American Air Lines American Airlines simply took my money for a ticket and didn’t provide the service. San Diego California

How far in advance did your wife contact them?

Because if she contacted them AFTER the fiirst leg of your flight that you missed..she was too late.  It is standard policy with every airline(and yes you agreed to this when you got the ticket) that if you miss ANY leg of your flight ALL remaining legs are automatically cancelled without credit.    So she could notify them after you missed a flight, but it wouldn't do anything to get the remaining legs re-instated.

Now, if she notified them before the first flight, they would have treated it as a cancellation/change.  In where the ticket would have been assessed a change/cancellation fee and you would have been reissued a ticket showing you were just taking the return flight.  If there happen to be a credit owed to you that would have been issued in the form of a credit toward another flight for you.

If you want to claim that she wasn't informed of this(which ever case) when she contacted them then that is fine.  But it wouldn't have changed the situation..it would have just notified you of this situation earlier.

I would doubt that you paid full fare for this ticket, as those are 2-3 times the cost of a discounted fare and unless you specifically request it are not the fares that come up when you are searching for flights.  They also are fully refundable even after the flight.  So there would have been no reason that they couldn't have just rebooked you on the return flight using the old itinerary.  I would be curious as to the price you paid for your tickets(round trip?) and the cities you were traveling between.

One other thing..missing two days of work was on you.  Unless you were flying to an airport in the middle of no where, there is no reason that you couldn't have gotten a flight out sooner than 2 days.