Chapter 3: The Things He Keeps Locked

The bracelet stayed in my head for three days. I did not sleep on it so much as circle it.

Then a morning came when the shower ran and Adrian was humming behind the glass, and before I could talk myself out of it, I crossed to his side of the room and opened the drawer.

I told myself I only wanted to be wrong. I wanted, so badly, to find nothing and feel foolish and go make breakfast like a normal wife.

The receipt for the bracelet was where I remembered. Twenty-two hundred dollars. Eight months old.

It was not alone.

Under it, a second slip. A necklace. Four thousand dollars.

Under that, a boutique receipt for a coat. Wine colored.

I had watched that coat walk through my front door three nights ago, with a pregnant woman inside it.

My hands started to shake. There were more slips beneath, a whole small stack of them, and I could not make myself count. The room tilted. I gripped the edge of the drawer.

The water shut off.

"What are you doing."

I turned. He stood in the bathroom doorway with a towel at his waist, water running down his chest, and his eyes went straight to the papers trembling in my hand.

"These are," my voice cracked and I hated it, "Adrian, what are all these."

"Put them back."

"A necklace. A coat." I could hardly get the air behind the words. "Eight months. You have been buying her things for eight months."

He crossed the room, slow, and he did not shout, and that was so much worse.

"You went through my drawer," he said.

"Please. Just tell me I'm wrong. Tell me there's some,"

He took the receipts out of my hand. Not roughly. Just certain, the way you take something from a child who should not be holding it.

"After I asked you," he said quietly, "this morning, for one simple thing. And this is what you do behind my back."

"I'm not the one doing something behind,"

His hand closed around my wrist.

Not a slap. Not a shove. Just his fingers, tightening, slow and deliberate, until the small bones shifted and the breath stalled in my throat.

"You go through my things again," he said, close enough that I could smell the soap on his skin, "and you will regret it. Are we clear."

I did not pull away.

I went still, the way you go still when something with teeth already has you, when moving is the thing that ends you. My eyes burned. I would not let them spill in front of him. I would not give him that.

And under the fear, small and cold and certain, a thought arrived that I had held off for months. I am afraid of my husband. I have been afraid of him for a long time.

"Adrian?" A voice at the door. Soft. Shaken. "I heard shouting. Is everything okay?"

Isabella.

He let go of my wrist. The blood rushed back into it, hot, and I cradled it against my stomach and said nothing, because nothing would come.

"Oh." Her eyes moved from the receipts in his hand to my face, and softened, and filled with pity. "Oh, Elena. No. Please tell me this isn't about me."

I could not speak. My throat had closed around the words.

"I told him," she said, turning to Adrian, wounded, one hand pressed to her chest. "I said she will find them and it will break her heart and she will think the worst of us. I never wanted any of it. You know I didn't." Back to me, so gentle it made me dizzy. "He was only being kind to family. Please don't turn his kindness into something ugly. Please, Elena."

And just like that, the floor moved under me.

The receipts were not proof of his lie anymore. In her mouth they had become proof of mine. My jealousy. My ugliness. My small, suspicious heart.

Adrian looked at her the way a man looks at the only calm person in a room full of noise.

"You see," he said to me. "She has more grace about this than you do. And it is her the whole thing is about."

I stood there shaking, and every word I might have said turned to ash before it reached my mouth, because I already knew that whatever I said would only prove them right.

So I said nothing. And the silence felt like going under water.

Adrian dressed while they left me standing there. Shirt. Watch. Then he lifted something off the nightstand and slid it into his pocket, quick, out of habit.

A lighter. Silver, catching the light.

Adrian did not smoke. I had never once seen him smoke.

Engraved on its side, small, were two initials, and neither of them was an A, and neither of them was a B.

I do not know why I noticed. I only know that I did, and that I tucked it away with the bracelet and the coat and the sentence in the hall, in the quiet place inside me that had started keeping a list I never asked to keep.

"We'll be late for the scan," Isabella said. "The seven month one."

"I know. Get your coat."

Not a word to me. Not a glance to ask whether I might want to come, to sit in a waiting room for an hour and pretend to be a wife.

I could not stand in that room and watch him wrap her into that coat with his hands. I turned and walked out, into the kitchen, and gripped the counter and stared at the wall and waited for the sound of the door so this could be over.

Their voices came low from the front hall. His, then hers. I did not try to hear them. I did not want to.

Then Isabella's voice lifted, just slightly, just enough, the way you raise your voice when you mean for it to travel through a wall to the woman on the other side.

Soft. Warm. Certain.

"Our baby needs you."

The front door opened, and closed.

And I stood alone in my kitchen with my bruised wrist against my chest, and the only word left ringing in the whole silent house was that one.

Our.