Wives and Girlfriends of Kingpins

# CHAPTER 4: BUCKHEAD BLINDNESS Camden Mercer was in her kitchen at seven in the morning. Big kitchen. White marble. Cold surfaces.

Professional-grade appliances that saw more catering staff than family meals. It was a space designed for envy, a stage set for the kind of woman who never let a hair fall out of place. Camden was that woman. She was currently arranging peonies in a crystal vase.

Massive, heavy-headed things in shades of blush and cream. She did not like peonies. They smelled like a funeral home and dropped petals everywhere, leaving a sticky, pollen-stained mess on the marble if you didn't catch them in time. But peonies were what the Buckhead brunch wives expected.

Peonies were the cost of entry for a certain kind of social standing. In her world, flowers weren't decor; they were a status report. Brunch wives talked, and talking wives noticed things like wilted stems or a dusty baseboard and called it a decline. In this neighborhood, a decline was a death sentence.

You didn't just lose friends; you lost your spot in the ecosystem. She was dressed for a brunch that didn't start for another eleven hours. White linen dress, perfectly steamed. Gold sandals that cost more than a month’s worth of groceries for a normal family.

Hair flat-ironed into a sheet of dark glass and pinned back with a gold clip. Makeup done to the point of poreless perfection. She looked like she was ready to host a magazine spread for Architectural Digest. She looked like a woman whose only problem was deciding which vintage of champagne to serve with the poached eggs.

That was the trick to being a wife in a house like hers. You kept moving. You kept your back straight while the foundation cracked under your feet. You made sure the flowers were fresh even when the air in the room felt like it was running out of oxygen.

If you stopped, you started thinking. If you started thinking, you started feeling. Feelings were for people who didn't have a legacy to protect. The coffee on the island had gone cold.

A thin, oily film had formed on the surface. She hadn't touched it. She just stared at it, the dark liquid reflecting the recessed lighting of a kitchen that people on the internet called goals. Camden called it expensive evidence.

Everything in the house—the sub-zero fridge, the custom cabinetry, the hand-poured plaster walls—had been paid for by something ugly. Every mortgage payment was a receipt for a secret. Every renovation was a way to bury a mistake. The children came down at seven-fifteen.

Eli came first, his footsteps heavy and deliberate. He was nine and already had his father’s watchfulness, that way of scanning a room before he entered it, looking for the mood before he looked for the milk. He didn't run. He didn't shout.

He moved like a small man with a heavy burden. Chloe was seven and still believed the world was a safe place built for her amusement. She dragged her stuffed rabbit by one ear, her hair a bird’s nest of curls. Camden packed their lunches without looking at the counter.

It was a sequence of movements she could perform in her sleep. Turkey and cheese on sprouted grain. Organic apple slices. Juice boxes with the straws taped to the side.

No crust on Chloe’s. Extra pickles on Eli’s.

"Mom, you look pretty," Chloe said, climbing onto a velvet-upholstered barstool. The fabric was cream. Chloe had chocolate on her thumb. Camden didn't flinch.

She just reached for a damp cloth and wiped the child’s hand before the stain could set.

"Thank you, baby." Camden didn't look up from the sandwich she was wrapping. "Where you going?"

"Brunch."

"With who?"

"Ladies from the committee." Chloe accepted that. Brunch was a word that meant 'Mom is busy' in her world. It meant charity auctions and polite lies.

Eli did not accept it. He stood at the edge of the island, his eyes fixed on his mother’s hands. He was looking for the tell. He was looking for the tremor.

She kept them steady. That was the most important part of the performance. If the hands shook, the lie collapsed. If the voice trembled, the children smelled the fear.

She kept her face soft, a mask of maternal calm that she had spent six years perfecting.

"Eat your breakfast, Eli," she said. Her voice was cool, level, the kind of voice that didn't leave room for questions. "Your bus is in ten minutes."

"Dad didn't come home last night," Eli said. It wasn't a question. It was an observation of fact. "He had a late meeting in Midtown," Camden replied.

She didn't miss a beat.

"You know how Kaelen is when he wants something finished." Mentioning Kaelen Valecourt usually shut down the conversation. Even the children knew that name meant work. It meant money.

It meant silence. Eli chewed his toast slowly, his eyes never leaving hers. He didn't believe her, but he knew the rules. You didn't push the adults when they were wearing their "everything is fine" faces.

When the kids finally left for school, the house fell into a silence so heavy it felt like a physical weight. Camden didn't sit down. She went upstairs to lay out Soren’s suit. It was a ritual of submission disguised as care.

