My Husband Can Hear Every Unspoken Thought Of Mine novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: The Cake
Ansel leaves the cake cutting for his best friend's girlfriend's thumb, and Leona cuts the cake alone; at 4 a.m. he answers a thought she never said out loud.
My husband left our wedding reception in the middle of the cake cutting, and three hundred guests watched him go.
I was holding the knife.
His hand was over mine on the handle, and the photographer had just said, "On three."
His phone rang on two.
The ringtone was "Eye of the Tiger."
Barrett Collier had set it as a joke years ago, and Ansel had never figured out how to change it.
Ansel looked at the screen, then at me, then at the screen again.
"It's Barrett," he said.
"Barrett is your best man," I said. "He's standing right there."
He was.
Barrett was at the dessert table, five yards from us, with a phone at one ear and his free hand waving at Ansel.
"Melody cut her thumb on the champagne bottle," Ansel said. "It's bleeding, Leona."
"There are four doctors at table nine."
"They're cardiologists."
"It's a thumb."
"It's a thumb that won't stop, and Barrett says she won't let anyone but me look at it."
I have one rule about asking for things.
I ask once.
If the answer is no, or later, or a face that says twenty minutes, I never ask again, and I never wait around for a second chance.
"Stay," I said.
Ansel's thumb was already on the green button.
"Twenty minutes," he said. "I promise."
He kissed my cheek, pulled the black leather bag out from under the head table, and walked toward the ladies' lounge.
Barrett jogged after him, still talking into his phone.
A guest at the next table had filmed all of it.
She held her screen up for her husband, and I could read the caption from where I stood: "Doc duty calls on his wedding day!"
The knife was still in my hand, and the cake was still whole.
Three hundred people were looking at the bride.
I should say how I got there, in one breath.
Two months earlier, my grandmother Margaret Thackeray had lined up three heirs from our families' allies at one dinner and told me to pick a husband or lose my seat at Thackeray Holdings.
I picked the doctor, because he was the only one who hadn't spent the dinner pitching himself.
The other two had talked about their yachts.
Ansel had slid the lemon tart in front of me before I'd opened the dessert menu, and I'd figured he read my face.
I lifted the knife.
"I'll do it myself," I told the photographer. "Take the picture."
So I cut the cake alone.
The first slice fell over on its side, and the photographer took the picture anyway.
When the band started our song, there was nobody to dance it with.
My grandmother crossed the floor with her cane hooked over her arm and took my hand.
"He'll be back in twenty minutes," Margaret said.
"He said that."
"Leona."
"I asked him once, Grandma."
She looked at me for a while.
"Your grandfather missed three of my birthdays," she said. "I stopped counting at the fourth."
She was a very bad comfort, and she was the only one on the floor.
Twenty minutes became an hour, and an hour became the end of the band's last set.
At midnight I wrapped a slice of lemon tart in a napkin and rode the elevator up to the honeymoon suite alone.
So I stopped waiting for him.
I sat on the edge of the bed in my dress and thought it as loudly as I could, since I had nobody to say it to.
I won't wait up.
I won't ask again.
He kissed my cheek and smelled like hand sanitizer and expensive failure.
In the morning I'll be so polite to him that he'll feel like a guest in his own marriage.
Then I turned off the lamp, lay on my side facing the wall, and thought: I am asleep.
The door opened at ten past four.
I heard the bag go down on the carpet, then one shoe, then the other, and the mattress dipped behind me.
I kept my eyes shut.
"I'm sorry about the cake," Ansel said.
I didn't answer, because I was asleep.
"You're not asleep," he said. "You haven't been asleep since midnight."
His voice was low and very tired.
"You thought, I won't wait up. Then you thought it again, louder, with a swear word in the middle."
I stopped breathing.
"Also, the hand sanitizer is hospital grade," he said. "It is not the same as smelling like expensive failure. That one stung."
I opened my eyes.
Ansel sat on the edge of the bed in his wrinkled tuxedo shirt, looking right at me.
I had not said any of it out loud.
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