Chapter 7

AURORA

I washed my face.

That is the part nobody would believe. I went up my own stairs with my husband watching me from the bottom of them, and I went into my own bathroom, and I turned on the tap and put cold water on my face with both hands like a woman doing exactly what she had been told.

Then I left the tap running.

I needed the sound. The pipes in that house ran down through the wall behind the living room and he would hear it through the ceiling, and as long as he could hear it he would think he knew where I was.

I looked at myself in the mirror for about two seconds.

I did not recognise the woman looking back, and I did not have time to.

Move.

The bedroom was dark and ordinary. Our bed made, because I had made it that morning. His watch on the nightstand. A book he had been pretending to read since August.

I went into the closet and shut the door behind me and turned on the little light.

His shoe boxes were stacked on the shelf above the hanging rail, six of them, the way they had been stacked for four years. I took them down one at a time and set them on the floor quietly, because quiet mattered more than fast.

And there it was. Grey. Dull. About the size of a microwave, bolted through the shelf into the stud behind it.

Four digits.

He had never changed them. He had asked me to open that safe for him so many times, his hands full, his coat on, running late, baby, grab my passport, the code's the usual, that I could have done it with my eyes shut and probably had.

I had never once opened it on my own.

I want that on the record, because four years is a long time to be in a house and never open the one locked thing in it. That was not trust. I understand the difference now. Trust is a decision you make. What I had was something closer to not being curious about a man I had already decided was good.

My fingers were shaking so badly the first attempt failed.

I pressed my thumb hard into the shelf, counted to three, and did it again.

It opened.

---

Inside there was less than I expected, which frightened me more than a lot would have.

His passport. Mine. Two envelopes of cash, neither of them thick. A watch that had been his father's. The deed to the house. A spare set of car keys.

And a plain grey folder, soft at the corners, maybe forty pages.

I took the folder out and sat down on the closet floor with my back against the wall and my phone in my hand, and I photographed every single page.

Not read. Photographed.

That was the only clear decision I made that whole night and I still think it was the right one, because if I had started reading on page one I would have been there until morning and I would have had nothing.

So I went fast. Phone up, flash off, shoot, turn, shoot, turn. I counted them as I went, the way I have counted things my whole life when I am frightened.

One. The mortgage.

Two. Insurance on the house.

Three. Something from an accountant with a logo I half recognised.

Four. A page of bank statements. His personal account. A standing order going out every month on the ninth, the same amount, to something called Greyfield House, and it had been going out every month for longer than the page covered.

I did not know what Greyfield House was.

I photographed it and turned the page.

Five. A loan agreement for the Hamilton development, which was the only thing he had talked about at dinner for a year. Numbers with too many zeros. A schedule of repayments. A lender named at the top of it that meant nothing to me at all, some trust or other, the Hartwell Trust, and I remember thinking only that it was a long document and that I was going too slowly.

Six. The second page of the same agreement.

Downstairs, a door opened.

I went completely still with the phone in the air.

"Aurora?"

His voice came up through the floor. Easy. Unhurried.

I did not answer.

The tap was still running in the bathroom. I listened to it, and I listened to him listening to it, and after a moment I heard him move back across the living room and the door closed again.

I breathed out.

Then I turned to page seven.

---

It was shorter than the others. One sheet. A lot of white space and a lot of small print and three lines near the bottom where people sign.

The heading said it was an assignment of shares.

I read it twice before any of it went in, and then I read the third line of it and my ears started ringing.

I knew the night. That was the thing. I knew the night immediately, before I had even finished the sentence, the way you recognise a song from one note.

It had been the end of June and it had been hot and we had eaten on the back step because the kitchen was too warm. He had a glass of red in one hand and a folder in the other and he had been apologetic about it, laughing, saying he hated bringing work home, saying Dorian's accountant had been on at him for weeks about the way we were set up.

It's a tax thing, baby. It's boring. It saves us about nine grand a year and it means if the studio ever gets sued they can't come after the house.

He had put the folder on his knee and held the pen out to me.

And I had taken it, and I had signed where his thumb was, and I had not read one word of it, because I had been twenty-seven years old and in love and tired, and because he had never in his life given me a reason not to.

I had signed three pages that night.

He had turned each one for me himself.

I sat on the floor of my own closet with the grey folder open on my knees and the tap running down the wall behind me and my sister sitting on my couch in my robe two floors below, and I looked at the bottom of page seven.

My signature. The real one. The loop I have put on everything since I was fifteen, on every contract and every birthday card and every school form I ever signed for Noelle.

And above it, the thing I had given away.

Not the house. Not the car. Not money.

The studio. My mother's name over the door on Cranmer Street, the one I started in a rented room with two folding tables and her sewing scissors, the one I built for six years while he told everybody at every dinner party how proud of me he was.

Sixty percent of it. In my own handwriting. Dated the second anniversary of the day I married him.