Novels by Ziya

Chapter Three: Brunch with a TraitorI was home before my husband.Nero let me out at the corner of my building and waited, engine idling, until I had passed the doorman and the elevator doors had closed on my own pale face. The apartment was dark and quiet and smelled like the lavender candle Rowan had said made it feel like a home, Isa. I stood in the entryway for a full minute without turning on a light.Then I did what a woman does when her life has just split in two. I took off my coat, hung it on the hook, and went to wash my face.At 12:34, I heard the key in the lock.I was in bed by then, on my side, eyes closed, breathing slow and even. I had practiced it in the bathroom mirror. The trick, I discovered, was to think of nothing. To be a woman asleep. To be a house with the lights off.The bed dipped. A warm weight settled behind me, and I smelled hotel soap, the expensive kind, with a note of something floral that was not mine."Isa?" Rowan whispered.I didn't move.He presse

Chapter Two: Room 1412I laughed again.It wasn't the sharp, ugly sound from earlier. This one came out low and tired, the laugh of a woman who has been handed one impossible thing too many in a single night."You're insane," I said."I've been told I'm patient. It's not the same thing.""I am married.""So am I." He said it without a flicker. "That's the point."I pushed away from the desk and walked a full circle around the portrait of the woman in the green dress, because standing still felt dangerous. My heels clicked against the polished concrete, too loud in the empty gallery. "You want me to have an affair with you.""I want them to believe you are having one." Dante did not move. He stood where he was, hands loose at his sides, and let me pace. "Not in truth. In performance. A dinner where they happen to see us. A phone call you take in another room, smiling. My hand at your waist when they are watching, and not when they aren't. Small things. Piece by piece, until they cannot

Chapter One: The Man Nobody NoticedI was hanging the last placard of the Hartwell retrospective when my sister's husband walked into my gallery and ended my marriage in one sentence.But that's not how it began. It began with the door chime, a soft silver note I had forgotten to turn off when I locked up. Except I hadn't locked up. I realized that as the sound drifted through the empty white rooms of the Calloway Gallery at 9:42 on a Thursday night, and every hair on my arms rose."We're closed," I called, without turning around."I know."The voice was low and even, and I knew it before I turned. Dante Marchetti, my sister's husband. The man who had sat across from me at every family dinner for four years and spoken perhaps forty words in total, most of them thank you and pass the salt.He stood just inside the doorway in a plain charcoal coat, rain darkening his shoulders. Behind him, through the glass, a black sedan idled at the curb with its lights off. A man sat at the wheel, no