My Husband's Regret

Chapter 2: The Study

Jake

Two years earlier, my father called me into his study on a Tuesday morning and told me I was getting married.

Not asked. Told.

I remember the exact weight of the room when I walked in — the smell of the leather chairs, the low hum of the air conditioning fighting against a summer that hadn't fully broken yet, my father standing at the window with his hands clasped behind his back like he was rehearsing something he'd already decided didn't require my input at all. My mother sat in the corner chair, the one she always claimed when she wanted to observe without participating, and she didn't look up from her tea when I came in, didn't offer me even the smallest acknowledgment that my life was about to be rearranged without my consent.

"Sit down, Jake."

I didn't sit. I don't know why that detail has stayed with me so clearly, more clearly than almost anything else from that morning, but I remember standing there, arms crossed, already braced for whatever was coming, because you don't get called into that study for good news. Good news happened over dinner, delivered with wine and something close to warmth. That study was reserved for decisions that had already been finalized somewhere far above my head.

"We've found you a wife," my father said, like he was informing me he'd found a good deal on a property acquisition.

I laughed. I actually laughed, one short, disbelieving bark of a sound, because for half a second I genuinely thought it was a joke, some strange, uncharacteristic attempt at humor from a man who did not make jokes, who had never once in my life made a joke. But he didn't laugh with me. My mother still didn't look up from her tea, her spoon making one slow, unbothered circle against the china.

"You're serious," I said.

"The Whitfield girl. Chloe." He said her name the way you'd read a line item off a spreadsheet, flat and functional. "The families have been in discussions for months. It's a good match. Good for the company, good for the family name, good for—"

"Did anyone plan on asking me?"

"I'm asking you now."

"That's not asking, that's informing me after the fact and calling it a courtesy."

He turned from the window then, finally, and looked at me with the particular expression he reserved for moments when he considered a conversation to already be settled, regardless of how much longer I intended to keep talking into it. "You're twenty-nine, Jake. You run half this company already, and in five years you'll run all of it. This isn't a request for your feelings on the matter. This is what's happening. The wedding is in six weeks."

Six weeks.

I want to say I fought harder than I did. I want to say I stormed out, made calls, tried to find some way out of a life that had just been decided for me over tea and property talk in a room that smelled like leather and old money. But the truth is, I'd grown up understanding exactly how much power I actually had in that house, and it was considerably less than most people assumed, for someone who stood to inherit so much of what filled it. I left the study that day already resigned, already furious in a way I didn't have anywhere useful to put, and I did the only thing that felt like it was actually, entirely mine.

I called Christina.

We'd been seeing each other for eight months by then, quietly, the way you keep something quiet when you know your family would never approve of a woman who came from nothing, who worked as a receptionist at one of our subsidiary offices, who had no name worth mentioning in the rooms my parents cared about. I never introduced her to anyone. I never planned to, if I'm honest with myself now, looking back with whatever clarity two years of consequences has finally given me. It was easier that way — no expectations, no pressure, no scrutiny, just something that existed entirely on my terms and didn't require my father's approval to keep breathing.

When I told her about the marriage, I expected anger. I braced for it the whole drive to her apartment, rehearsing what I'd say, how I'd explain that this changed nothing real between us, that it was a piece of paper, a business arrangement dressed up as a wedding, a formality my family required and I had no meaningful say in.

She wasn't angry. She was quiet in a way that unsettled me far more than anger would have.

"So you're just going to marry her," she said. Not a question.

"I don't have a choice."

"Everyone has a choice, Jake."

I didn't have an answer for that then. I still don't, if I'm honest, which is a thing I've had to become much better at doing over the last two years than I ever was before all of this.

I told her it wouldn't change anything. I told her I'd still see her, still make time, that a wedding was just a formality my family needed for optics and nothing more than that. I meant it when I said it. I want that somewhere on the record, even if it doesn't excuse anything that came after — I meant it, in that moment, as a promise to her, not as a betrayal already being quietly planned. I didn't think of Chloe at all during that conversation. I didn't think of the woman I was about to marry as a person with her own version of that Tuesday morning happening somewhere across the city, her own father delivering the same verdict in some study of her own, her own life folding itself around a decision she hadn't made either.

