I was making dinner when a police officer knocked on my door. “Sir, your wife was in a serious car acc:ident an hour ago.” My heart stopped. “No, that’s impossible—she’s upstairs asleep.” The officer frowned, and I led him to our bedroom. His hand went to his side. “Sir,” he whispered, “please step back. That’s not who you think it is.”

Marco Christian stood at the floor-to-ceiling windows of his corner office, the Seattle skyline shimmering through a curtain of afternoon rain. At forty-two, he commanded respect and fear in equal measure. His steel-gray eyes, the color of a winter sky, had witnessed countless business deals where he’d crushed competitors without so much as a flinch. Marco Christian didn’t just win; he obliterated.

“Sir, your wife called about dinner tonight,” his secretary’s voice announced through the intercom, crisp and impersonal.

Marco’s jaw tightened, an almost imperceptible clenching of muscle. Jenny. His wife of sixteen years and the mother of their fourteen-year-old daughter, Casey. The woman who had once looked at him with an adoration that felt like sunshine now scheduled dinners with him like a business appointment.