Chapter ~ One

LIORA

“One more Christmas without you in my arms. I am doing my best to endure.”

The lines sat near the bottom of the page, in my husband’s handwriting.

I froze.

The paper was thick and cream, and it had gone soft along its folds. At the top was a date in the neat, slanted figures he used for contracts. Eight days ago.

The watch box slid from my fingers and landed on the carpet without a sound.

That was Dorian’s hand. And that was not a letter to me.

For a moment, I couldn’t move. The clock on his bookshelf ticked. Blood rushed in my ears, and heat climbed painfully into my face.

Above the lines was her name. Seraphine.

I wasn’t sure if it was dust that had flown into my eyes but it blinked even faster and my eyes felt wet.

Endure. That was the word he had chosen for the five years he had spent beside me.

On our FIFTH wedding anniversary, the fourteenth of December. I sat on the floor of my husband’s study and learned that he had been writing to another woman since the morning I became his wife.

I hadn’t come in to look. I had come to leave a gift, a watch, to surprise him, despite the disappointment I had felt after seeing the reservation he left for me this morning.

Compared to every year of our wedding anniversary, there was no blue box this morning.

I had noticed it before I noticed anything else, standing at the foot of the stairs in the gray half-light with my robe pulled tight, between the tree in the hall and the garland on the banister.

For five years, on the morning of our anniversary, a pale blue box had waited beside my coffee cup, tied in cream ribbon, with a pair of earrings inside that I would carry upstairs and put away in a drawer.

This year there was a card, propped against the cup in the exact spot where Dorian would leave the box.

The text on the card read, “Halden House. Private room. Eight o’clock. You don’t have to feel scared, there will be no one around.”

I had read the last line twice.

How carefully did he make cruelty sound like consideration.

Dorian’s study door had been standing open, which he never allowed, and the bottom drawer had hung open a finger’s width.

I only moved closer to push it shut when I saw a stack of envelopes tied with a black ribbon, and beneath it, thicker, a bundle of folded pages with no envelopes at all, every one in his handwriting.

I’m not sure why I opened them but one read,

‘The day I married her. I tried to write you something kind and couldn’t. I am sorry. I am sorry that I am not sorry enough to stop.’

There were five years of them. Birthdays. Christmases. One from the night I came home from the hospital, when I had lain awake in the guest room listening to him pace the hall. I had thought he was pacing for me. He had been composing.

All along, he had never been incapable of feeling. And his excuses of being tired, of being busy, of being “not a man who says things,” were not true.

He simply never said them to me.

I went back to the first page, the one dated eight days ago. The ink was darker, pressed harder into the paper. Beneath them, there was one more line.

“Come home. I will tell her after the anniversary.”

I read it three times.

Tell her. He had already decided. The only thing my husband was waiting for was a decent date to end me on.

A bitter smile touched my lips.

How pathetic.

My five years with Dorian were a living example of what it meant to be in a loveless marriage. And I confirmed it today, of all days, as I wandered into his study to give him a watch.

Below me, the front door opened.

I went still.

Footsteps on the stairs followed, and a sound I almost didn’t recognize. A laugh. Dorian’s, but younger, warmer, a laugh I had not heard once in the years I had known him as my husband.

“Welcome home, Sera,” he said into the phone, in a voice I would have given anything to have aimed at me. “There will be a car waiting at four.”

He was coming up.

I shoved the pages into the drawer, in the wrong order, and slammed it shut. I snatched the watch box off the carpet. I was on my feet at the window with my hair pulled forward over my cheek when the door opened.

The laugh was still on his face. I saw it.

And I watched it die, the way light dies when the switch is flipped, the moment he saw me standing in his study.

It took less than a second. I have thought about that second more than anything else he has ever done.

“What are you doing in here?”

“I wanted to leave you something.” I held out the box. “Happy anniversary.”

He took it. He did not open it. His eyes found my cheek, the way they always did, and moved on. “Did you get the card?”

“I did.”

“I thought you would be more comfortable. A private room with no one staring.”

“That was very thoughtful,” I said, which was the phrase I used for things I couldn’t bring myself to say I hated.

He looked relieved. That was the whole conversation.

“I forgot something,” he said, as though I had asked.

He crossed to the desk, took a small key from his pocket, and turned it in the bottom drawer. A small, guilty click. I hadn’t known it had a lock.

He had forgotten nothing. He had come back to be sure the drawer was closed.

“I’ll try to see you there,” he said at the door, already looking at his phone.

I heard his steps on the stairs. I heard the front door.

I stayed at the window and watched his car pull away down the drive.

The glass was dark with the morning and gave me back my face, small and warped, the scar running from my temple to my jaw like a crack through glass.

Once, this face arrived in people’s living rooms at five o’clock every evening. Strangers used to stop me in pharmacies to tell me they’d watched me the night before. I used to walk into a room and feel eyes follow me for reasons that had nothing to do with pity. Now they slid away, quickly and politely.

I let myself remember, the boy whose first love left for Paris and never looked back. I noticed how much he was consumed with grief and felt back that I could not help him.

Then the night of my first broadcast rehearsal as lead anchor of the five o’clock bulletin, in the chair I had worked seven years to earn.

He had never once come to watch me work. That evening he came, and stood at the back of the studio floor beside camera three with his hands in his pockets, and I read the whole bulletin to the lens pretending not to know where he was standing.

I heard the gantry before I saw it. A long metal groan from somewhere in the ceiling, and Dorian looking up and not moving. I remember leaving the desk. I remember both of my hands flat against his chest, shoving him out of the light. I remember thinking, absurdly, that no one would ever have to know it was me that made that move.

Then a sound like a bell struck with a hammer, and nothing.

I woke in a hospital with my face in gauze. The girl the network had been quietly grooming to sit beside me had taken my chair before the week was out. She is still in it, more popular every year. Some nights I catch myself mouthing the sign-off at five o’clock, with the television on mute.

Every December I watch the network’s holiday special the same way, her smile in my chair, tinsel glittering behind her.

I had given up my face for Dorian. My career went with it. And five years later, the man I had saved still could not give me the one thing I had never asked him for, even while I wanted it so badly: to be loved.

He married me out of guilt. He is careful with me, generous even, in a way a stranger might take for tenderness.

I knew better.

I took out my phone. There, unanswered in my inbox for three weeks, was an offer from a documentary house in Lisbon. Narrator and producer. A real title with my name in the credits. A start date exactly thirty days away, in the middle of January, and a first project on the winter festivals of the Portuguese coast. A line at the bottom: Please confirm by signed letter.

‘Thirty days,’ I thought.

He meant to tell me after the anniversary. Fine. I would not wait to be told.

I will give this thirty days. And before that plane leaves, I will be the one to ask for the divorce.