Too Late, Don Russo: His Pregnant Wife Signed First novel · Chapter 3 of 24

Chapter 3: The Wrong Town

Don stands up at the board breakfast and cannot say the speech, reads her signature, and realises he does not know the name of her grandmother's town.

Don's POV

The last guest left at half past one.

I went up to my study to be alone with what I had done.

The desk lamp was still on.

The papers were where I had left them, but the ring lay on top.

Her ring. The plain gold band I had put on her finger at the courthouse because she said she didn't want a show.

Under my signature, on the line I had left empty, there was a second one.

Betsy Penberthy Russo.

She had struck out Russo with one straight line.

She had used the gold pen she gave me for my thirtieth birthday.

I stood there holding it until the cap left a dent in my palm.

She had signed in the time it takes to walk down a hallway.

No scene, no call, no lawyer, no tears I could find.

I had been told she was miserable. I had been told she'd been waiting for me to let her go.

I had believed it.

Still, some part of me had expected her to come downstairs and say, Don, wait.

She hadn't.

I looked at the sticky note I had stuck on the corner of the page.

Tell her after the gala. Keep it quiet.

That was the last decent thing I had planned.

"She left," Valeria said from the door.

She stood in her red dress with her shoes in her hand.

"Maybe it's easier this way, Don."

"Where did she go?"

"I don't know. She took a taxi, I think. She looked fine."

She came across the room and put her hand on my arm.

I let her.

I had been letting her do that all night. I had even let her turn my face away from the balcony.

I had seen Betsy standing up there in the pale dress, one hand on the rail.

I had looked at my wife for a moment.

Then I'd looked away because I was a coward and the music was loud.

At eight o'clock I stood at the head of the boardroom table with a single page in my hand.

There were four cameras behind the glass wall.

I had not asked for cameras.

Marco had put his folder at my elbow with his easy grin.

"Short and sweet," he said quietly. "Mrs. Russo and I have mutually agreed to part. Thank the board. Sit down."

I read the first line.

Mrs. Russo and I.

Her name was not even on the page.

I looked at it until the words stopped being words.

The anchor outside the glass was waiting, the whole room was waiting, and I heard myself say, "There will be no announcement."

Someone coughed.

"This meeting is over."

I walked through the cameras and into the elevator, and nobody stopped me.

Marco caught me in the garage, one hand on my sleeve.

"What the hell, Don? The press is in the building. We planned this."

"I never planned the press."

"The board needed to hear it from you."

"I wrote 'keep it quiet,' Marco."

"You wrote 'after the gala.' It's after the gala." He laughed and lowered his voice. "Look. She signed in ten minutes. She wanted out as badly as you said."

I hadn't said that.

Somebody had said it to me, and I'd said it back to myself so many times it sounded like mine.

"Have legal send her a settlement," I told him. "Be generous. Double whatever you think."

"Of course."

"No conditions. She gets it and she's free."

"Of course," said Marco.

He didn't meet my eyes.

I let that go too.

I called her number from the car.

It rang through to a voicemail she had never recorded.

I called again.

Then I called nine more times, parked outside the Greenwich house with the engine running.

Eleven.

Each time it went to the same silence.

I got out and walked into the house and went upstairs to her room.

It had always been her room. I'd kept the master bedroom to myself for working late.

I had never counted the nights I slept in there alone.

The closet was neat.

Her clothes hung in a straight line, gray and cream and pale blue, every one of them the same cut.

Her winter coat still hung at the end of the rail.

She had walked out into the cold in her gown.

On the dresser was a photograph in a small frame.

An old woman in a gray cardigan, laughing at the camera on a pier.

On the back, in blue ink, a child's handwriting said: Grandma Bea, the ferry.

I turned it over, looking for an address.

There was no address.

I called Marco, then my own assistant, then the housekeeper who had worked in my house for six years.

Nobody knew where Betsy's grandmother lived.

I had been married to Betsy for three years.

I was her husband, and I did not know the name of the town.

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