He Called Our Son a Curse, Now I Own His Company novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: The Gap in the Door
Joanna carries her son's drawing to Landon's office at night, hears him call Max a curse, records it, walks out, and goes home to the yellow-tabbed pages she has always signed without reading.
At 9:40 on a Tuesday night, the guard at my husband's tower signed me in and told me to go right up.
I had my son's drawing rolled in my hand.
He is six, and he had spent the whole evening on it at the kitchen table in his red headphones.
It was a ferry with three people on the deck, and he had colored the middle one blue because blue was his father's color.
He would not go to bed until it was on his father's desk.
I had texted my husband to ask if I could bring it by.
He wrote back: Working late on the quarter. My chief of staff is here too, she can let you in.
Then she texted me herself: Go up! He's been grumpy all day, your boy's boat will fix him. I'll leave the door open.
I remember smiling at that.
Camille Doyle had run my husband's office for three years, and she had been so kind to me about Max.
She had learned his favorite ferry route and sent him a little wooden boat for his birthday.
The thirty-first floor was dark except for one line of light down the hall.
It came from Landon's door, which stood open about a hand's width.
I heard Camille laugh, low and breathless.
Then I heard something hit the mahogany desk, and a pen rolled off and landed on the carpet.
I stood there in my white blazer with a six-year-old's drawing and looked through the gap.
My husband had Camille back against the edge of his desk.
Her skirt was pushed up around her hips, and his hands were on her thighs.
Her head was tipped back and her eyes were shut.
"God, Camille," Landon said, and his voice was rough. "Nobody else has ever made me feel like this."
"Not even Joanna?" Camille asked.
My stomach went cold, and I could not make my feet move.
"Then why do you drive home to her every night?" Camille said.
"Because of the boy," Landon said.
He said it flat and hard.
"She's his mother. Every time I look at her, there he is. Do you know what it's like, having a son like that? He can't even say good night to me properly."
"Baby," Camille said softly.
"He's a curse," Landon said. "That's all he is. I got cursed."
I had been holding the drawing so tightly that the paper had creased in my fist.
I could hear Max at the table that evening, humming to himself, saying Blue is Daddy over and over.
I took out my phone with my thumb steady, because it was not shaking at all.
I opened the camera, held it to the gap in the door and pressed record.
The screen showed the desk, the light on the wall, the two of them and the clock above the bookshelf that said 9:47.
I filmed Landon pulling her toward him again.
I filmed Camille say, "Say it to her face one day," and Landon laugh and say, "When I'm ready."
I filmed until I had four minutes.
Then I stopped, and I did not push the door.
I did not scream at them or cry or throw the drawing at his head.
If I walked in, he would apologize with tears in his eyes and Camille would say it was a mistake.
By morning I would be the hysterical wife who had misunderstood a stressful night.
I wanted them to have no idea.
So I stepped out.
I put the drawing back in its cardboard tube, and I walked down the hall in the dark.
At the elevator I forwarded the video to my own email, then to my sister's address, and then to a folder I made up on the spot named Max's School.
The guard looked up when I came through the lobby.
"That was quick, Mrs. Reed."
"I changed my mind about disturbing him," I said. "Could you write down the time I left?"
He gave me a puzzled look and wrote it on the log: 9:56.
At home, our sitter was asleep on the couch, and Max's room was dark except for the little ferry lamp by his bed.
I stood over him a long time.
He slept with one hand curled around the strap of his headphones.
I went to the kitchen and found the stack of paper on the counter where Landon always left it.
It was the quarterly packet from his legal department, an inch thick, with yellow tabs sticking out of the side.
Landon's text from that afternoon was still on my screen: Pages are on the counter. Just Max's sections, yellow tabs, sign them in the morning.
I had signed those tabs every three months for six years.
I had never asked one question about them.
I pulled out the top page and, for the first time, I began to read.
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