Chapter 2

Edward's scowl didn't soften. He walked right past me and grabbed the phone I'd set down.

My heart slammed against my ribs. I was sure he could see my fingerprints on the screen or sense that I'd been snooping.

But he glanced at it briefly and slid it into his pocket without a second look. The smoothness of it was unnerving.

"Don't bother with the milk. Something urgent came up at the office. I have to run out."

As he spoke, he reached for his coat on the hook by the door.

"It's so late," I said before I could stop myself.

Edward froze with his coat half-on. He turned and looked down at me with that patronizing glare I knew too well.

It was the look that said I was a burden, a question he didn't want to answer.

"Olivia, the IPO is in a critical window. Every minute matters. We're talking about millions of dollars shifting in valuation. If you don't understand the business, stay out of the way.

"And while I'm gone, deal with that stupid robot vacuum. It's been bumping under the sofa for twenty minutes, and the sound is driving me up the wall."

He pushed the door open and walked out. The door clicked shut behind him, sealing out the cold night air and the last shred of warmth I felt for him.

He said I didn't understand. I stood alone in the silent living room, watching the red taillights of his car disappear down the street. A bitter laugh escaped my lips.

Edward seemed to have forgotten something.

Five years ago, when his business plan was a mess of typos and empty promises, and every investor in town showed him the door, I was the one who sat at this kitchen island and rewrote the entire pitch deck.

When he couldn't afford a Chief Technology Officer, I was the one who built the backbone of GrantTech, typing code right here in my pajamas.

To protect his fragile ego, I stayed invisible.

I let the world think I was a sickly housewife who never left the house. But inside these four walls, I was the company's secret weapon.

I wrote the patent applications, I drafted the grant proposals, and I designed every single slide for his roadshows, pulling all-nighters while he slept.

That "revolutionary AI risk control system" he loves to brag about in interviews? It was running a script I wrote half a decade ago to filter spam emails. I repurposed it for his servers.

And now he told me I didn't understand?

I walked to the big window and watched his car turn toward the hotel.

My phone buzzed. It was a message from the company's technical group chat.

The operations director tagged me: [Olivia, the server load is spiking, and we're getting constant error alerts. Should we increase the bandwidth?]

Edward never reads these technical messages. He wouldn't know a buffer overflow from a breakfast burrito.

I was the only one in the entire company who knew how to keep this massive, duct-taped system running on a shoestring budget.

I stared at the flashing code on my screen, my fingers resting on the keyboard.

On any other night, I'd log in remotely, clear the cache, and have everything running smoothly in ten minutes.

But tonight, I looked at that glaring red warning symbol. It looked a lot like Edward's hypocritical face.

I closed the chat app and switched my phone to airplane mode.

If he thought I was clueless, I could stop being a genius.

Let the alarms ring. Let the system crash. It was not my company that was about to burn to the ground.

*****

The sound of Edward's ringtone ripped me out of sleep first thing in the morning.

"Olivia! Where is my blue tie? I told you to drop it at the cleaners yesterday. Why isn't it hanging in the closet?"

Edward's voice was sharp and frantic on the other end.

The background noise was muffled. It sounded like he was sitting in his car, or maybe walking through a hotel lobby.

I held the phone to my ear and sat up, my head pounding like a drum.

"It's in the second drawer on the left side of the walk-in closet," I said, my voice steady.

"Can you get your head in the game for once? I shouldn't have to call you about every little thing." Edward cut the line before I could say another word.

See? This was my life.

To Edward, my entire purpose revolved around locating his ties, fixing the robot vacuum that got stuck under the sofa, and being the designated driver when he drank too much at company dinners.

I got out of bed and went through the motions of washing my face. I stared at the pale, tired face in the mirror.

I thought about last week, the one time Edward actually acted like a concerned husband. He took me to see a psychiatrist.

He said I'd been jumpy and couldn't sleep, and that I was probably developing anxiety from being stuck inside the house for so long.

The doctor was an old friend of his from college, Bob Carter.

Bob held my test results in his hand, adjusted his glasses, and looked at me with a very serious expression. "Olivia, your hormone levels are completely out of balance.

"This is a textbook case of anxiety combined with paranoid delusions.

"You believe your husband is unfaithful, and you think the company can't run without you. These are pathological illusions. They aren't real."

Edward sat beside me, holding my hand. His face was a perfect mask of regret and guilt. "Olivia, this is my fault.

"I've been so buried in work that I forgot about you. I promise I'll be home more. I'll make this right."

In that moment, my eyes actually stung with tears. I was moved by the performance.

I believed him. I honestly thought the problem was me. I thought the stress of not being able to have a baby was making me crazy and suspicious.