LEONARD WAS IN BED READING WHEN HE HEARD THE DOOR chime. He glanced at the clock on the nightstand. Eleven. He heard his wife’s footsteps stomping up the stairs, and she burst into the bedroom and strode to the foot of the bed. Her eyes blazed and she pointed a red manicured finger at him.
“I don’t know how you can sleep at night,” she began.
He looked up from his book. “What do you mean?”
“Your policies. People are dying because of your greed.”
He felt his face grow hot. “What the hell are you talking about?”
“I was just at the hospital visiting my mom and saw Sunny, the little girl I told you about. Her life could be saved by a new treatment, but she’s going to die because your company says it’s too experimental. Her family has been paying huge premiums for months to get the best coverage and still your bean counters turned them down.”
He shook his head. “How dare you come in here and lecture me. You have no idea what goes into that decision making or if that treatment would even work. You want to go out and start being the breadwinner around here? When you stop spending my money, you can criticize me. In the meantime, shut the hell up.”
Patrice just stood there, an ugly vein pulsating in her temple. Her mother’s illness necessitated daily treatments for two-week windows with three-week breaks in between. Patrice went every day, leaving the children in the care of the nanny, and over the course of the long days at the hospital, she was getting to know the other patients. She’d come home at night and bore him with their stories of crippling debt and marginalized care as they had pled with their insurance companies to pay their bills. Sunny’s family in particular had really gotten under her skin. The child was seven, just a little younger than their own daughters, and had been battling a blood cancer for over a year. Her prognosis wasn’t good, but that wasn’t his problem. Patrice had no right to speak to him like this. He turned off the lamp and plunged the room into darkness. Let her stumble to the bathroom in the pitch black.
“You’ll be sorry,” she shot back. “Just wait.”
The only thing he was sorry about was that she wasn’t the one needing treatment.
Leonard’s relationship with Patrice hadn’t always been adversarial. In the beginning, she had adored him, even called him her soul mate. They’d met when they were both working at Jefferson Health Care. He’d joined the management training program when his plans for law school fell through, and she was the administrative assistant to the president of the company. They started dating and within six months had moved in together. She was hot and fun back then, and Leonard figured her proximity to the top couldn’t hurt his career. Her putting in a good word for him had helped him get his first promotion.
After a couple of years, he decided it was time to become a family man, so he proposed. By then he’d been promoted to vice president and he told Patrice she should quit her job. He wanted the whole package—the stay-at-home wife who would cook and clean and cater to his every need. But what she wanted was to write fiction. In the beginning, he encouraged her—not because he thought she was good at it, but because he was trying to seem like a good husband. He thought she’d realize after a while that she had no talent and give up. But Patrice was tenacious, determined to make it into print. So he paid for her to take some classes, hoping the teacher would be honest about her mediocre ability, but that didn’t happen either. She stuck with it for the first few years, and he had to grudgingly admit that her writing improved. But Leonard didn’t want a wife who would lock herself away for hours at a time pecking at a keyboard, trying to write the great American novel. He wanted someone who would support his dreams, his goals. He was rising to the top and he needed a wife to take care of the rest. So he pointed out the slim odds that she’d ever make it and began to pressure her to get pregnant. Once the twins came along, it was easy to get her to put away her fantasies of becoming a published novelist and focus instead on him and the girls.
At first it went well. She enjoyed all the perks that his new position as senior VP of marketing afforded them. It wasn’t enough for Leonard, though. He had his eye on the top job and there was nothing that was going to stand in his way. He wasn’t above climbing over the backs of his colleagues and if he had to ruin a few careers on the way, so be it. When Leonard finally became CEO five years ago, everything changed. He gave up his gym membership and let his diet go to hell. What was he in training for anyway? He had the wife and the job. He was rich and powerful and could have anyone he wanted. He didn’t need to punish himself with exercise and diet anymore.
He didn’t bother trying to hide his indiscretions from Patrice; in fact, it amused him to see her sneaking looks at the texts on his phone. He stopped initiating sex and waited to see how long it would take for her to care. After a few months, she began to reach out to him again and he’d go along unenthusiastically. He loved keeping her off balance. But in recent years, she’d made it clear to him that she no longer cared, and in fact, had no interest in spending time with him, in or out of bed. They went through the motions for the sake of the children, and even though she’d broached the subject of divorce with him, he’d told her that it was off the table. He wasn’t going to have his children grow up in a broken home the way he had. She didn’t have it so bad after all. He worked his ass off and she had every luxury money could buy. Was it too much to ask that she show him a little respect?