Playing Mr. Playboy

Chapter 5: Mrs. Ashcroft

Elena's POV

Ashcroft Vantage Group occupied fourteen floors of glass and steel that I had once known better than I knew my own apartment. I remembered the smell of the paint the week they moved in. I remembered negotiating the lease myself, nine years ago, back when it was two floors and a folding table Daniel used as a desk, back when I still had a business card with my own name on it.

I hadn't set foot in the lobby in over two years.

I told myself, walking in, that I was only there to drop off Sophie's forgotten permission slip — Daniel had promised to have it signed and back to school by pickup, and I'd genuinely forgotten it in his coat pocket that morning. That part, at least, was true.

The rest of it — the reason my heart was hammering, the reason I'd worn the gray blazer I used to wear to investor meetings instead of the sweater I'd grabbed off the hanger — I didn't examine too closely.

The receptionist behind the front desk was young, polished, a face I didn't recognize. Of course I didn't. I hadn't been in this building in two years, and companies like this one turned over their front desks every eighteen months or so, fresh graduates cycling through on their way to somewhere else.

She glanced up at me with the bright, empty courtesy reserved for strangers off the street.

"Can I help you?"

"I'm looking for Daniel Ashcroft," I said, and something about saying it out loud — to a woman who had no idea who I was, who saw nothing in my face but another visitor with an appointment or without one — made my chest go strangely tight.

"I'm sorry, Mr. Ashcroft just left with his wife," she said pleasantly, already glancing past me toward the man waiting behind me in line. "They usually grab lunch around this time on Thursdays. If it's urgent, I can have someone reach his assistant?"

My mouth had gone completely dry. "His wife," I repeated.

"Mm-hm." She was already reaching for her headset, moving on, her attention sliding away from me entirely. "They were just—"

I didn't hear the rest of it. The lobby seemed to tilt very slightly, the way a room does when you stand up too fast, all that glass and steel and marble swimming for one long, unsteady second.

*I* was his wife. I was standing right here, in the lobby of the company I had mortgaged my dead parents' house to help build, holding a permission slip in my purse for our daughter, and this stranger behind the desk had just referred to some other woman — casually, pleasantly, without a flicker of hesitation — as though there had never been any question of who Daniel Ashcroft's wife actually was.

Eleven years. Eleven years of building this, of being this, and I had become so invisible inside my own marriage that the front desk of my own husband's company didn't even recognize my face.

I thought of every suspicious thing that had piled up over the last two weeks — the bar, the burner number, Priya's flinch over Vegas, Mia's careful warning, the foil square hidden in a bag I always packed. Every piece of it had felt, until this exact moment, like something I might still be imagining. Something I could still talk myself out of, the way I'd talked myself out of it a hundred times before.

This, I could not talk myself out of.

*He may not simply have betrayed our marriage,* I thought, standing frozen in that lobby while the receptionist murmured something into her headset. *Without me knowing it, he may have let another woman step into the exact place that used to be mine.*

But who was she?

I didn't create a scene. I didn't demand to know her name, didn't raise my voice, didn't do a single thing that would give anyone in this building a reason to remember me as anything other than an ordinary visitor who'd stopped by and left again.

I decided, standing there with my heart slamming against my ribs, that I was going to find out. Quietly. Completely. On my own terms, in my own time, the way I used to find out everything I needed to know back when I was the kind of woman who read a balance sheet before her morning coffee.

I turned to leave.

That was when the receptionist's gaze lifted, over my shoulder, toward the revolving door behind me — and her entire face changed. Warmed. Brightened into the easy, familiar smile you give someone you actually know, someone whose name you don't have to check a screen to remember.

“Mrs. Ashcroft, you're here!"

I turned around.