Chapter 4: A Face I've Never Seen Before

The photograph just sits there on the blanket. I make myself pick it up, my hand not quite steady, and I hate that, hate that this body keeps giving away what I feel before I've decided to feel it.

It's me. Or it's Rowan, before I was in here wearing him. Same face, dark hair pushed back, standing in some hallway with white columns and a window behind him letting in flat gray light, the kind you get right before evening turns into something else. A man's hand rests on his waist. Low. Easy. Like it's done that before.

I don't know the man's face. Never seen it. Not in this life, not in the one before it, and there's something almost funny about that in a sick sort of way — I'm being accused of a betrayal I can't even picture well enough to argue against.

"I don't know him," I say.

"Of course you don't."

"I'm serious. I've never seen this man."

He laughs, if you can call it that. Just air through his teeth. "You're holding a photo of yourself with him. Taken three weeks before our wedding. Two floors below where we're standing right now. And you want me to believe you don't know him."

"This morning I didn't know your name either. Didn't recognize this room. Didn't recognize my own hands, Caius." Saying it out loud sounds insane even to me. "So yes. I don't know him. I understand exactly how that sounds. It's still true."

Something flickers in his face. Not belief. Not yet. But a hesitation, a hairline crack where a second ago there was nothing but certainty.

Iris has gone quiet in the corner, watching like she isn't sure she's allowed to have an opinion in this room.

"Where'd you get it," I ask.

"Doesn't matter."

"It matters to me. Somebody followed me. Photographed me. Close enough to catch that." I put the picture down, face up, because I can't keep looking at it, at this stranger's hand on a waist that's mine now whether I asked for it or not. "Who sends you photos of your own husband? Who does that, Caius?"

He doesn't answer. Which tells me plenty on its own.

"Someone who wants this marriage gone," I say, working it out as the words come. "Someone who wins if you throw me out. If there's a scandal. If the kid turns out to be someone else's."

"Careful," he says. Low.

"I'm not trying to be clever. I'm saying what's obvious." I look at him properly now, past the anger, trying to find whatever's underneath it. "Somebody wanted you to see this today. Not last week. Today. Same morning a doctor tells you the dates are wrong. That's not bad luck. That's timing."

He stares at me a beat too long, and something raw moves across his face, something that looks almost like he wants to believe me and hates that he wants it.

"Marcus was already here," Iris says, quiet, from her corner. We both turn. "Before you came in. He knew about the pregnancy before we told anyone."

Caius's jaw tightens. "He was here."

"Let himself in. Rowan told him eleven weeks before I could stop it."

"You told him."

"I wasn't thinking straight." True. No version of this makes it sound better, so I don't try. "He walked in already acting like something was wrong, and I said too much. I know."

Caius drags a hand down his face and for the first time since I woke up he looks less like ice and more like a man who hasn't slept properly in longer than this morning, carrying something heavy long before I ever opened my eyes in this body.

"He's had this a while," he says, mostly to himself, turning the photograph over like it might say something different on the back. "Sitting on it. Waiting for the moment that hurts most."

"Why today, then?"

"Because today gives him two things instead of one." He looks up. "A pregnancy the timeline can't explain. A man in a photo he can point at. He doesn't need proof, Rowan. He just needs people wondering."

"Then find out who the man is." I fold my arms, more to have something to do with them than anything else. "If it's not what it looks like there's an answer somewhere. People don't just vanish. Somebody knows his name."

"You think I haven't tried."

"I think you've tried to catch me lying. Not the same as trying to find the truth." My voice comes out sharper than planned, and I let it stay that way. "You've spent this whole morning deciding what I am before you asked me one real question. So ask. Ask something you actually want an answer to."

He looks at me a long moment. Long enough that Iris shifts her weight, uncomfortable, the way you do standing too near something private.

"Fine," he says. "Who is he."

"I don't know."

"That's not an answer."

"It's the only one I've got." I hold his eyes, don't look away first, because something tells me that matters with this man, that he reads every flinch like a confession. "I'm telling you the truth. I don't know his name. I don't remember that hallway. I don't remember marrying you, or humiliating your mother, or any single thing you think I did. I woke up in the middle of somebody else's disaster this morning and I'm trying badly to survive it."

Quiet, except the ultrasound machine humming itself down on the side table.

Then footsteps out in the hall. Fast. Too fast for staff, too loud for someone just passing.

The door bangs open before either of us can react. Garrison Caius's steward, I've picked that much up by now stands there out of breath, tie crooked, and something close to panic on a face I'd bet doesn't usually show much of anything.

"My lord." His eyes go past Caius, straight to me, and whatever he's about to say, he clearly wishes it wasn't in this room. "The man from the photograph. He's downstairs. Asking for Rowan. By name."