Chapter ~ Five

LIORA

I had meant to wait. I had promised myself thirty days. I had not promised myself a morning like this one.

He did not laugh. He did not say I was being unreasonable like I expected. He went very still, and then, to my surprise, he looked around the room first, at the waiter, the next table, the door, as though checking for witnesses.

“Not now,” he said quietly.

“Not now?”

“I was going to talk to you myself,” he said, almost to himself. “After the holidays. Properly, with everything arranged.” He caught himself, and set his jaw. “Seraphine is home through the holidays. It’s a delicate time, Liora. There would be talk. People would say the marriage ended the moment she landed, and I won’t do that to her.”

To her.

So that was the sentence from the drawer. A timetable to end everything we shared.

Somewhere inside me, the last thing that had been listening for an apology went quiet.

“We’ve been together for five years,” he went on, reasonable, almost tender, and reached across the linen to cover my hand. “How would you even manage without me?”

I thought of the drawer. five years of letters. And here he was, asking how I would survive without him, when he had spent every one of those years practicing how to live without me.

I slid my hand out from under his.

“Eat something,” he said. “We’ll talk about the rest later.”

That was when Seraphine arrived.

She crossed the dining room like a woman who had been expected, pausing only to accept the smile of the maître d’, and slid into the chair beside Dorian before anyone had asked her to.

“Oh, these are my favorites,” she said, to the plate in front of me. “You remembered.”

“Of course I did,” said Dorian.

I had to look at the plate again.

She turned to him, tucking her hair behind one ear, and the light caught on something small and pale. “Do you like them?”

Pearl drops, set in gold.

“They suit you,” he replied, with a smile.

“An early Christmas present,” she said, as if I had asked. “My favorite jeweller.” She glanced at me over the rim of her water glass. “He always did have good taste.”

I looked at the earrings properly for the first time. The shape, the setting, the exact luster of the pearl. They were a pair I had seen before, in a pale blue box in my dresser drawer, year after year, in slightly different versions. Birthdays. Anniversaries. Apology gifts. Always the same jeweller, always the same wrapping, and I had never once worn a single pair, because none of them had ever being my style.

This year there had been no blue box. There had only been a card.

Only then did I understand where this year’s box had gone. It had never been picked for me at all. It had been picked for her, every time, and I had simply been the woman who stood in for the one he actually wanted to see wearing it.

I watched the two of them lean toward each other across the table, easy in a way five years of marriage had never once made Dorian look with me, and my stomach turned over slowly, like it was trying to warn me before I understood why.

“Excuse me,” I said, and neither of them looked up as I went.

The restroom was empty and too brightly lit. I ran the water cold and held my wrists under it until my hands stopped feeling like they belonged to someone else.

“Liora?”

My hands went still beneath the water.

It had been said from the doorway, quietly, like a question.

I knew that voice.