Sometimes, to find the truth, you have to craft a lie. I had one weekend to determine if my fiancé’s affection was genuine or a calculated gamble. I just needed the right bait to catch him.
The kitchen was too clean again.
I sat at the long oak table with a plate of roasted chicken and a glass of pinot, the overhead light catching the edge of the silverware, which I had polished out of habit, not necessity. Outside the window, the maples were turning, and I realized I had not spoken a word aloud since I locked the office that afternoon.
A senior partner at a firm that paid me more than I had ever imagined earning, living in a four-bedroom house I had bought entirely on my own.
And on most nights, this was dinner.
I had not always lived this way.
My second husband left with most of my savings and a note that said he needed to “find himself.”
After that, I stopped looking.
Until Richard.
I met him six months ago at a charity gala for the children’s hospital. I had been standing near the bar, trying to remember if I had locked my car, when a tall man in a charcoal suit leaned in and said, “You look like a woman who already regrets agreeing to come tonight.”
“That obvious?”
“Only to someone who feels the same way,” he said, and offered his hand.
“Richard.”
He was 55, silver at the temples. The kind of man who pulled out chairs without making a show of it and remembered the next morning that I took my coffee with one sugar and a splash of cream.
For six months, he was patient. He never pushed.
He brought soup when I had the flu and sent flowers to my office on a random Tuesday, just because.
When he proposed on the back porch in September, I said yes before I had time to overthink it.
And then, slowly, I began to overthink it.
It was the small things. The way he ran his hand along the granite countertop one morning and said, “You really have built something beautiful here, Maggie. It would be a shame for anyone to disturb it.”
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