Chapter ~ Two

LIORA

“Sera.”

I tried the name aloud once, in the empty study, just to hear how it sounded in a voice like mine.

Five years, and Dorian had never given me a nickname. He used my full government name, carefully, like something he was afraid of scuffing. And I could not stop seeing his face in that doorway: the laugh, and then the switch, the second the light went out of it.

I went down to the kitchen and made coffee.

“What do I make for dinner tonight, ma’am?” Greta asked, a dish towel over one shoulder. “I could make—”

“He likes the—” I started, out of five years of habit, before I caught myself.

“He won’t be home for dinner,” she said gently, as if she were the one delivering the news. Which in every proper sense should have been the other way around.

“I know.” I nodded.

I opened my laptop at the kitchen island and read the Lisbon email one more time. Then I printed the acceptance letter and signed it, in ink. The consulate wanted it delivered in person before the end of the week. My hand did not shake once.

I waited to feel guilty. The guilt never arrived.

I thought of all the mornings I had spent at this same counter, reading news copy aloud to no one, calling it discipline because it was easier than calling it what it was. Waiting. Waiting for a man who had never once asked how my voice was holding up, who did not know that my career existed, and who would not have noticed if I stopped speaking altogether unless someone told him.

Thirty days felt shorter already.

By afternoon I had dressed up, which I had not bothered to do in longer than I could remember, and settled on something bold, with my hair half over the scar.

Greta caught me at the door, one eyebrow lifting before she could stop it. “Going out, ma’am?”

“Mmm.” I nodded. “To meet a friend.”

It was only half a lie. I was meeting a courier desk near the airport road and, if I let myself hope, some version of the woman I used to be.

The route ran along the arrivals terminal, and it was there, at a red light, that I saw a car I knew.

Dorian’s car, parked at the curb with the engine running, and beside it Mr. Pryce, his driver, cap in one hand and a bouquet of white peonies in the other.

In five years, Dorian had never bought me flowers, because he had decided early on that I wasn’t fond of them.

“Stop here,” I told my driver.

I don’t fully know why. Some tired, curious, self-punishing part of me wanted to see it with my own eyes, and that part won.

“Mr. Pryce.”

He turned. The color left his face by degrees. “Madam. I did not know you were—”

“Who are the flowers for?”

“For a guest, ma’am.”

“Is she landing at four?”

He looked at the flowers like they had betrayed him. “Mr. Dorian’s assistant said four o’clock. But Mr. Dorian said, ma’am, that you were not to be…” He stopped.

“Bothered,” I finished for him. “I understand.”

He said nothing else.

Beyond the glass, travelers came through the gate in ones and twos, in scarves and with gift bags, and none of them her, and yet the whole terminal seemed to be waiting for her to walk out.

I handed my letter to the courier desk with a steady hand. The recording Lisbon wanted alongside it was booked for nine-thirty that night, at a studio across town, because some quiet part of me had already known exactly how long Dorian would stay at dinner. Then I told the driver to take me to Halden House, early.

I can’t say why. I think I wanted to sit inside the room he had chosen for me before he arrived, and decide, calmly, what it was worth.

The room was small and exquisite and set for one. One place. One candle, a sprig of holly laid beside it. A single glass, and beside it a card in the same hand as the first. ‘Happy anniversary. I will try to join you.’

Try.

“Mr. Dorian is hosting the Ashworth board families’ holiday dinner in the main hall tonight,” the maître d’ said, gently, in the voice of a man reading from a script. “He asked that you be looked after here. Privately.”

“Of course.”

I looked at the candle for a while. Then I said I would like to freshen up, and walked out past the coat check and the potted palms strung with white lights, and stopped behind an ornate wooden screen where two of the panels did not quite meet. Voices spilled through the gap before I had decided to listen.

“—never comes to these,” a man was saying. “But Ashworth's girl is home for the holidays and suddenly he’s dropping everything.”

A woman’s laughter followed, light and lovely. I did not need to guess whose. “You’ve barely left my side since I landed. Doesn’t your wife mind?”

“His wife,” said someone with a drawl, “has the good sense to stay where she’s put.”

“He manages her wonderfully,” another voice added, approving, almost fond. “Credit to Dorian. Most men would have made a scene.”

“What happened to her?” Seraphine asked, and I could hear the small performance of concern folded into it, even through the wood.

They told her. The studio, the gantry, the scar. The years of never once bringing me to a dinner like this one. Somebody said Dorian himself had called it a courtesy to everyone involved.

I stood in the corridor with my palm flat against the panel and let myself feel, for one clean second, what loving him had cost.

“Why did you marry her, then?” Seraphine asked, and her voice had gone soft, which made it worse.

“She saved my life,” Dorian said. “I owe her.”

“So pay her,” the drawl said. “A house. An allowance. Why keep her at home to look at every day?”

“Is it really that bad?”

Somebody leaned in and dropped his voice to a stage whisper, and I heard the whole table exhale in laughter. I did not hear what he said. I did not need to.

I also did not hear Dorian laugh. But I did not hear him stop them either.

Somehow, that hurt more.

What had held still in my chest for five years, quietly, faithfully, finally stopped holding.

I could have turned around. There was still a version of tonight where I went back to the little room and its single candle, and let this be one more thing I knew and never said, the way I had with every cruelty in this marriage. It would have been so easy. I had five years of practice at that kind of easy.

I stepped out from behind the screen instead.

The main hall was long and gold, hung with garland and candlelight, and full of people in the middle of a laugh. It took seven seconds for the sound to drain out of it. I counted.

At the far table, Dorian stood so fast his chair fell back.

He looked at me.

No. He looked at Seraphine first.