I met Chloe for the first time eleven days before our wedding, at a dinner arranged by both families, at a restaurant so quiet and expensive it felt more like a courtroom than a first date. She wore green. I remember that clearly, the way you remember the first detail of someone before you know whether they'll matter to you at all. She was polite, careful, clearly as blindsided by the whole arrangement as I was, asking small, cautious questions across a table set with more silverware than either of us needed. For exactly one moment over that dinner, watching her navigate a conversation neither of us had asked to be having, I felt something that might have been sympathy. Might have been, if I'd let it, the beginning of something else entirely.

I didn't let it be anything.

I decided somewhere in the middle of that dinner, without ever saying it aloud to another living soul, that I would marry her because I had no real choice in the matter, and that I would keep the rest of my life — the part that actually still felt like mine — carefully separate from her. It felt, at the time, like the only kind of control I had left to hold onto in a year where every other decision had been made for me.

I didn't understand yet what that decision would cost. Not just for me. For her. For a version of both of us that might have existed if I'd chosen, even once, differently.

I think about that dinner more than I probably should, given everything that happened after. I think about the green dress, and the careful way she asked me questions like she was trying to find some version of me she could actually build a life alongside, and I think about how easy it would have been, even then, to choose a different path. To let her in instead of building the wall I spent the next two years reinforcing, brick by brick, every single night I chose the club over the house, every night I let Christina believe nothing between us had changed even as I stood in front of a room full of witnesses and promised the opposite to someone else.

I didn't know, sitting across from Chloe in that restaurant with her careful questions and her green dress, that two years later I'd come home to find the wreckage of every choice I'd made standing in my own bedroom doorway, her face doing something I will never be able to fully describe, no matter how many times I try to put it into words.

I didn't know that by the time I finally understood what I'd actually done, she'd already be gone.

The wedding itself is mostly a blur to me now, which feels strange to admit given how much planning went into it, how many months of my mother's attention it consumed. I remember the church was too cold. I remember Chloe's hand was steady in mine during the vows, steadier than my own, and I remember thinking, in some distant corner of my mind I didn't examine too closely, that she was doing a better job than I was of pretending this was something we'd chosen.

I remember my father's expression during the reception — satisfied, the way a man looks when a deal closes exactly the way he intended it to. I remember catching Christina's name on a text notification I quickly silenced, tucked away in my jacket pocket like a guilty secret I had no intention of examining on my own wedding day. I danced with Chloe once, a slow, careful dance neither of us seemed to know how to inhabit fully, both of us performing a closeness we hadn't yet earned and, I suspect now, both of us wondering privately whether we ever would.

She tried, in those early months. I want to be fair to her, even now, even writing this with the particular clarity that comes from having lost everything I once told myself didn't matter to me. She asked about my day. She learned how I took my coffee without being told. She redecorated the guest room into something that felt, for the first time since I was a boy, like a real home rather than a showroom my mother had curated. I noticed all of it. I simply didn't let myself respond to any of it, because responding meant admitting that some part of me was starting to want the life she was quietly trying to build around us both.

I kept seeing Christina through all of it. Not constantly — there were stretches, weeks even, where I told myself I'd stopped, where guilt won out over habit. But I always went back, some worn groove in me pulling toward the one relationship in my life that had never been assigned to me by anyone else, that I'd chosen entirely on my own terms, even if choosing it meant becoming a man I wouldn't have recognized at twenty-five.

I told myself, for two years, that Chloe didn't notice. I understand now how much of a coward's math that was — not that she didn't notice, but that I needed her not to have noticed, because the alternative meant reckoning with exactly how much damage I was doing to a person who had done nothing to deserve it beyond being chosen for me by two families who never once asked either of us what we wanted.

There's a particular kind of cowardice in being married to someone and still managing to make them feel like a guest in their own home. I understand that now. I didn't understand it then, or maybe I understood it and simply didn't dare to look directly at it, the way you avoid a mirror when you already know what it's going to show you. I let two years pass telling myself the marriage was a formality I was enduring, when the truth — the truth I only found the nerve to face after losing her entirely — was that I had been the one making it a formality. She had never stopped trying to make it real.