Chapter 104: Mrs. Harriet’s Neglect.
Mrs. Harriet woke alone.
She hadn’t expected anything different, not really. The other side of the bed had been cold for longer than she cared to count, and she’d stopped registering the absence as anything worth noting. But some mornings the awareness crept back regardless—the specific quiet of a house that belonged to two people but only ever housed the noise of one.
Richard hadn’t come home again.
She lay there for a moment, staring at the ceiling, running through the calculation she always ran on mornings like this. He’d texted around midnight—something clipped about a client dinner running long, an investor from out of state, the kind of message that used to come with an apology and now came without one. She hadn’t replied. There was no point replying to something that wasn’t really a question.
She’d known what she was marrying. That part was never in dispute. Richard had always been a man who measured his hours in returns, who treated relationships—all of them, not just hers—as instruments with expected yields. She’d found it compelling once. A man who didn’t waste time was a man who didn’t waste her time either, and there was something efficient and clean about a marriage built on mutual ambition rather than the messy neediness she’d watched destroy other women’s lives.
But efficiency, it turned out, made a poor substitute for being wanted.
She sat up slowly, pulling the sheet around her shoulders, and let herself think the thought she usually didn’t allow past the threshold of her own mind: she missed being desired. Not loved, necessarily—she wasn’t sure she required that anymore—but desired.
Chosen, actively, the way a man chooses to walk toward a woman instead of past her. Richard hadn’t touched her in weeks. Longer, if she counted honestly instead of rounding generously in his favor. And a man who stopped touching his wife without explanation was either exhausted beyond repair or finding that particular comfort somewhere else.
She was too old, and had built too much, to pretend she didn’t know which of those two was more likely.
But it was also why she remained with him until now.
The thought sat with her while she dressed, methodical and unbothered on the surface, the way she managed everything that threatened to become emotional.
She was still a strong woman. Still capable, still respected, still the one people in that firm looked to when Arthur’s temper needed managing.
But strength wasn’t the same as being catered to, and she’d quietly stopped expecting the second thing from Richard so long ago that she’d nearly forgotten she was allowed to want it.
It was during that stretch of quiet, sitting with her coffee and the specific loneliness of a house too large for one occupied person, that she’d sent Liam the message.
She thought about that now, turning it over.
An hour after their call, she’d realized something with a kind of dry, almost amused clarity: she wasn’t going home tonight either. The location Liam had questioned her about, the distance, the timing—all of it pointed toward an evening that wouldn’t conclude by any reasonable hour. And there was a small, indulgent part of her that wondered how Richard would react if she told him plainly. “Not home tonight. Going somewhere with Liam.”
It was a petty thought. She knew that. A woman well past the age of games shouldn’t find herself contemplating a strategy this transparent, this juvenile in its architecture. But the longer she sat with it, the more it justified itself, because if a comment like that failed to provoke anything in Richard—no question, no flicker of concern, no reflexive jealousy—then nothing would. And jealousy, whatever else it was, remained the most honest emotion available. It didn’t lie the way words did.
She wondered, not for the first time, whether Richard had someone else entirely. It wasn’t a natural state of affairs, a marriage running this long without intimacy, without either party seeking it elsewhere. Men didn’t simply stop. Something redirected them, always.
She caught herself there and exhaled, setting the coffee down harder than she meant to.
Because as bad as it seemed, there was a chance Richard wasn’t cheating because Richard respected his reputation above all else.
But what was she doing.
She wasn’t a teenager plotting to make a boy jealous at a school dance.
She was a managing partner with a firm’s reputation resting partially on her shoulders, and whatever she was doing with Liam needed to serve a purpose beyond wounded pride.
That was the part worth holding onto—the part that mattered. If things with Liam continued the way she suspected they might, if his trajectory turned out to be what she believed it could become, there was real value in staying on solid footing with him. A future partnership. Leverage built early, while the relationship could still be shaped rather than merely managed.
Which meant she had to be careful.
She didn’t know whether to mention Liam’s name to Richard directly, didn’t know what version of events, if any, had already reached him. Arthur talked. Arthur always talked, feeding his brother selective truths dressed up as concern, and there was no way to know exactly what shape those truths had taken by the time they landed in Richard’s ear.
But Richard, for all his faults, was direct. Blunt to the point of rudeness, but consistent in it. Any accusation Arthur lobbed at her, Richard shut down immediately, almost reflexively—not necessarily out of devotion, she suspected, but out of some deeper instinct to protect what belonged to him, wife included. He extended the same protection to Arthur in return, defending his brother with equal reflex whenever someone challenged him.
Which was precisely what made him so difficult to move.
He needed to see something concrete before he’d believe it. He’d built his entire firm on that principle—evidence over accusation, proof over suspicion—and he wasn’t about to abandon it just because the subject was his own wife’s discretion.
Arthur understood that too. It was why he was working so hard to gather everything he could before bringing anything to Richard at all.