He Made Us His Secret, So We Disappeared novel · Chapter 12 of 24

Chapter 12: Wife and Son

By ten the next morning, forty people on Chancery Lane had read the email.

I could tell the moment we stepped out of the lift onto the London office floor.

Conversations stopped. A woman by the printer dropped her coffee stirrer in the bin and did not look away.

Marcello walked in front of me, and then he stopped.

He turned around.

"Naomi."

"I'm here."

"You don't have to come in."

"I know."

"Do you want to stay?"

I looked at the faces. Associates, assistants, two senior partners. A man I had trained on a merger six years ago, who had never learned that I was Marcello's wife.

I thought of Miles in Lucia's garden that morning, with the key ring from Chiara sitting on the hall table where I had put it.

"I'm staying," I said. "Not for you."

"Understood."

"I'm staying because Miles needs to hear that his father said it out loud."

Marcello turned back to the room.

"Everyone, a moment, please."

The floor went completely silent.

He stood in the middle of forty people with his hands at his sides, and I watched him decide to do the one thing he had avoided for eight years.

"An email went out last night," he said. "Most of you have read it. It is partly true."

Nobody coughed.

"I have a wife."

He looked at me.

"Her name is Naomi Hargrove. We were married in this city, in a registry office a mile from here, eight years ago. She is a better lawyer than I am."

A phone lifted in the third row.

I saw it.

So did he.

He did not stop.

"We have a son. His name is Miles. He is seven. He built a model of the water cycle that took first place at his school, and I was not there."

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