“You’re the smartest woman I know,” he said, looking like a beaten child. “She’s a very effusive, lonely woman. She’s a widow, and she’s harmless.”
“I’m very sorry to hear it, about her being a widow. Tell me something, is that what you use this boat for? Your little flings while I think you’re away on business and you lie to me about where you are? That must be an expensive hobby for you, keeping the boat for that.” It cost him a fortune to run it, but he loved it, far more than she did. “If that’s the case, I won’t be coming back here again. I’m not going to have the whole crew laughing at me behind my back, while you bring your girlfriends here, and then invite them back on the boat when I’m on board. That’s a bit much. Don’t you think? Or have you lost all sense of decency? Are you so rich and important now that you think you can buy anything, and have anyone you want? Or is that really how it is? And you don’t care if you have a wife and kids to come home to, you just want to grab it all, the eternal kid in a candy store. The trouble is you’re twenty-eight years old, almost twenty-nine, you’re at the top of your game, and you can have any woman you want. You never used to care about all that, but you do now. You shouldn’t be stuck with me, Zack. That was our big mistake. You were my best friend. But I guess I’m not very interesting compared to the women you meet now. And they all want you. And you need all of us, not just me. You’re turning into your father, or you will if you’re not careful. He needs a flock of women to feed his ego. You want them to fill the void you can never fill.
“I don’t want to be part of a team, Zack. I don’t want to share you, or be the home team while you have Marlenes on the road. If that’s what you want, you shouldn’t be married. Not to me anyway.” And the worst of it was she was twenty-six years old, and if she stayed with him, he would break her heart again and again forever. She knew that now, and if she stayed, she couldn’t pretend to herself that it would be any different. It wouldn’t be, and they both knew it. This was who he had grown up to be. They were kids when they got married. And this was who Zack Katz was turning out to be as a grown-up, a billionaire, and a spoiled brat who wanted his cake and to eat it, and to cheat on his wife. He needed the Marlenes, and whoever the next one would be, and he thought he could get away with it, and he deserved it. She realized now that there would always be another Marlene stashed somewhere. He couldn’t help it, and didn’t want to stop.
“Are you leaving me?” he asked in a frightened voice.
“Would you care?” she responded in a hard tone.
“Of course I would, I love you,” he said with tears in his eyes, and she could see that he probably meant it. His mother had more or less abandoned him when he was eleven, he couldn’t bear the thought of losing Ruby too. And he needed all of them to fill that void.
“Maybe you do love me, but you need the others too. That’s not what I want. The problem is we have two very young children, a two-year-old and a three-year-old, and I have this pathetic old-fashioned belief that children need a father. A real one. And if I leave you, they get screwed. If I stay, I do. So I haven’t decided yet what I’m going to do.”
“Why don’t you stay and we’ll try to work it out. We’ll have a good week together somewhere.” His tone was pleading. He wasn’t a bad man, he just couldn’t be faithful to her and never would be. She knew that now.
“And then what? You go back to London for a week of ‘emergency meetings’ to see Marlene, until the next one comes along that you can’t resist. I thought you were over that, but apparently not, and now I get that you never will be. You’re always going to need just one more to fill the void