Chapter 1: The Woman He Brought Home

I wore the green dress tonight. The one Adrian loved before he forgot to love things.

He picked it out himself, our third date, laughing when I said it was too much. "Wear it for me anyway," he'd said, and I had, and he looked at me all night like I was the only lit thing in the room.

He used to leave notes in my coat pockets back then. Little things. "Missing you already." I found one on a Tuesday once and grinned like a fool on a crowded train.

That was the man I cooked for tonight. Not the one who came home late and quiet. The old one. I still believed he was in there somewhere, under all the silence, waiting for me to reach him.

I lit the candles twice, because the first set burned down while I waited.

I checked my phone. Nothing. I turned it face down so I would stop.

There was a time he called if he was ten minutes late. There was a time he called just to hear me pick up. I put that thought where I keep the others, folded small.

Then the key turned in the lock, and everything in my chest lifted at once.

I stood. I smoothed the dress. I made my face soft and glad.

The door opened, and he was not alone.

Adrian came in first, coat over his arm, his eyes sliding past me to the table. Behind him came a woman.

Beautiful. Dark hair, a wine-colored coat, and one hand resting on the round swell of her stomach.

Pregnant. Heavily, unmistakably pregnant.

"You're staring, Elena," Adrian said, and hung his coat on my hook without looking at me.

"I'm sorry." The apology came on its own. It always did. "I didn't know you were bringing anyone."

The woman smiled. Warm. Too warm. Like she had smiled inside these walls before.

"You must be Elena," she said. "He talks about you."

"This is Isabella." Adrian poured himself a drink and offered one to no one. "She's staying with us for a while. My cousin."

Cousin.

Something in me went still and careful, the way you go still when a stair gives under your foot in the dark.

"Your cousin," I said.

"She needs somewhere quiet for the pregnancy." He said it fast, rehearsed. "It's temporary."

Isabella lowered herself onto the arm of my sofa with a small sigh and looked around the room like she was pricing it.

"I hope it isn't a bad time," she said. "Adrian promised you wouldn't mind."

Adrian promised. I turned the words over and set them down gently.

"Of course not." My voice came out even. I was proud of that. "You're welcome here. I made dinner, there's plenty, if you're hungry."

I had made it for him. For us. I do not know why I offered it to her.

"She can't do lamb right now," Adrian said. "The smell. Isn't that right."

"Pregnancy." Isabella wrinkled her nose, sweet and sorry. "Everything's a fight."

Then he did the thing that stopped my breath.

He crossed to her, and he crouched, and he pulled the throw from the back of my sofa and laid it over her knees like she might crack.

"You're cold," he murmured. "You should have said something."

I stood there reaching for the last time he had touched me like that, on purpose, gentle, and I could not find it anywhere.

My stomach rolled, slow and greasy. I pressed the back of my hand to my mouth and told myself it was the wine I hadn't even poured.

"Elena." He still did not turn around. "Go and clear your things out of the guest room. All of it. She'll sleep there."

The guest room was mine. My books, my sewing, the boxes from my mother's house I had never been able to open. The one room in that whole cold place that still felt like me.

"That's, Adrian, that room has all my," I started.

"Tonight." He cut me off without raising his voice. "Not tomorrow. Now."

"Can we just talk about where she,"

"Do you have a problem," he said, turning at last, "with me bringing my cousin into my house?"

My house.

Not ours. My.

I felt the word go in slow, like cold water under a door.

A year of marriage, and I had never once heard him say it that way. I stood there with my mouth half open and nothing coming out, because what do you say when the man who chose you starts talking about the walls around you like you are a guest in them too.

"No," I said finally. "No problem."

"Good. Then move." He turned back to Isabella. "Take your time on the stairs, she'll bring your things up."

I lifted the coat from Isabella's shoulders. It smelled like a perfume I did not own.

And she caught my eye, and she smiled.

Not the warm one this time. A small, private smile. The kind you give someone when you both know a secret and only one of you is meant to.

She wanted me to see it. Even then, I understood that much.

I carried her coat upstairs and I packed my life into the hallway, one box at a time, the sewing, the books, the sealed boxes from my mother I still could not open, out of the one room in that house I had quietly, stupidly saved for a nursery of my own someday. When it was empty I stood in the dark with one hand flat against my stomach until the sickness passed.

When I came down, they were laughing. They stopped when they heard me.

Dinner never happened. Adrian said Isabella needed rest and walked her up himself, one hand at the small of her back, the way he used to walk me.

I cleared two plates no one had touched, and poured the wine down the sink, slow, watching it swirl pink into the drain.

The study door was locked when I passed it. It was always locked. A year married, and I had never once been inside, and when I asked, he said it was work, only work, and I had learned to stop asking.

I lay on my side of the bed and waited for him.

I must have slept, because I woke to the mattress cold beside me and a voice in the hall.

His voice. Low. Softer than he had used with me in months.

I did not move. I kept my breathing even and my eyes half shut, and I listened.

"You're fine. I've got you," Adrian murmured, on the other side of a door that was not ours. "You know I would never let anything happen to you, or the baby."

A pause. The rustle of someone shifting closer.

And then, so quiet I almost missed it, the words that turned my blood to still water.

"Just a little longer. Then everything we planned is ours."