CHAPTER FOUR

Evi - POV

“Calista called at eleven on a Friday night,” which meant she already knew something was wrong before I said a word.

That was the thing about Calista. She didn’t wait for you to fall apart before she showed up. She had a radar for the quiet kind of pain, the kind people carry without making noise about it, and she had been pointing it at me since we were nineteen years old sharing a flat with broken heating and too many instant noodles.

“Talk,” she said when I picked up.

“I’m fine.”

“Evi.”

I sat down on the edge of the bed and looked at the wall. Our bedroom. His and mine, though he had made it very clear in the three weeks since returning home that the word “ours” was a technicality rather than a reality.

He slept on his side. I slept on mine. The space between us in that bed every night felt wider than the actual distance.

“He called it an arrangement,” I said. “To my face. In the library. Like I was a contractor he was updating on the terms of a project.”

Calista was quiet for a moment. The particular quiet of a woman choosing between what she wants to say and what she knows I need to hear.

“And you said?”

“Alright.”

“Evi-”

“What was I supposed to say, Cal?” I kept my voice low. The house had ears and I had learned that early. “Was I supposed to cry? Argue? Tell him he has me wrong?”

“You could have told him the truth.”

“He doesn’t want the truth. He wants a transaction.” I lay back against the headboard and stared at the ceiling. “So that’s what I’ll give him.”

She made a sound that meant she disagreed but knew better than to push tonight. That was the other thing about Calista, she knew when to hold her argument and when to just stay on the line.

We talked for another hour about nothing important. Her job, a film she had seen, a terrible date she had been on with a man who spent the entire dinner talking about his ex. Normal things. I needed normal things badly that night and she knew it without being told.

After I hung up I sat in the quiet of the bedroom for a long time.

The estate at night had a particular kind of silence, heavy and expensive, the silence of thick walls and high ceilings and too many empty rooms. I had gotten used to it over four years. It used to unsettle me in the beginning, all that space and quiet, coming from a small apartment where you could hear your neighbors through the walls. Now I moved through it easily.

I knew every creak of the floorboards on the second landing. I knew which door didn’t close properly unless you lifted the handle slightly. I knew this house better than I knew most people.

That knowledge meant nothing to the man who owned it.

I heard him before I saw him, footsteps in the corridor outside, unhurried and deliberate. They stopped outside the bedroom door. A pause that lasted slightly longer than it needed to. Then the door opened and Evanthe came in.

He looked at me on the bed without expression. I looked back.

This was how most of our evenings went. Two people occupying the same space with the careful precision of people who have agreed without words to keep a certain distance.

He would come in late. I would already be there. We would exchange nothing or very little and the night would pass and morning would come and we would do it again.

He moved to his side of the room. Removed his watch. Set it on the nightstand the way he did every night, same spot, same movement, same order. Four years unconscious and the habit was still in his hands.

“The Harmon account closes tomorrow,” he said without looking at me. “I’ll be back late.”

I didn’t know why he told me these things. He had been doing it since he came home, small logistical updates delivered in the tone of a man dictating notes. Not conversation. Not warmth. Just information transferred from one party to another.

“I’ll let the kitchen know,” I said.

He nodded. Turned slightly.

And then he looked at me, really looked, the way he almost never did. Not the assessing look from the hospital, not the cold calculation of the library. Something else. Something that didn’t have a clean name and lasted only a second before he pulled it back.

“You don’t have to wait up,” he said.

“I wasn’t waiting,” I said. “This is my room too.”

Something shifted in his jaw, a muscle working quietly. He turned away.

I watched his back and felt the pull of it, that persistent, inconvenient, completely irrational pull that four years of silence had built and three weeks of coldness had not managed to kill.

I hated it. I had been hating it since the morning after the first night he reached for me across that wide careful distance and I had been foolish enough not to move away.

That had been a week ago and neither of us had mentioned it.

He got into bed. I turned off the lamp on my side. The dark settled between us, thick and full of everything neither one of us was going to say.

“Evanthe,” I said quietly.

A beat.

“What.”

I almost said it. The real thing, the words I had been carrying since before he even knew my name. The years of it. The quiet impossible weight of loving someone who looked at you and saw a contract.

“Nothing,” I said. “Goodnight.”

He said nothing back.

I lay in the dark and listened to his breathing even out and I made myself a promise, quiet, private, the kind you make when you finally get tired of breaking your own heart.

I was going to stop waiting for him to see me.

Whatever it cost me, I was done waiting.