The CEO's Discarded Wife Returned With His Twins

At nine o'clock on the night someone tried to kill Edmund Calloway, I was warming his teapot.

Three hundred people were celebrating his eightieth birthday in the ballroom beyond the service door, and not one of them had asked my name.

Rain slapped the high window of the butler's pantry, the cold March kind that blows straight off the harbor. I ran the hot tap into the brown pot, swirled it, tipped it out. Edmund liked his Lapsang Souchong strong enough to strip varnish. Nobody else in the family would touch it. Behind me a caterer's boy was piping cream onto four hundred tiny pastries with the face of a man defusing a bomb.

"We've got staff for that, Mrs. Calloway," said the head caterer, looking at my plain gray dress, bought on sale in medical school.

"He likes it a particular way."

My clutch was on a folding chair outside the pantry door, because there was nowhere else to put it. At six minutes past nine I found there was no milk and went up the corridor to the kitchen for a jug, and the clutch stayed where it was. At a quarter past I came out with the tray, tucked the clutch under my arm, and carried the tea up.

---

The gala was on a Saturday. Our third wedding anniversary fell on the Wednesday after it. I'd circled the date in my planner in January, and in February I'd crossed the circle out.

I'd seen Rhys Calloway exactly four times that evening. Once on the stairs, when he'd said, "You're late," and kept walking. Once across the ballroom, tall and black-haired in a ring of men who ran things, his green eyes moving past me to the door. Once at the bar, where Vivienne Sutter had her hand tucked into the crook of his elbow.

"Darling, you have to tell them about the Singapore deal," she was saying, honey-blonde and lit from somewhere I couldn't see. "Nobody tells it like you."

Rhys didn't tell it. He didn't move her hand, either.

The fourth time was a photograph. A man with a camera lined up the family by the fireplace, and Rhys stepped half a pace to his left so the frame would close without me in it. I don't think he even decided to do it.

Delphine found me afterward by the windows: Rhys's stepmother, only eighteen years older than him, silver bob, gray cashmere, a voice that never rose above the level of a hospital library.

"You look lovely, Margot," she said, and touched my arm. "Gray is so restful on you."

I was almost sure she meant it kindly.

Owen Pike, Rhys's assistant, was telling everyone the speeches were at ten. They were at ten-thirty. I told him so. He wrote it in a tiny notebook.

"Thank you, Mrs. Calloway."

He was the only person all night who said it like it was my name.

Inside my clutch, beside a lipstick I never used, was a folded card in my own handwriting: Edmund's medications, doses, times, the name of his cardiologist, his pharmacy. I was a first-year surgical intern and a nurse's daughter, and my mother had raised me to believe you never let an old man go anywhere without someone carrying his list.

---

The study was up the back stairs, at the end of a corridor of hunting prints nobody looked at. Edmund was already at the board when I came in with the tray.

"There she is," he said. "My opponent."

He was eighty that day, and I'd never seen him look so well. The old walnut pieces were set out between the two leather chairs, worn pale at the crowns from sixty years of hands.

"You've been winning all night," I said. "Everyone's told you so."

"Everyone's told me I look marvelous for my age. They say that at funerals too." He pointed at the chair. "Five minutes. Then they'll want me to blow out something."

I set the tray at his elbow: the brown pot, one cup and saucer in the old Larkmoor bone china with its band of gold leaves, a small white jug of milk, because he took it first, in the cup. The smell came up between us, tar and pine and woodsmoke on a wet day.

He moved a knight. I moved a pawn. He took the pawn.

"You always give me that one," he said.

"You always take it."

He laughed, and then an odd brightness came into his face. I've found the word for it since. It was the look of a man about to hand over a present he'd hidden in a drawer for years.

"After the cake," Edmund said, "I'm going to say something that makes my grandson look at you properly."

My hands wanted a chart, a pen, anything. I put them in my lap.

"Edmund, you don't have to say anything about me."

"I know I don't have to." He tapped the board. "Your move."

I moved a bishop, badly. He saw it and let it go.

"Shall I pour?"

"Not yet. A Lapsang that's stewed a little is a Lapsang with an opinion." His hand rested near the cup. "Three more moves and I'll have you."

There was a soft knock on the open door. Delphine stood there with the corridor light behind her.

"Sweetheart," she said to me, "Rhys is asking for you in the ballroom."

Edmund frowned at the board.

I stood. Some stupid part of me was pleased. In three years he had not asked for me in a room full of people.

"I'll come back for the game," I told Edmund.

"The game will be here." He didn't look up. "Go and be looked at."

I took the back stairs because they were quicker. Halfway down, Gideon came up past me, Rhys's half-brother, seventeen and all elbows, a guitar case bumping the banister. He was supposed to play something for Edmund after the cake. He flattened against the wall to let me by.

"Hey, Margot."

