Something in the walls

Alexandria’s POV

I heard him moving around downstairs at two in the morning.

I wasn’t asleep. I’d been lying in the guest room with the lights off, staring at the ceiling and turning his apology over in my hands like something I’d found on the ground and didn’t know if it was valuable or dangerous. I’m sorry, Alexandria. Three words, quietly, to nobody. Like he hadn’t meant for me to hear them and that was exactly why they were stuck in my throat.

The footsteps moved from the kitchen to the study. Then back. Then stopped.

I told myself I didn’t care. I pressed my face into the pillow and closed my eyes and tried to find sleep somewhere in the dark. But my body was doing things it hadn’t asked my permission for — the low persistent ache in my stomach, the way my heart kept interrupting itself, the fact that my hand kept moving to my abdomen without instruction.

I was ten weeks along, roughly. The hospital had estimated. Ten weeks of a secret growing inside me while the marriage around it was rotting from the inside out.

I got up around two thirty, not for any particular reason, just because horizontal felt dishonest when my brain was this loud.

The house was dim. One lamp was on in the study, the warm yellow light spilling out under the door into the hallway. I stood outside it for a moment like an idiot, hand not quite touching the door, listening.

Silence. Then the soft sound of something — paper, maybe. Or a book.

I pushed the door open.

He was on the couch. Not at his desk where he usually worked, not in the leather chair with his tablet and his market reports. He was on the couch with his jacket off and his sleeves pushed up and a glass of something on the table that looked mostly untouched. There was a folder in his lap but he wasn’t reading it. He was looking at the window, at the dark city outside, and when I pushed the door open he turned his head and looked at me without surprise.

Like he’d been expecting me.

That irritated me mildly.

“I heard you moving around,” I said.

“I wasn’t trying to be quiet,” he said.

I leaned against the doorframe. I hadn’t changed out of my dress properly — I’d swapped it for a loose sleep shirt and my hair was down and I was aware I looked nothing like the polished thing he usually presented to the world, but it was two thirty in the morning and I was past caring.

“You should sleep,” I said.

“So should you.”

“I couldn’t.”

“Neither could I.”

We looked at each other across the study. The lamp threw shadows in all the wrong directions, making the room feel smaller than it was, closer. I noticed the folder in his lap had my name on the tab. Not my married name. My maiden name. Grayson was his. The name on the folder was the one I was born with.

“What’s that?” I said.

He looked down at it like he’d forgotten it was there. Then he closed it and set it on the table beside the untouched drink. “Nothing you need to see tonight.”

“That’s not an answer.”

“It’s the answer I have right now.”

I wanted to push it, but I also had approximately zero energy left for confrontation and my feet were cold and the couch looked—

I sat down. Not beside him. On the opposite end, my back against the arm, my feet tucked under me. I don’t know why. I just did it and then it was done.

He didn’t say anything about it. He just shifted slightly to give me more space, which given that it was a long couch and I hadn’t sat close to him anyway was unnecessary but noted.

“Tell me something,” I said.

“What.”

“Anything. Something I don’t know about you.” I tilted my head back against the cushion and looked at the ceiling. “In ten years I realize I’ve run out of things I actually know about you versus things I assumed.”

A long pause. I thought he was going to deflect. Jamie deflected personal questions the way other people breathed — automatically, without thinking.

But then he said, “I failed my first business law exam.”

I turned my head to look at him. “What?”

“Freshman year. Business law. Failed it completely. Had to retake the module.” Something moved at the corner of his mouth that wasn’t quite a smile. “I told everyone I’d switched electives. Nobody knew.”

“I didn’t know that.”

“Nobody did. That was the point.”

I considered this. Jamie Grayson, who ran a company worth more than most small countries, who moved through rooms like the laws of gravity had been written specifically for him — failed a module and hid it from everyone for years.

“Why are you telling me now?” I asked.

He looked at me. “You asked for something you didn’t know.”

“I didn’t expect you to actually answer.”

“I know,” he said. “I’m trying to—” He stopped. His hand moved on his knee, a small restless motion he wasn’t aware he was making. “I don’t know how to do this. The talking part. I’ve always been better at fixing things externally than—”

“Than being a person?”

A breath that was almost a laugh. “Something like that.”

We sat quietly for a while. The city outside was doing what Vegas always did at this hour — glowing, restless, refusing to commit to darkness. I watched the light on the wall and tried not to think about the folder with my name on it or the baby or Kendrick or any of the ten thousand things pressing against the inside of my skull.

“I used to come in here at night,” I said. “When you were working late. I’d sit on that chair.” I pointed at the leather one by the window. “I just wanted to be in the same room as you. I thought proximity might eventually become something else.”

He was very still.

“Did it?” he asked.

“For a while I told myself it did.” I looked at my hands. “Then I stopped coming.”

“I noticed,” he said quietly. “I noticed when you stopped.”

I looked up at him. “You never said anything.”

“No.” He held my gaze and didn’t flinch from it. “I didn’t.”

The lamp hummed softly between us.

“Why not?” I asked.

And for the first time all night, Jamie Grayson had absolutely no answer.