Once Bitten, Twice Shy

"Five years," I said out loud, to no one, because saying it out loud made it real.

Five years of marriage. Five years of building Gideon Shaw into the man half this city wanted to shake hands with. Five years of candlelight dinners on this exact date, in this exact dining room, with the same white orchids he bought me the first time he told me he loved me.

I lit the last candle and stepped back to look at the table. Two plates. Two glasses. A bottle of the wine we drank the night he proposed. I had asked the chef to make the dish Gideon's mother used to cook for him, the one he claimed no one else could ever get right. I wanted tonight to remind him of every reason he chose me.

My phone buzzed against the table runner.

*Gideon*: Emergency at the office. Contract issue blew up. Might be here late. I'm sorry, El.

I read it twice.

Five years married to a man who built an empire out of nothing, and I had learned that "emergency" was a word that meant different things depending on the day. Sometimes it meant a supplier missed a shipment. Sometimes it meant a board member got cold feet. It never meant our anniversary should wait. Funny as that may sound, it wasn't.

I could have been angry. I could have poured a glass of wine and let the candles burn down to nothing while I stewed over an empty chair across from me.

Instead, I called the chef and asked her to pack two plates in a carrier bag.

If Gideon couldn't come home for our anniversary, I would bring the anniversary to him.

The drive to Shaw Holdings took eighteen minutes at that hour, the city thin and quiet, streetlights sliding across the windshield. I held the food carrier on my lap the whole way like it was something breakable. In my head, I pictured his face when I walked into his office. Surprised. Maybe embarrassed that he'd made me sit alone with the candles. Then grateful, the way he always was when I showed up for him without being asked.

The executive floor was almost empty. Most of the lights were off, the hallway lit only by the exit signs and the glow coming from under one door at the end of the corridor.

Gideon's office.

His assistant, Talia, sat at her desk outside it, a half-eaten sandwich in front of her and her coat already on like she'd been trying to leave for the last hour. When she saw me, she stood up so fast her chair rolled back into the wall.

"Elise." She said my name like a warning. "Hi. I didn't know you were coming."

"It's our anniversary," I said, lifting the carrier bag. "I thought I'd bring the party to him."

"He's really busy right now." She stepped in front of the hallway like her body could block a door thirty feet away. "It's a bad time. Maybe I can have him call you when he's done?"

"Talia, I've known you for three years. You've never once tried to keep me from walking down that hallway."

Her eyes went somewhere over my shoulder, and her mouth opened and closed without a sound coming out.

That was when I saw it.

A handbag, sitting on the floor outside Gideon's office door. Cream leather, gold clasp. Not mine.

I looked at Talia. She looked at the floor.

"Whose is that?" I asked.

"I don't know," she said, too fast, too high.

I started walking.

"Elise, wait, please, let me just…"

I didn't stop. My heels hit the marble in a rhythm that matched the pulse suddenly loud in my ears. The closer I got, the more I could hear voices behind the door, low, familiar, the cadence of two people who had done this before and knew how to keep their tones down.

I stood outside the door instead of opening it. My hand hovered over the handle.

I don't know why I didn't push it open right then. Maybe because part of me still wanted an innocent explanation. Maybe because some cold, careful part of me already understood that once I opened that door, I would never be able to close it again on the marriage I thought I had.

So I listened.

"You worry too much," Gideon said, his voice low, amused, the tone he used when he was trying to calm someone down. "She trusts me. She's trusted me for five years. She's not going to start asking questions now."

A woman answered him. I knew the voice before I could put a face to it.

Naomi Reed.

"She's not stupid, Gideon," Naomi said. "Eventually she's going to notice the transfers. Someone in accounting is going to say something."

"No one in accounting is going to say anything, because no one in accounting has access to what we're moving. It's structured through the subsidiary accounts. Clean. Untraceable back to either of us."

My stomach dropped.

This wasn't the sound of an affair. This was the sound of a plan.

I pressed my palm flat against the wall to hold myself up, my other hand still gripping the food carrier like an idiot, like I was still that woman from twenty minutes ago who thought tonight was about candles and wine.

"And if she asks about her father's shares?" Naomi asked.

"She won't. She never checks the voting structure. She's never once cared about the operational side of the business. That's why this works."

I closed my eyes. My father built that company from a warehouse and a loan he almost didn't get approved for. My father, who told me before he died to never let one person hold all the power over what he built.

I thought that person was supposed to be me.

"I don't like this," Naomi said. "I didn't sign up to steal from his daughter."

"You signed up for a lot more than that the day you agreed to help me," Gideon said. There was an edge in his voice now, something sharper underneath the calm. "Don't get soft on me. Not when we're this close."

"Close to what, exactly?"

A pause.

I held my breath.

"Once Elise signs the final transfer, she'll have nothing left," Gideon said. "The shares go to the holding company. I control the board. And by the time she figures out what happened, there won't be anything left for her lawyers to fight over."

I stared at the door.

Everything around me went completely still, like the hallway itself was holding its breath with me. The candlelight waiting at home. The dinner I had planned for weeks. The anniversary card in my purse where I'd written, *five years down, forever to go.*

My husband wasn't cheating on me for another woman.

He was cheating on me for everything my father left in my name.

I looked down at the food carrier in my hands, at the plate I'd packed with his mother's recipe, made with love I didn't know yet was already wasted on him.

Then I looked back at the closed door, at the thin line of light underneath it, at the two voices on the other side deciding exactly how much of my life they planned to take.

I didn't knock.

I didn't walk away either.

I stood in that hallway and understood, for the first time in five years, that I had absolutely no idea who my husband really was.

And I was about to find out exactly how far he was willing to go to take everything my father ever gave me.