Seventeen seconds.
That was the length of the voicemail Linnea Montclair found on her husband's phone — saved, not deleted, played back more than once. Seventeen seconds of a low, careful tenderness in Everett's voice. The voice he used to have for her. Meant, now, for a woman named Lana Sorrel.
He'd listened to it downstairs. Then he'd come up and scrambled eggs with chives, and asked how the foundation dinner had gone, and she'd realized she couldn't remember the last time he'd spoken to her that softly.
That was the part that made her sick. Not the affair.
The ease of it — the way a man could carry a secret that size and still ask about the eggs.
For eight years, Linnea made his life seamless. She ran his foundation, hosted his dinners, wrote every place card by hand, and let her own name go quiet so his could get louder.
She doesn't scream. She keeps her hands still at her sides, tells him she heard it, and calls a divorce attorney in the morning.
But a man who whispers to someone else at his own wife's dinner doesn't get to keep her. And a year from now, when Everett wants to come home, he'll find a woman who has stopped making herself small — and he'll have to earn back every one of the seventeen seconds he gave away.
A second-chance billionaire romance. Betrayal, a wife who reclaims herself, grovel, and a hard-won reconciliation. Open door.