Navy wool. A crisp white shirt. The silk tie he liked because it made him look like a man who didn't have to shout to be heard. She smoothed the fabric over the duvet, her fingers catching on the fine weave.

She did it without thinking, muscle memory from a thousand mornings of being the perfect partner to a man who was increasingly becoming a stranger. She looked at the empty side of the bed. It hadn't been slept in. The silk pillowcase was smooth, cold.

She wondered if he was at the Midtown condo. Or if he was somewhere much worse. On her way back down, she stopped at the laundry room. The air in the small room was thick with the scent of high-end detergent, a chemical sweetness that tried to mask the reality of what she was doing.

Soren's shirt from last night was in the basket. He had dumped it there at three in the morning before leaving again. She had washed it herself. Twice.

The washing machine was a high-tech marvel, but even it struggled with certain secrets. The pink on the cuffs—the faint, stubborn reminder of a spray of blood—was finally gone. She pulled it out and held it up to the LED light. Nothing.

It was clean. It was a lie in fabric form. She folded it and slid it into a donation bag she kept in the corner. She wouldn't let him wear it again.

Every time she saw that shirt, she saw the way he had looked when he walked through the door at midnight, his eyes wide and his hands trembling. That was the second shirt this month. The first one had been ruined by grease and something that smelled like old copper. This one was ruined by the truth.

The garage door groaned open at eight-fifteen. Camden checked the clock on the microwave. Soren was never home at this hour. He left the house at six and didn't return until the sun was down.

Sometimes seven, sometimes eight, sometimes later if the 'business' required it. He didn't come back before nine in the morning unless the world was ending. Or unless he had failed so spectacularly there was nowhere else to go. She heard his footsteps in the mudroom.

They weren't his usual confident strides. They were heavy, frantic, the sound of a man running out of places to hide. The door to the kitchen swung open, and the silence of the house shattered. He looked like a wreck.

His jacket was gone. His shirt was damp at the collar, dark circles of sweat blooming under his arms despite the morning chill. His face was a mask of tension, his jaw locked so tight she could see the muscle leaping in his cheek. His eyes moved too fast, darting to the windows, the hallway, the back door, as if he expected the walls to start closing in.

He didn't even look at her. He looked past her, searching the room for threats she couldn't see.

"You're home early," she said. She didn't move from the island. She kept her hands on the marble. He didn't answer.

He walked straight to the cabinet above the sink, pulled down a bottle of expensive whiskey, and poured a glass. No ice. No water. Just three fingers of amber liquid that cost more than most people's car payments.

It was nine in the morning. The sun was streaming through the windows, illuminating the dust motes dancing over the expensive marble. It was a beautiful day in Buckhead, and her husband was drinking like he was at a wake.

"Soren," she said, her voice dropping an octave. "I'm fine, Camden. Jesus. Why do you always—" He stopped.

He didn't finish the sentence. He couldn't. He didn't have the breath for a full argument.

"You didn't say anything. I just asked why you were home." He downed the drink in one go, the glass clinking violently against his teeth. He set the glass down and rubbed his face with both hands, his wedding ring catching the light.

When he finally looked at her, his eyes were bloodshot, the edges raw with a lack of sleep and an abundance of panic. He looked smaller than he had yesterday.

"Meeting went wrong," he muttered. He reached for the bottle again. "What kind of meeting?"

"The kind that goes wrong, Cam. Don't push me. I don't have the energy for the interrogation." She waited.

She had learned that silence was a better pry bar than questions with a man like Soren. He poured another drink. The sound of the whiskey hitting the glass was the loudest thing in the room. He took a sip this time, his hand shaking just enough to make the liquid swirl.

"Kaelen called," he said, his voice barely a whisper. Camden’s stomach bottomed out. Kaelen Valecourt was not a man who called with good news. He was the sun their entire world orbited, and he was a sun that burned anyone who got too close.

If Kaelen was calling Soren at dawn, it wasn't to discuss the quarterly projections.

"What did he want?"

"The quarterly payment. He wants it early."

"How early?"

"Next week." Camden closed her eyes for a second. She knew the math. She had been tracking the numbers in the middle of the night while Soren slept the heavy, fitful sleep of the guilty.

She had been into the files he thought were hidden. She had seen the outflows to companies that didn't exist. The numbers didn't work. They hadn't worked since Soren decided he needed to prove he was more than a glorified accountant for the Valecourt empire.

He had tried to be a player, and he had played himself into a corner.

"We don't have it," she said. It wasn't a question. Soren let out a laugh that sounded like dry leaves scraping on pavement. "No shit we don't have it.

I know we don't have it. I'm the one who has to look him in the eye and tell him why the ledger is light."

