My Billionaire Husband Announced He Loved Someone Else Over Dinner — He Was Waiting For My Tears, But I Had A Secret That Brought His Entire Empire Down

Part 11

Claire Sinclair called me in June.

I did not answer.

She called again the next day. And the day after that. On the fourth call I picked up, not because I had decided to but because I had run out of reasons not to that I respected.

“Maya,” she said. “Thank you for —”

“Don’t thank me for answering,” I said. “Say what you called to say.”

A pause. When she spoke again her voice had the quality of someone who had rehearsed something and has realized, at the moment of delivery, that the rehearsed version isn’t going to work.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I know that’s — I know there’s no version of that that’s adequate. I know that.”

I said nothing.

“I told myself stories,” she said. “About what your marriage was. He told me things, and I — I chose to believe them because I wanted to. I know that now.”

“What did he tell you?”

She was quiet for a moment. “That you’d been unhappy for years. That it was a marriage of convenience at this point. That you understood, somewhere, that it was ending.”

“None of that was true.”

“I know.” Another pause. “I know that now.”

I thought about the birthday card she had sent me in October. The small hand-drawn flowers along the bottom edge. I had put it on the refrigerator and looked at it for two weeks before taking it down.

“Why are you calling me?” I said.

“Because I’m not — I’m not with him anymore.” She said it with the specific flatness of something that has been decided and is now just a fact. “I ended it in March. After the settlement conference. I heard what he did with the MDR money, with the investors, with —” She stopped. “I heard the shape of it. And I understood that the version of him I thought I knew wasn’t the full version.”

“No,” I said.

“I don’t expect forgiveness,” she said. “I’m not calling for that. I just —” She paused again. “I wanted you to know that I see it. What happened. What I was part of.” She paused one more time. “And I wanted to say that you were not routine. Whatever he told you about what you were to him. You were not that.”

I looked out the east-facing window of my office. The afternoon light had shifted from the morning version — less precise, more generous, the way light is in the later part of the day when it has been working for a while and has learned something.

“I know that,” I said. “I’ve known it for a while.”

“Okay,” she said. “I’m glad.”

“Claire.”

“Yes.”

“Don’t call again,” I said. “Not because I hate you. I don’t, particularly. But because there’s nothing else that needs to be said and I’d rather use the time for other things.”

A long pause.

“Okay,” she said. “I understand.”

I hung up.

I sat at my desk for a moment.

Then I opened the Brooklyn project file and went back to work.