The CEO's Unwanted Wife novel · Chapter 2 of 24

Chapter 2: Her Side of the Closet

Vanessa's garment bags fill Linnea's closet; she hides her passport and notebooks with her friend, and her husband walks into her lab.

The next morning there were six garment bags hanging in my closet, and none of them were mine.

They hung on the left side, where my winter coats had been.

The housekeeper stood in the doorway holding two more, and she would not meet my eyes.

"Mr. Merrow's office sent them at seven," she said. "Miss Endicott needs somewhere to keep her things for the fundraiser fittings."

"Where are my coats?"

"In the guest room, ma'am. I'm sorry. I was only told to make space."

I unzipped the nearest bag.

Cream silk. Camel wool. A gown the color of champagne with a tag that said Endicott.

It was the fourth thing of mine she had taken in a year.

First my seat at the head of the charity table. Then my name on the foundation's thank-you cards. Then the reading chair in Dalton's study.

Now my closet.

Yesterday morning I would have said nothing and gone to the lab early.

Today I zipped the bag closed, smoothed it flat, and said, "Please hang them neatly. She'll want them pressed."

The housekeeper blinked at me.

"Yes, ma'am."

I took my suitcase out of the guest room and packed only what I needed for an ordinary day.

Then I went to my mother's sewing box on the shelf and slid out the false bottom.

My passport was there, soft at the corners. It had my maiden name in it, because I had renewed it in secret last winter.

Under it lay a folded paper, my one-way ticket to Zurich, Saturday night.

I put both inside my gym bag between a towel and my lab notebooks.

Nobody had ever looked inside that bag in four years, because nobody in that house had ever asked what I did all day.

The driver was waiting at the curb.

"The train, thank you," I said, and walked to the station.

The lab was on the third floor of the old science building on the river, and it smelled like warm plastic and coffee.

Becca Hallam was already at her bench with her curly red hair stuffed under a cap.

She took one look at my face and pulled me into the supply closet.

"You did it," she said.

"He signed it yesterday."

"He signed it?" Her voice went up a whole octave. "Without reading? Linnea, I love you, but he is going to find out and he is going to be a nightmare."

"Not for five days."

"Five days."

"Zurich called. I'm going Saturday night."

Becca screamed into her own sleeve.

Then she grabbed me by both shoulders and shook me, laughing.

"I will drive you to the airport myself. I'll carry your bags. I'll fight security."

"Becca. I need you to keep these."

I held out the gym bag.

She understood at once and her face got serious.

"Passport. Notebooks. And the drive with every file from the Zurich application, in case he cuts my email."

"He wouldn't."

"He doesn't know your face," Becca said. "That's what makes me nervous. Four years, and I've never seen him walk you to a door."

She took the bag and tucked it into the bottom of her locker behind a stack of old lab coats.

Then she turned the key and hung it on a string inside her shirt.

"Done. If he asks, I'm just a girl with a lot of towels."

I laughed, and it came out wet.

"Don't cry yet," she said. "We have four days of work. The centrifuge tubes won't label themselves."

We went back to the bench.

The morning went by. I thawed samples. I logged numbers. Becca sang under her breath and got the words wrong.

At ten past eleven the door at the end of the room opened.

It never opened that way. People knocked.

The whole room went quiet, a graduate student froze with a pipette in the air, and Becca's song stopped in the middle of a word.

I looked up from the microscope.

Dalton stood in the doorway in a dark suit with the top button of his collar open.

He had never been in this building. In four years he had never asked to see where I worked.

His driver waited behind him in the hall.

His eyes moved across the benches and the freezers and the whiteboard covered in my handwriting.

Then they found me and stayed.

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