"Hey. Break a string."

"That's not the saying."

"It is for guitarists."

He grinned and went on up. I went on down. I didn't think about it again for five years.

---

Rhys was not asking for me in the ballroom.

I found him with Vivienne and three men from the port authority. He saw me come in, and his face did nothing at all.

"Delphine said you wanted me."

"I didn't." He turned back to the men.

Vivienne gave me a smile that was mostly teeth. "Oh, darling. There must have been a mix-up."

"There wasn't," I said. "Delphine was very clear."

One of the port authority men looked at his shoes. Rhys didn't turn around. I stood there long enough for people to notice. Then I went back to the windows and watched the rain and did not cry, because I was twenty-five years old and a doctor, and I'd decided in our first year that he would never get that from me.

At a quarter past ten the lights dimmed and the cake came in on a trolley. Four tiers, white, eighty candles in rings. The room sang. Edmund stood by the fireplace, straight as a mast, Delphine on one side, Conrad on the other, Rhys a little behind, where he always stood near his grandfather.

Edmund leaned forward to blow. Then he stopped.

"The candles," he said, puzzled. "They've got yellow rings around them."

Someone laughed. He blinked hard, twice.

Then he bent at the waist and was sick on the parquet, and his knees went, and he fell sideways into the trolley, and the top tier came off and broke on the floor beside him.

I was across the room before anyone screamed.

He was gray. His lips were blue at the edges. I put two fingers into the side of his neck under the jaw and felt nothing, and moved them, and felt nothing, and watched his chest. It didn't rise.

"Call an ambulance," I said. "Cardiac arrest, eighty-year-old male. You. Get me the defibrillator from the front hall, there's one by the coat check. Go."

I didn't wait to see who went. A man in a dinner jacket put his hand on my shoulder and said something about letting the professionals handle it.

"I am the professional," I said. "Take your hand off me."

He took it off. I knelt in the vomit and the buttercream, put the heel of my hand on the center of his breastbone, laced the other hand over it, locked my elbows, and pushed.

Hard and fast, a hundred and ten a minute. I felt a rib give on the fourth compression and kept going. You always keep going.

I hum when I work. I've done it since I was a child, sitting in hospital corridors while my mother finished a shift. Under my breath I hummed the tune Helen used to sing doing the dishes, and I counted inside it. Twenty-eight, twenty-nine, thirty. Tilt the head. Two breaths. Back on the chest.

A waiter brought the defibrillator with shaking hands. I talked him through it without stopping: open it, pads out, one here, one here, press nothing until it tells you. It analyzed. It advised a shock.

"Everybody clear."

His body jerked. Nothing. Back on the chest.

Later they told me it was nine minutes. It felt like forty and it felt like one.

The paramedics came in at a run with the rain on their jackets. One took over compressions from me without a word. The other charged the paddles on their own machine. Clear. Shock. A pause so long I heard the rain at the windows.

"I've got a rhythm," the paramedic said. "I've got a pulse."

The room breathed out. I stayed on my knees, arms burning, my gray dress soaked from hem to waist with things I won't describe.

Rhys was kneeling on the other side of his grandfather. I hadn't seen him come. He had Edmund's left hand in both of his, and for one second, across the old man's chest, his eyes met mine and there was nothing in them but thanks. I would think about that second a great deal over the next five years. It didn't last long enough to keep.

The paramedic with the bag looked at me. "You family?"

"His granddaughter-in-law. I'm a doctor."

"What does he take?"

I didn't have to think. "Digoxin, metoprolol, apixaban. The list's in my bag."

---

My bag was on the floor where I'd dropped it. Vivienne got to it first.

"I'll get it, darling," she said. "Let me help."

She crouched in her silver dress, opened my clutch with her long fingers, and lifted out, between finger and thumb, an amber plastic pill vial with a white pharmacy label.

My list was still folded in the inside pocket where I'd put it.

She turned the vial to the light. EDMUND CALLOWAY. DIGOXIN 125 MCG. It was empty.

I watched her face. I'll remember it for the rest of my life: her eyebrows went up a fraction too late, an actress a half-second behind her cue.

"Darling," she said, clearly, to the room. "Why is his digoxin bottle empty?"

Three hundred people turned toward me.

I was kneeling on the floor with his vomit on my hands. Edmund was on a stretcher under an oxygen mask. The paramedics were strapping him in. Someone was crying. Conrad was holding an empty glass. Delphine had her fingertips pressed to her lips.

Rhys stepped through all of it. He took the vial out of Vivienne's fingers. He didn't look at her. He looked at the label, then at me, and I had been his wife for three years and I had never once seen him look at me the way he did then. He was giving me his full attention at last.

He held the vial up between two fingers, a specimen for the lab.

"What did you put in his tea, Margot?" he asked, quiet enough that only I could hear.