HER HIDEOUS FACE

I watch the video three more times unable to stop myself.

Soren was laughing, holding a glass of whiskey... whiskey!

He's broken his own rule.

He leaned into Elizabeth and calls her by a nickname I'd heard in passing many years ago. That makes her giggle and his gray eyes seem to light up at the sight of it.

Six years I've known Soren sober, controlled, careful with everything he does. Six years without a single drink in this house. And yet there he is, laughing loud enough that I can hear it through my phone speaker.

"Welcome home, Liz," he says in the video, arm out, pulling her into the group like she never left. In every memory I have of him, he's calm, steady, and his warmth never once reached his eyes.

He's never smiled at me like that. Never used that tone on me, not once. So it isn't that he doesn't know how to be warm. He just never wanted to be, not with me.

I bite on the inside of my cheek and try to suppress the ache that spread through my chest.

That video drags me into a rabbit hole and I find Elizabeth's social media account, and scroll through it.

A few minutes later, the sun is brighter, a stark contrast to the darkness I felt hovering over me.

"Mrs. Malcolm, are you up?" Our housekeeper's voice carries up the stairs. "What would you like for dinner tonight? I would like to add it to my list of meals for this morning."

I open my mouth to say make what he likes, out of habit more than anything, but she gets there first.

"Mr. Soren won't be joining you. He said not to wait on him."

I nod like I hadn't already known. I'd seen it on Elizabeth's page before Belle even opened her mouth — a dinner reservation, tagged location, a string of little heart emojis under the post.

I knew immediately that Soren was going to be there.

I eat breakfast alone, same as every morning. Usually I spend the hours after running scales just to have something to do before he comes home, filling the silence in this house with my own voice so I don't have to listen to how empty it actually is. Today I have somewhere else my attention needs to go.

I open my email and read the theater's message one more time before typing my reply. Confirmed. I'll record the demo tonight and send it over by the end of the week.

My finger hovers over send a second longer than it needs to. Then I hit it.

A breath leaves me, and for the first time in longer than I can remember, it feels like relief instead of dread. Thirty days are already counting down in my head.

That evening, I change out of my house clothes into something plain, pull my coat on, and head for the door. Belle catches me on the way out.

"I'm going to meet some friends, I'll be back soon." I tell her. It isn't true. I'm on my way to a studio a few streets over to lay down the demo, and I don't feel like explaining that to anyone in this house, not even her.

The car cuts through the restaurant district to skip traffic, and that's when I see Soren's car, parked right outside a place I recognize — one of the private ones, the kind with rooms instead of tables, the kind he's never once taken me to.

I tell the driver to stop.

I don't know what makes me get out, it was stupid but I did it anyway. I walk in past the host like I belong there, straight down the hall, until I reach a private room near the end. The door isn't shut all the way. There's a lacquered screen just inside it, meant to block the entrance from view, and I slip into the gap between the screen and the wall where the light doesn't reach. From here I can see the whole table. No one at it can see me.

"Normally we can't drag him out for anything," a man's voice says, raising his glass toward Soren. "But she's back for two days and he drops everything."

Laughter follows. I recognize a few of the men from photos I've seen over the years — Soren's friends, men who've never once been introduced to me.

I know Elizabeth's face better than I know most of my own family's. Heiress to the Stone family, raised alongside Soren and his circle since they were children, the youngest of the group, doted on by every one of them. We've never spoken more than a few words to each other back when we attended the same school. There's nothing between us, not really. There never needed to be.

"You've been with me every single day since I got back," she says, voice pitched sweet, innocent. "Isn't your wife upset?"

"With a face like that," one of the men says, "she wouldn't dare complain about anything."

The table laughs.

"What happened to her face?" Elizabeth asks, leaning in like she's genuinely curious.

"Burns," another one answers. "Bad ones. Honestly, we all feel for Soren, having to live with that every day. She's nowhere near good enough for him as it is, and he can't even take her anywhere looking like that. He's said it himself — her face isn't exactly fit for public viewing." The man snorted like it was the punchline to a joke.

Like I was a joke.

I gritted my teeth and held back, I shouldn't have come here.

"Six years married and I've never even seen a photo of her," someone else adds. "Didn't know you had a wife at all until Marcus mentioned it."

I stand frozen in the dark behind that screen, listening to six years of hiding my own face get handed around a dinner table like a party trick.

A bitter smile pulls at my mouth. He's never taken me to a single one of these dinners. Never brought me to a party, never introduced me to a single person sitting at this table. Half the room didn't even know he had a wife until tonight.

Isn't it all because of my face?

"Why did you even marry her, then?" Elizabeth asks with clear mirth in her voice.

"She saved my life," Soren says flatly in the voice he uses when he doesn't want to talk about something. "I owe her."

"Owe her, sure," one of the men says, swirling his drink. "But you don't owe her your whole life. Pay her off, set her up somewhere nice, and be done with it. Why keep a woman like that in your house, staring at that disgusting face every morning?"

"Is it really that hideous?" Elizabeth asks, soft with fake concern, like the question costs her something to ask.

A chair scrapes back. "Watch this," a man says, voice pitched high and mocking, muffled like he's clapped a hand over half his face. "Don't look at me! I'm hideous!"

My fists clench tightly and my nails dug deep into my palms.

The whole table breaks into laughter, loud enough that it rattles something loose behind my ribs that had been holding steady for six straight years.

I step out from behind the screen and push the door open.