Kate’s flight was due at 10. He made it twenty minutes early and paid for guest parking, not sure he could take driving around the airport loop without getting into an accident. He bought a magazine at a newsstand but couldn’t manage an interest in it. Halfway through paging through it he realized he didn’t even remember which rag he’d bought, let alone what he was reading.
He was anxious, keyed up—on edge from the argument with the Old Man and that hadn’t gone away now that he was on personal business, it had only compounded. Silly, of course, to be dreading his wife’s presence like some sitcom husband. It wasn’t as if life had been cigars and beer every night while she was gone. He’d kept up the same well-mannered lifestyle as when she was present.
But he’d gotten used to her absence; it’d become easy for him. Not that it would be hard living with her, but…
His wife had called him the previous night. She was returning to Granson after a three-month stay in a rehab clinic. The prognosis was good, according to her. “I’m cured, really I am. It’s not just that I don’t want the stuff. They taught me all sorts of ways to manage it, if I did want it, and not to give in, and to cope.”
“That’s wonderful, Kate,” he’d said to her, not knowing why he didn’t mean it.
No, he’d known. There’d been other claims that it was all over, other times she’d gotten clean for the last time, and every time she relapsed. He didn’t want to hope that she was really, truly clean and sober. He didn’t want to doubt her while she bustled around the house like the woman he’d fallen in love with. He’d married her saying for better or for worse, and sickness and in health, but it was this damned… blending that he couldn’t stomach. He didn’t know, couldn’t begin to tell if she was really back to normal… or if it was what was normal for her now.
It was a relief when he finally saw her coming out of the concourse. His heart leapt and he realized he was glad to see her after all. She looked… herself. A lot more herself than he remembered her being. She’d been too thin when she left, with blotches on her pale face, and now she was more tan, more filled out, moving more like a dancer than someone feeble or in pain.
When she saw him, she rushed over to him and Caruso felt her arms around him once more, her svelte body so weightless despite her curves that he indulged in picking her up and squeezing her. It was wonderful. No bones, no gauntness, just her. She giggled and squealed as he put her down.
“That’s quite a welcome,” she grinned at him. “But I’m afraid I’m going to have to ask for more.”
“More?” Caruso asked her, lifting his eyebrow.
“Much more.” She patted his back where her hands rested, just at the base of his spine. “Don’t worry, though. I’m sure you can give it to me.”
“Just as soon as we get home,” Caruso promised her.
“Oh, don’t you have to get back to work?”
“Fuck work. I haven’t taken a personal day since you left. They can manage without me now.”
Kate smiled shyly. “Sounds like you. Never taking any time for yourself. I’m going to have to make sure you stay at home some and pay attention to me.”
“I won’t give you any trouble there, promise. Where’s your baggage, though? You don’t even have a shoulder bag. Traveling light?”
“Never.”
Kate looked back over her shoulder and Caruso followed her eyes to another woman. She was a beauty. There weren’t many other ways to put it. Long and lean, tall as a model, close enough to Kate’s good looks to be a sister. Tall and straight with those pristine English features, dark brown hair and light blue eyes. As she came closer, Caruso saw her eyes were green.
An emerald and a sapphire. That was what they reminded him of. Two gemstones, prettily perfect, so much alike and yet with an appealing variety, an awareness that he could never know one with a knowledge of the other.
She was hefting a duffel bag and lugging behind her a suitcase on rollers that Caruso recognized was Kate’s.
“James, this is Elizabeth,” Kate said. “I met her at the clinic.”
Elizabeth shifted the duffel bag onto its strap in order to offer her hand to Caruso. “Don’t worry, I was a nurse, not a patient.”
“Elizabeth had a few things fall through and needed a place to stay, so since I was checking out anyway, I told her she could stay with us.” Kate shot a smile up all of Caruso’s height. “Won’t that be fun?”
“Delightful,” Caruso said, seeing his dreams of a sexual rechristening of their home evaporating. “Let me get that for you.” He took the duffel bag from Elizabeth and she cracked a kink out of her back in gratitude.
“It’s so nice to meet you. Kate’s told me everything about you.”
“I didn’t know there was that much to tell.”
Driving away from the airport, they were silent. Caruso didn’t want to say anything too venturesome with Elizabeth in the backseat, overhearing. Kate was content to lean her head on his shoulder and simply be close to him. She didn’t babble like she had before—maybe that was a symptom of the addiction and this quiet was the real her. But it made Caruso feel like he was driving with a stranger. That they’d exhausted all the things people say when they first meet and hadn’t found any common ground to truly discuss, so a companionable silence was all they could agree to.
Home was three stories of gray stone and clapboard on two acres of manicured grounds that Caruso paid a landscaping crew to keep pristine, the same way he paid a cleaner to come by every two weeks and get at the grout on the tile and streaks on the glass that he didn’t want to be bothered with. Otherwise, the property was modest for the salary he was making.
