It was earlier in New York, so there was no reason Marj wouldn’t be awake to answer her phone. She had to be avoiding him. She might possibly have seen the photo and be determined to leave him, believing him to be a cheater. It didn’t bear thinking about. He was catastrophizing, and he was not a man to panic. He was always so level-headed when it came to business. Except, once again, this was personal and he was much less comfortable in the personal arena.
Brandon called his pilot and told him to ready the plane. He needed to get back to Manhattan. If there was about to be a firestorm, they needed to face it together, present a united front for the stockholders. That much was true. But the real reason he was flying home early was that he needed to talk to his wife in person, needed her to see his face and know he told the truth. He set an early alarm for his early takeoff and kept his phone by the bed. It never rang. Despite the fact he left her three more messages.
Chapter 13
Marj spent most of the night reading books on volunteerism and philanthropy. Her e-reader app was full of information on nonprofit administration and grassroots programs to improve literacy and graduation rates. She had found herself interested, after her work in the afterschool program, in helping teenagers in particular. She had spreadsheets of ideas to help them. They needed job skills and life skills—how to be punctual, dress neatly, address one’s boss and coworkers appropriately, how to cook basic meals and balance a checkbook and how to write a resume.
She had an appointment with the principal at the school where she’d volunteered before. She wanted to help start a program to communicate and model these skills for the juniors and seniors. They talked about poverty culture and about the coded language of the middle class and how most of the kids in the school didn’t know the script for getting a decent job, the phrases and buzzwords they’d have to understand, the gestures and demeanor necessary. Together they worked out a once a week class that Marj would start, bringing in guest speakers from the community and doing role plays for interviews and practicing how to fill out job applications and things like that.
By the time she was finished, Marj was excited to begin with the kids in the fall. She was also anxious about that picture, the one of Brandon with the blond. She’d seen it, of course, she had. She wouldn’t let herself stare at it, analyze it, try to guess at his motives. It already hurt badly enough, knowing what she knew now—that she was a temporary arrangement anyway. If he’d only planned on keeping her around for six months despite his declarations to the contrary, why couldn’t he have kept it in his pants until the half a year had elapsed? Surely he wasn’t crappy enough to cheat on her…was he? It was too harsh to consider it. He knew how badly she’d been hurt when that bastard Luke cheated on her with the secretary. She and Brandon had even weathered his own run-in with a secretary, and they’d been honest with one another and came out on the other side of the ordeal stronger than ever before. Or at least, she thought they had.
What if all that was fake? What if he had been boning the secretary all along and now he was screwing the blond in Dubai as well? She might be his cupcake on another continent, so he didn’t get lonely while administering to the needs of his father’s so-precious company. It nauseated her to think her husband had a girl in every port, or in every international office as it were. She’d watched him so often, so closely, for any sign that he wasn’t serious about her, any indication that he was only humoring her until something better came along, something real. But it felt real, dammit, it felt far too real!
She couldn’t talk to him yet. Couldn’t face him and listen to his side of the story, a side that left him both blameless and noble, she had no doubt. He was charming, persuasive. She knew she’d end up believing him. She just wasn’t ready to hear it. He shouldn’t have been alone at dinner with a woman who looked like that, getting that close, that intimate. There was touching, whispering. It wrenched her, sickened her. She had listened to his voice mails. She knew he was on his way home. Marj would have to deal with him, and soon. But she would delay it as long as possible. She knew this was going to hurt, and knew that nothing but more drama and more pain would come of it. A man like him was probably turning down women left and right all day long, but it didn’t make it easier to tolerate.
On one hand, she consoled herself that he wouldn’t need to lie to her because she was only his temporary spouse, but then she remembered that he’d been lying to her for a while now, making her think that permanence was an option. So he might lie about this just to keep her compliant or to keep her from flipping out on him. He wasn’t a man who liked displays of emotion, and she was for sure having some serious emotions about their situation.