"Then what do we do?" He didn't answer. He stared into his glass like it was a crystal ball. Camden watched him and felt a familiar, cold dread settle in her chest.

She had seen this look before—not on Soren, but on her father. The look of a man who was drowning in a swimming pool he’d built himself. It was a look of profound, terminal arrogance meeting reality.

"Six months ago," she said, her voice precise, "you took out a line of credit on this house." He looked up then, his eyes narrowing. "How do you—" "I found the papers, Soren. You left them on the desk in your office like they were a grocery list.

You didn't tell me. You didn't ask. You just signed away the roof over our children's heads." He said nothing.

Silence was his favorite weapon, but today it felt like a white flag. A lie would have meant he still thought he could fix it. Silence meant he was waiting for the blow to land. He looked at the Sub-Zero fridge, the custom range, the designer lighting.

He looked at the evidence of his own failure.

"We can sell the lake house," she suggested. "It's in my name. We can move the money quietly. It’s not enough for the full payment, but it’s a gesture.

It shows Kaelen you’re working on it." Soren laughed again, that same hollow, ugly sound.

"That’s a drop in the bucket, Cam. That covers six months of interest. We need years. We need a miracle.

Kaelen doesn't want gestures. He wants his money. He’s got people breathing down his neck, which means he’s breathing down mine."

"Then we step back," she said. The air in the kitchen shifted. The temperature seemed to drop ten degrees. Soren went perfectly still. He set the glass down with a deliberate, slow movement that was more threatening than his earlier twitching. "From what?"

"From Kaelen. From the business. From the 'consulting' that keeps you out until four in the morning. From all of it. We take what’s left and we go. We go to my mother’s place in Savannah. We disappear for a while." He stared at her as if she were speaking a foreign language. "Step back," he repeated, the words tasting like poison. "Yes. Before someone gets hurt. Before the police start looking at more than just the tax returns."

"Step back where, Camden? Back to what? A mortgage we can't pay? A legitimate business that’s been a front so long it doesn't even know how to make a profit? The kids’ private school? The summer program in France? The cars? The life you've spent ten years curating? All of this is built on paper that is currently on fire. You want to step back into nothing?"

"I want to step back into alive," she said. The word hung in the air, raw and bleeding. She hadn't planned to say it, but it was the only truth left in the room. Soren’s face twisted. It wasn't anger; it was the hurt of a man who realized his wife saw him as a liability. He saw the judgment in her eyes and it burned him worse than the whiskey. "You think I'm going to get us killed."

"I think you're in too deep, and you're too proud to admit the water is over your head. You’re making mistakes, Soren. Sloppy mistakes. The shirt last night—" "I had a flat tire," he lied.

It was a weak lie. A child’s lie.

"Tires don't bleed, Soren." He flinched. He looked like he wanted to strike her, then he seemed about to cry. He did neither.

He just stood there, vibrating with a frantic energy that filled the room.

"I'm in exactly as deep as I need to be to keep you in that dress and the kids in that school," he hissed. "You like the view from this hill? Then stop asking how the hill was built. You want to tell Kaelen we’re 'stepping back'?

Go ahead. I’ll drive you to the cemetery myself so you can tell his headstone. Because that’s the only way you leave Kaelen’s circle. You leave in a box."

"That's not an answer, Soren. That's an excuse."

"It's the only one you're getting." He turned his back on her, dumping the rest of the whiskey into the sink. The glass went into the dishwasher with a sharp, violent clink. He leaned over the counter, his hands braced on the edge of the marble, his head hanging low between his shoulders. He was panting, his breath coming in short, ragged bursts. "I got it handled," he said to the sink. "You don't. You’re drowning."

"I said I got it!" He slammed his fist onto the marble. The vase of peonies wobbled. A single blush petal fell, landing in the damp sink. "I’m going to make the call. I’m going to fix the numbers. Just... just stay out of it, Camden. Go to your brunch. Be pretty. That’s your job."

"My job is to make sure our children have a father who isn't in prison or a grave." He spun around, faster than she expected. He was in her space in a second, the smell of whiskey and fear-induced sweat rolling off him. He looked like a cornered animal—dangerous because he was terrified.

He grabbed her upper arms, his fingers digging into the expensive linen of her dress.

"Don't," he hissed. His voice was low, vibrating with a tremor he couldn't hide. "Don't you dare stand there in your perfect house with your perfect hair and act like you're above this. You know exactly what it takes to keep this life moving.

You've enjoyed every second of the view. You liked the jewelry. You liked the travel. Don't pretend you didn't know the price.

You signed the papers too, Camden. Your name is on every offshore account I’ve got.