My Husband Played Stranger, So I Took Off the Ring novel · Chapter 2 of 24

Chapter 2: Say It Quieter

Nate drags her into a stairwell to hide from his father's driver and admits Maisie is his half-sister. Ends on Maisie standing in the doorway.

Nate took my elbow before Maisie finished her question.

"Excuse us a second," he said. "Roxana and I need to go over her cousin's parking pass."

"What parking pass?" Bridie said.

He was already steering me out the door.

I let him, because I wanted to see how far he would go.

He took me down the hall, past a boy carrying a mini fridge and a mother crying over a poster.

Then he shoved open the door to the back stairwell.

It swung shut behind us with a heavy clunk.

The stairwell smelled like floor wax and old paint.

Nate let go of my arm.

"You can't say that out here," he said.

His voice was low and fast.

It was the voice from the night of our fight, and I hated how fast my heart went.

"Say what? That I'm divorcing you?"

"Roxy."

"You shook my hand."

"I know."

"You said 'Hi, Nate.' To me. Like I was a girl who stopped to ask you for directions."

He rubbed the scar in his eyebrow, which he does when he has nothing good to say.

"There's a man in the quad," he said. "Gray car, parked by the fountain. He's my father's driver."

I looked at him.

"Your father."

"Lionel. He's a trustee of this university. His name is on the library." Nate swallowed. "He sent the driver to follow me today. He thinks I'm only here for Maisie."

"Who is Maisie?"

"My sister."

"You don't have a sister."

"Half sister. My father remarried when I was five." He said it quickly, like he'd rehearsed it in a mirror. "She's nineteen. She's the only person in that house who ever packed me a lunch."

"You have never said her name to me."

"No."

"In three years."

"No."

"Why?"

"Because if I told you about her, I'd have to tell you about him."

I laughed, and the sound bounced off the concrete.

"You told me your father was dead."

"I told you I didn't have a father," Nate said. "That's different. I didn't lie."

"That is the most lawyerly thing you have ever said to me."

He winced, because I was right.

I stepped closer and made myself look at him.

He had gotten thinner.

There were shadows under his eyes, and a line between his eyebrows that hadn't been there at twenty-one.

"You sent me dozens of texts about nothing," I said. "'Business trip.' 'Working late.' 'Won't be home this week.' You didn't come home for two years. And now I walk into a dorm and you are making a bed for a girl you call your sister."

"She really is my sister."

"I believe that now," I said. "That's not the part I'm angry about."

His throat moved.

"What's the part?"

"The part where you looked right at me and decided I was a person you could pretend not to know."

"I had two seconds."

"You had two years."

He didn't answer.

Somewhere above us a door banged and a crowd of kids laughed.

When it faded, Nate said, "Maisie can't know yet. If she knows, he'll know, because he reads everything she sends. Her mail, her texts, her school portal."

"That's disgusting."

"That's my father."

"Then why do you work for him?"

I saw it land.

He hadn't told me that, either.

I only knew because it had been in the last text he sent me in June, between a lunch menu and a photo of a bridge.

[Hargrove Group offered me a position. I took it.]

I had read it forty times.

"It's complicated," Nate said.

"I have a pen in my bag. I can make it simple."

I pulled the folded papers from my backpack.

They were the divorce forms I'd printed at the library in April, back when I thought I'd mail them and never see his face again.

I held them out.

Nate looked at the papers, and I watched something crack across his face.

He didn't take them.

"Not today," he said.

"You said you didn't want to fight."

"I don't. I'm asking you for until Friday."

"Why Friday?"

"The trustees give a dinner for the new students. My father will be there. I'll be there." He looked at the papers, and then at me. "Give me until Friday, and I'll sign anything you hand me."

"Then why not sign right now?"

"Because I want to do something first."

"What?"

"I can't tell you."

I folded the papers back up.

My hands were shaking, and I hated that, too.

"You have no idea how much I wanted you to fight me," I said. "In the last two years. Even once."

"Roxy."

"Instead you gave me a man who bends down in a dorm and tucks in the corners."

The door at the top of the stairs opened.

We both looked up.

Maisie stood there with her hand on the frame.

Her curls were flattened on one side from the door, and she had my ring in her fist.

She came down two steps, and the gap in her teeth showed when her mouth opened.

"You told her about me," she said to Nate, "and you never told me about her?"

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