I Made a Deal With the Devil

My name was Eleanor Vance. An ordinary woman. And I was dead.

I had died on that guardrail-less cliff road in northern Maine. One rain-lashed morning, my car lost control on a slick curve, went over the edge, and drove down into the churning Atlantic below. No witnesses. No skid marks. Not even time to scream for help.

I made a deal with the Devil. He gave me seven days back among the living. Seven days to set my own affairs in order with my own hands. After that, my soul would be his.

I turned it over and over, and there was only one person I could entrust this to. My husband, Julian Ashford.

Today happened to be our third wedding anniversary.

Eleven hours after my death, I dragged a suitcase home.

The case was heavy. My body lay folded at the very bottom, wrapped in the black body bag the Devil had given me, a few clothes tossed on top for cover. The illness a month back had worn me down to a hundred and five pounds. Otherwise I couldn't have hauled even myself. The canvas strap cut a deep groove into my shoulder. Not that I could feel the pain anymore.

I had barely dragged the case into the front hall when Julian, on his way out, came face to face with me.

He stepped down from that gleaming black Bentley, his perfectly cut suit hugging his frame. Broad shoulders, narrow waist, beautiful in the way of a man about to be peeled off a magazine cover. Three generations of Ashford old money had watered him into this gilded, lacquered thing. Even past thirty-five, he could still make a room full of women hold their breath.

His gaze landed on the bulging suitcase. He raised an eyebrow, and his mouth curled into its usual sneer.

"Out before dawn, home dragging a suitcase. What tragic little drama is this? If Mrs. Ashford means to run away from home, she might as well pick a time when there's an audience."

I looked at him quietly, and I smiled. But deep in my chest, something twisted, pulse by pulse.

The old me would have dredged up the hair tie on the spot and fought him from the front hall to the study. "I'm not running away. Just going off for a few days. I'll be back."

Julian stared at me for two seconds. The sneer caught for a moment in his eyes. He must have sensed something was off about me today. He opened his mouth as if to ask, then asked nothing at all, only tugged the hair tie from his cuff, unhurried, and slipped it into his trouser pocket.

He didn't press. That was like him. All these years, he had never bothered to spend an extra question mark on me.

I had known whose hair tie it was since the night before. Before I climbed that cliff road, my phone screen had lit up notification after notification. Page Six alerts from the New York Post, popping one after another. "Real Estate Heir Drives Starlet Home Late at Night." "Julian Ashford and Oscar Winner Vivienne Cole Rumored to Be Living Together." In the photo, that same pale-purple hair tie was looped around Vivienne's wrist.

Vivienne Cole, the newly minted Oscar winner. The women around Julian had come and gone over the years. She had lasted the longest.

His affairs were nothing new, either.

The first time I caught him, I cried and screamed and smashed a whole set of bone china.

The second time, I'd packed my bags in silence and let him talk me out of leaving. This time, I'd meant to make one last scene, calling him in the rain, not watching the curve ahead.

By the time I understood what was happening, the whole car had already carried me over the cliff.

Yet standing here now, I realized I had no desire to ask anymore.

That heart I had once held for Julian had probably died long ago. I had just never noticed.

I dragged the case upstairs, took the body bag out, and hid it in the closet of the guest room. The one we had slept apart in for a year, the room he would never set foot in. The Devil had said the body, sealed in that bag, would not rot or give off the faintest smell for seven days.

Going back downstairs, Henry the butler came up to meet me, lowering his voice as if afraid to disturb something. "Madam, Mr. Ashford had the staff prepare your anniversary gift yesterday. It's in the living room."

Henry had been a butler in the Ashford house for nearly fifty years. He was the only person in this cold, hollow house who still cared about keeping up appearances between Julian and me.

Something caught in my throat.

The thing I had longed for and never gotten in life, delivered into my hands only after death. It was almost laughably cruel.

In the center of the living room, Julian stood glaring at an open box of black velvet, his face dark enough to wring water from.

A set of sapphires lay inside, a gilt-edged card pressed beside them. I stepped closer and caught the line printed on it:

"To Mr. Julian Ashford and Miss Vivienne Cole. May you walk hand in hand, every road smooth and bright."

One of his people had switched the boxes. The gift meant for Vivienne, swapped with mine.

The young master of the Ashford house, nailed through the chest by a greeting card.

He snatched up his phone, his voice cold enough to crack against marble. "A whole team, and they can't get one thing right. Tell HR to clear out everyone who touched this account tonight. Every last one of them—"

"Don't."

I reached out and pressed down the hand about to dial.

The instant my fingertips touched the back of his hand, he stilled, almost imperceptibly. I knew why. My hand was cold, unnaturally cold. But he had long since gotten used to it over the years, chalking it up to my naturally poor circulation, never thinking twice. He couldn't have known that the dead can never be warmed again.

"It's just a card." I drew my hand back. "Reprint it and be done. No need to cost a whole team their jobs over this."

Julian gripped the phone, frozen in place. He turned his head to look at me, the shock in his eyes not even hidden.

"Eleanor. Someone just handed you a weapon. Why not use it to against me and stir up chaos? Instead, you're defending them?"

I gave a small shrug. "I'm tired. I don't have it in me to fight anyone over things like this anymore."

He stared at me for a long time. Long enough that I thought he would finally ask something. But he only swallowed back the "clear them all out," dropped a hard, cold "Dock their bonus for the quarter," and hung up. No questions, no softening, as if this small strangeness in me wasn't worth a sliver more of his attention.

After he hung up, he picked up his whiskey and said, out of nowhere, "You didn't used to be like this."

I lifted my eyes to him.

"The old Eleanor Vance," he took a sip, his gaze roaming my face like he was trying to place a stranger, "could cry or laugh over a single word from me. Could tear half this house apart over another woman's hair tie. Now look at you. Cold as a stone."

His mouth curved into something I couldn't read. "I really do miss the way you used to fall to pieces."

I didn't answer.

I had no energy left to be angry. Not anymore.

Julian set the glass down, as if remembering the real matter at hand. "Go on, then. What do you want for the anniversary? I'll make it up to you."

I shook my head.

"I don't want the sapphires. I don't want anything else. There's only one thing I want." I looked at him. "Drive me up to the northern coast. Just the two of us, you drive, seven days round trip."

Julian's hand stopped halfway, glass in the air. His mouth curled slowly into that sneer, as if he had finally seen through something.

"So that's it. All this gracious, understanding act, the whole long way around, just to ask me to take you on a trip."

I almost didn't know whether to laugh. My image in his mind really wasn't anything good. "If that's what you want to think, then that's what it is. It's the last thing I'll ever ask for. Give it to me, and once we're back from this trip, whatever is left between us will be settled."

He probably hadn't expected me to skip even a word of protest, to deliver a plea like it was a notice.

That sneer stalled on his face for a beat. In those eyes that always saw through everyone, that were used to reading people down to the bone, something flickered for the first time. An uncertainty he didn't even notice in himself.

After a while he raised the glass again, hiding his expression behind it, and said coolly:

"Fine. I'll drive. Seven days. One more, and you find your own way home."

In my heart, I quietly added the half he would never hear:

With my body. To the sea where I most wanted to rest. So you could sink me under it with your own hands.