My Foolish Husband's Regret Comes Late novel · Chapter 2 of 24

Chapter 2: The Ring in the Cake

Lydia sets the birthday cake in front of Preston, pushes her wedding ring into the icing before a hundred guests and walks out, then learns she is locked out of the Lowell Grand with her father's folder still in her desk.

I walked down the center aisle between the round tables with the cake held in front of me.

Heads turned one table at a time.

The laughing stopped about halfway down, when a woman near the stage saw the box and said my name.

Preston's smile stayed on his face for two more steps before it understood.

"Lyd?" he said into the microphone.

His mother stood beside him in a cream suit, with pearls in her ears and her hand already on his sleeve.

At his other side, in the chair that should have been mine, sat Gwen in her silver dress.

She half rose when she saw me and put a hand to her chest.

"Lydia, thank goodness," she said. "I tried to call you."

She had not called me.

Past her, at the nearest table, sat the cousin who had texted me, and six more of my twenty guests with their napkins in their laps.

Nobody looked away fast enough.

I stopped at the head table and set the cake box down in front of my husband.

"Happy birthday," I said.

The microphone caught it, and it went out to the whole ballroom.

"I baked it at five this morning. Lemon, because you like lemon."

"Lydia, darling." Helen took the microphone from his hand as easily as she took everything. "There was a mix-up with the date. The foundation moved the party forward and we simply assumed you knew."

"I planned a dinner for twenty at a restaurant on Rush Street," I said. "I sat there for forty minutes."

"Then someone should have told you."

"Someone did. Gwen texted me at four that everything was set."

Gwen's mouth opened and shut.

"Also at six o'clock, your family office froze every card I own," I said. "The manager gave me ten minutes to pay fourteen thousand six hundred dollars or be walked out by security."

I looked at my husband.

"I paid it myself."

Preston's face had gone pink.

"Frozen?" he said. "Mom, what is she talking about?"

"The annual review, sweetheart," Helen said. "You signed it this morning with the rest of the stack. It's routine."

"I didn't know it froze Lydia's."

"Of course not. Gwen should have warned her."

Gwen said she was so sorry, so, so sorry, she had been run off her feet.

I watched my husband accept that.

He did it with a little nod, and his shoulders came down.

He had not once asked me whether I was all right.

I turned the ring on my finger.

It was a plain gold band, and it came off easier than I thought it would.

I pushed it down into the top of the cake, into the soft yellow icing, beside the gold candle in the shape of thirty-five.

"Lyd," Preston said, and his voice dropped. "Don't do this here."

"You told a hundred people I was too busy to come to your party."

I said it loudly enough for the hundred to hear.

"I'm not busy anymore."

Three phones at the front table were up and recording.

Helen watched the phones, and she smiled for them.

I walked back up the aisle without hurrying, and nobody stopped me.

He caught me in the lobby, under the big staircase, with his tie crooked.

"Lyd. Come on. You're upset, I get it, you should be."

He reached for my elbow, and I stepped back from it.

"Where are you even going to go?" he said. "Everything is in the family accounts. You don't have a dollar."

"I have friends."

"Come home and sleep. We'll sort out the cards in the morning. I promise it's a clerical thing."

He said it in his easy voice, the one for bad news that wasn't his.

"You signed a paper that cut off your wife and you didn't read it," I said. "That's the clerical thing."

"I didn't know."

"I know you didn't."

We had been married four years, and I believed him.

I went out through the revolving door into the cold, and he did not follow.

My phone buzzed on the sidewalk.

It was the Lowell Hospitality HR system, in capital letters.

Your access to the Lowell Grand will be deactivated at midnight. Personal belongings will be boxed by security at 8 a.m.

I stood under the awning with the wind in my hair.

In the bottom drawer of my desk upstairs, under the spare shoes, was a manila folder.

It was the only thing in that building that was mine.

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