un-see it.”

“Drive.”