They’d discussed moving into a larger house when they had kids, maybe even building a mansion to Kate’s exacting specifications. But with Kate going through what she had to go through, that thought had fallen by the wayside. The house was slightly too big for one man, just right for a couple, and had room for a third wheel.
When they pulled into the driveway and waited for the garage door to open, Elizabeth got out and took the luggage from the trunk, making herself useful by taking the bags to the front door instead of making Caruso wrestle them around the car in the cramped garage. It was the first time he and Kate had been alone since she’d gotten back.
When he turned off the motor, Kate let out a deep breath. Like she hadn’t been expecting to make it home without some terrible accident befalling her.
“Everything alright?” Caruso asked her, able to think of several reasons why she should be tense. Not many that would explain why she would relax now, though.
“I could ask you the same question. I wasn’t the best wife, was I? More of a liability. In the clinic, I used to imagine—what if the company went under because you were so worried about your stupid addict wife…”
“There’s no helping what you went through. It happens to all kinds of people. The important thing is that you got better.”
“And you don’t hold it against me? How long I spent—depriving you of a real wife?” Kate laughed unpleasantly. “I feel like a kidnapper. Like I took the woman you married and held her hostage…”
“You didn’t do anything like that. You were just sick, that’s all.” Caruso kissed her on the cheek. “You’re better now. I’ll make it easy for you to stay here. I’ll be patient… we never have to talk about it if you don’t want to.”
Kate put her hand on his lips and for a moment, Caruso thought she was silencing him before her fingers moved and felt his lips, the same way she would if she were kissing him. “Do you really want to help me? Then tell me one thing: was there anyone else while I was away? I won’t be angry, and I wouldn’t blame you either. I just need to know if I was the only one—”
“There was no one, Kate, and there won’t ever be. Only you.”
She smiled at him with a sadness that Caruso knew would take time to lift. It was reassuring, in a way. If she were totally the old her, it would be too good to be true. But her taking time to get back into the swing of things… that felt real.
“We’d better let Elizabeth in before she breaks a window.”
“She doesn’t do that, does she?” Caruso asked, mock worried, and Kate started to reassure him before she realized he was kidding.
His phone rang then. Kate gave a pleasant nod, remembering how his career had a habit of tapping him on the shoulder, and let herself out of the Jag.
“I’ll put Elizabeth in the guest room, assuming you haven’t turned it into a gym or anything.”
“That’ll be fine,” Caruso told her before putting the phone to his ear. “Caruso.”
“Mr. Caruso, so brusque. I like that in a businessman. This is Demi Moore. I was supposed to meet with you this afternoon, but I’m at your desk and you don’t seem to be here…”
Her voice surprised him. Low and husky, serious and yet lilting. Caruso found it pleasant, surprisingly warm, not the strident tones he would’ve expected from a woman turning the wheels at a billion-dollar-corporation.
He pictured her in his mind: a serious, unsmiling woman who covered any trace of femininity in glasses and a pantsuit. That was the impression he’d come by from publicity photos and online profiles. But then, it wouldn’t be the first time an executive had promoted a persona that wasn’t much like who they were in real life. Off the battlefield, she could be as different from the image she projected as he was from the invincible captain of industry he played at being.
“I got called away for a couple hours. I’m on my way back if you still have time for a meeting.”
“But now I’ve worked up at an appetite,” she said poutily. He could just about picture that pout, recognizing it from when Kate felt bratty, but it didn’t seem to go with the strong features he recalled Demi as sporting. “If you hadn’t had lunch yet, why don’t you meet me at the Butcher’s? Since this meeting is really just us getting to know each other, we can do that over a steak?”
“I was actually thinking—”
“Oh, my treat, of course. I know Sinclair isn’t as big an operation as Athens. Not much petty cash.”
Caruso smiled ruefully. She really was trying to big-dog him. He might be offended, on another day, but with Kate back in his life, back to normal, it just felt ridiculous. “I’ll head out there now.”
“Good man,” she said, with the same intonation she might call a dog a good boy. “Bring an appetite. Even when I’m not cooking for a man, I like to see that he’s well-fed.”
He pocketed his phone feeling like he’d signed up to go bungee-jumping. That voice of hers—the charm with which she chose her words—it certainly got to a man. It made him feel the woman on the other end of the line was one step away from proposing phone sex.
He knew what she really wanted, though. To make it clear that she was the boss and his days of respectful independence were over. That even if Sinclair Circuitry was his fiefdom, she was God Emperor of the Universe. Even if there were executives over her, they were old and she was young. All of them, everyone, would have to get in line with her or be blown into atoms.
Lady, I don’t want that, I don’t want to be God Emperor, I don’t want a steak dinner and I don’t know if I ever want Sinclair Circuitry if you’re going to be filming your Tiktok videos there. I just want to order a pizza and sleep with my wife, but since you’re paying, okay, do your worst. It’s your dime.