The night I left, I cooked his favorite meal one last time and served it on a plate I’d thrown with my own hands. It was a small, lopsided ceramic bowl, glazed a flat, dark gray. He didn’t notice.
He never noticed the effort it took to keep his world turning. His suits, his schedule, his dinners. I managed Bram Carrington's schedule and correspondence, the upstate senator married to the woman from his hometown. I had given up my pottery studio in Hudson for this life, trading clay for canapés. He was too loyal to his family's rule that a Carrington wife must never give interviews or express opinions.
The text came through on his phone, which he’d left on the counter. His mother. *So proud of how you’ve managed Arden. The household runs so smoothly under your guidance.He'd taken all the credit for my decision to never speak to the press.
I put the plate in front of him. “I’m done being your favorite utensil,” I said. I walked out and drove to the empty storefront on Main Street I’d leased with the last of my savings. My studio. My life.
Bram’s life fell apart. He burned the toast. He missed a donor meeting. He called, but I’d said all I had to say. His reckoning came when he found the half-finished sculpture in my old closet—a study of his hands, a labor of love he never knew I was working on. The one thing I was making just for him.
Has a man ever earned back a woman he never saw in the first place? Is a grovel enough when the betrayal was a lifetime of indifference?
There is no cheating in this book.
