He tried harder for her than anyone he’d ever been with. Gaining a smile, a laugh, made him happy to his core.

He didn’t know when things went south. Didn’t know when she’d stopped loving him, when she gave up on their marriage. It was well before Dashiell, that he knew. Was it when they’d renovated the behemoth? Weren’t renovations a major driver in divorce cases, like Facebook and affairs? He thought he’d read that somewhere.

Or was it when the words he wrote for her dried up, and he stopped working entirely? Before he got desperate. Before he made the greatest mistake of his life.

No, he thought it was maybe before all of that when his warm and sexy wife had grown cold. Frigid. Unwilling. Distant.

The laughs had become few and far between. She’d looked at him with a mix of derision and bemusement, as if she’d woken up one morning married, and to a stranger, to boot.

He’d asked her, one very drunken night, why she’d stopped loving him. She’d laughed, harshly. “I love you more now than the day we met. That’s the problem.” And she wouldn’t say anything more.

And here they were. Five years later, parents of a dead baby, their ruined marriage strewed on the rocks, mistakes piled like a stack of ancient newspapers against the door.

He was responsible for Dashiell’s death. For Sutton’s madness. For the missed deadline, the stalking, the canceled book contract. Ethan knew this, knew it to his bones.

He’d made so many mistakes, there was no recovering from them all.

There was just one problem.

He loved Sutton to his core. He’d never loved a woman as much as he loved her. He would do anything for her. Anything.

He had to decide whether Sutton was simply hiding from him for a few days, or if she’d left for good. Problem was, if she didn’t show up by this evening, he was going to have to bring the police in to search for her, because everyone would be suspicious of him if he didn’t, and the subsequent investigation was going to rip apart their very carefully cultivated lives, and who knew what sort of roaches would scurry out of the woodwork?

If she was hiding out for a few days, all well and good. If she’d actually run, he would have to go after her. For her to disappear permanently and thoroughly would have taken planning.

Either way, Sutton was a very cunning woman. He simply had to think like her, and he’d find the path to her again.

And then it hit him.

The bank account. He hadn’t checked the bank account.

BEAUTY AND THE BEAST

Then

Ethan’s agent nudged him. “There is a woman watching you from across the room.”

Ethan glanced over, didn’t see anyone of note. Then again, he was lubed up, like a lock drenched in oil. He’d already had a few cocktails, and had plans for a few more before he passed out in his soft king bed upstairs. He liked the rooms in the hotel; they were clean and spacious and pleasant, not at all threatening, unlike some of the aggressively modern places his publisher put him up at, thinking the extravagant price tag was a justifiable expense to keep their cash cow happy.