Read Online The Wife of Reilly by Jennifer Coburn - Free Book Online Page A

while turning on his lamp. “You’re my ideal woman. That’s why I married you. Enough with this morbid talk. With all the traveling I do, I’m far more likely to go down in a plane wreck. You don’t see me grilling you about who you’re going to remarry.”
    I didn’t get to sleep until two that morning. Half the time I spent thinking about Matt and our blissfully happy future together. The other half was thinking about how I was going to find a new wife for Reilly, inarguably one of the most decent people I’d ever known. Good. Kind. Smart. And wonderful. But not the love of my life. Not Matt.
    * * *
    That night I realized that my whole marriage to Reilly was a reaction to being dumped by Matt. We met at Wharton where Reilly was also earning his MBA. I was a waitress at one of the restaurants near campus where he used to eat his breakfast and read the Wall Street Journal every morning. There was something about a guy that ate at the same place every morning that was extremely appealing to me at the time. We also had a few classes together where he showed himself to be extremely diligent and committed to making things work. We were both assigned to the same mock project management team in class, and ran into some serious financing and cash flow issues. Other problems were also threatening this Acme Widgets’ viability; the company was on the brink of bankruptcy. By midnight, the three other students in our group had thrown in the towel and said they’d think about solutions the next day. I was so impressed with how Reilly stuck with the task at hand and finally came up with a workable strategy for the fake company. It was five in the morning, and he looked like he’d been through the spin cycle of the dryer, but the man finished what he started, just as he promised he would. Anyone with that kind of determination was the guy for me, I decided. A month earlier I had put together a list of the five character traits I was looking for in a husband: stability, consistency, reliability, dependability and sensibility. Reilly was better than a new washing machine.
    He was also cute and funny and had a daffy charm about him. Over the months I grew to really love and respect Reilly. When he asked me to marry him, I saw no reason to decline. I convinced myself that passion is something that would build over time, but was later informed that it was actually the other way around.
    What we lacked in chemistry, Reilly and I made up for in our ability to work together as life partners. Things were not bad with Reilly. In fact, I was quite comfortable with our life together. But when I compared our relationship with the weekend I had with Matt, I realized I loved Reilly like the brother I never had. I loved Matt like the husband I never had.
    Of course, Reilly is not the Patron Saint of Husbands either. Our first big blow-out was a month before our wedding when he surprised me by telling me that his parents were paying for our honeymoon as a wedding gift.
    “That’s unbelievably generous of them!” I said. “It’s so extravagant, though. A month in Italy is not cheap.”
    “Well,” Reilly hesitated. “I know we talked about Italy, but my parents booked something a little different for us. They meant well and I think we can make a good time of it.” I didn’t want to make a good time of it. It was a honeymoon. If ever there was a time I didn’t want to work, this was it. Italy was my dream. Italy would just be wonderful. I wouldn’t have to make it that way.
    We didn’t just “talk” about Italy, as Reilly so politically put it. We made an itinerary. We had reservations at local pensiones. I was even taking a conversational Italian mini-course on Monday nights after work. I had always romanticized the thought of taking a gondola ride with my husband in Venice, seeing the great museums and eating like a glutton in paradise. Suddenly that plan was out, and his parents had booked a two-week stint for us at Club Wed, a