CHAPTER EIGHT

Vanessa's POV

When I got home, I tore the silver bracelet off my wrist out of rage and hurled it across the apartment.

The bracelet struck the radiator with a sharp clang and dropped out of sight behind the sofa.

Adrian did not even turn around. He stood at the kitchen counter in his good jacket and poured himself a glass of tap water, as though tonight had been an ordinary Saturday. As though my sister had not taken him apart in front of my parents, one question at a time.

“Feel better?” he asked.

“The bank turned you down.”

He drank his water.

“The bank turned you down, Adrian, and I heard the news from Isabella. From Isabella! At my father's table, with my mother looking at me as though I had married a beggar.”

“One bank.”

“How many did you try?”

Silence came as a response. 

“How many?”

He set the glass down so hard the water jumped over the rim.

“My business is none of your concern.”

I stared at him.

“None of my concern? I'm your wife!”

“Then act like one.” He yanked his tie loose and tossed the tie on the counter. “You sat there and let her.”

“I defended you!”

“You called her questions a silly little quiz.” He laughed without any humour at all. “Great help, Vanessa.”

“At least I said something! You sat there sweating while she asked you about bonds. Bonds, Adrian! Even I know...”

I stopped.

Even I knew nothing about bonds. But the man I remembered did. The man on the magazine covers did.

Adrian picked up his keys from the bowl by the door.

“Where are you going?”

“Somewhere nobody asks me about interest rates.”

“With what money?”

He turned with his hand on the doorknob.

“Ask your father. Oh, wait. Your father's furnished apartment still has painters in every room, and your father's shares are still a promise on paper. I married a Whitmore, Vanessa and I'm still paying the rent.”

The door slammed behind him as he left and the radiator banged twice.

I stood alone in the middle of the room. In despair, I looked around. 

One bedroom. A sofa with a broken spring. A kitchen smaller than my old closet. One window, and beyond the glass, a brick wall close enough to touch.

What was even worse was that the radiator banged all night. Every night. Adrian said the landlord would fix the pipes in the spring.

In my first life, I lived in the Blackwood mansion. My dressing room alone was bigger than this whole apartment and my husband never once raised his voice at me.

He never raised anything. Not his voice. Not his eyes from his papers at dinner. Not even an eyebrow on the morning his lawyers handed me the divorce papers.

And yet, tonight, he walked into my father's dining room, looked at Isabella and asked, Do you want to leave?

Five words. In our whole marriage, he never asked me a single question like those five words.

Then, in the hall, he pried Adrian's fingers off Isabella's wrist, one by one. Afterwards he glanced across the hall at me for one second in the way a man glances at a stranger.

As he should.

In this life, I was a stranger to him.

I pressed my palms against my eyes.

No. I made the right choice, I thought. I knew I made the right choice.

In my first life, Adrian Cole became the richest man in the country. I watched every step from the outside. The glass tower with Cole Global in silver letters across the front. The Westbridge Ledger calling him the sharpest financial mind of his generation. Isabella on his arm at every gala in diamonds, smiling her quiet little smile as though she had done nothing to deserve any of them.

She had done nothing. Adrian did everything. Everyone said so.

So why had he sat at my father's table tonight with sweat on his upper lip, unable to answer questions my sister asked without blinking?

Nerves, I thought while nodding repeatedly as if to assure myself. Geniuses had bad nights after all. He was twenty-seven, and the bank had embarrassed him, and Isabella had ambushed him with textbook nonsense.

And Isabella...

I lowered my hands.

Isabella smiled when I chose Adrian. She handed me a billionaire's future without a single tear. Tonight she knew about the bank. She knew about Father's plans. She sat at the table and ate lamb while Father screamed at her, and she did not even put down her fork.

The Isabella I grew up with cried when a waiter frowned at her.

Why was she different now?

A chill crept down my spine as a thought came to me but I pushed it away.

Impossible. People did not come back from the dead. I did but I was different. I had to be different.

I got down on my knees beside the sofa and reached into the gap behind the cushions for the bracelet. First, dust. Then a coin and a hairpin. Then cold silver under my fingers.

My hand closed around the chain.

And the room disappeared.

***

Cold air struck my face.

Traffic roared past. Horns. Wet pavement. A wide city street under a white sky.

Across the road, a man stood under a bus shelter.

It was Adrian.

But it was not the Adrian who had slammed the door ten minutes ago. This man was thin. His coat was torn at the shoulder. His face was unshaven, his cheeks hollow, and his eyes were empty. He stared up at a tall building. Floor after floor of glass, shining against the sky.

A black car stopped in front of the building.

A woman stepped out.

It was Isabella.

She wore a dark suit, and her hair was pinned up, and she walked slowly, with one hand resting low on the front of her jacket. In her other hand she held our grandmother's emerald necklace, the gold chain wound through her fingers.

A doorman held the glass door open for her.

She did not look across the street. Not once.

Adrian watched her walk inside. He did not move.

Then the street tipped sideways and went black.

***

I woke on the floor of the apartment with my cheek pressed against the rug.

Something warm ran over my lip. I touched my face and my fingers came away red.

It was blood. My nose was bleeding.

I sat up too fast, and the room spun. The bracelet lay beside my knee.

My heart pounded so hard I heard each beat in my ears.

What was happening to me? What on earth was happening?

I snatched up the bracelet and squeezed the silver until the clasp bit into my palm.

Nothing.

I touched the radiator, the brick wall and the green numbers on the oven clock.

Still nothing.

I grabbed my lipstick from my bag. Nothing. My phone. Nothing. The pearl ring Mother gave me on my sixteenth birthday. Nothing.

Only the bracelet had something and it was only once.

I sat on the rug with blood drying on my chin and tried to understand what I had seen.

Adrian, ruined. Isabella, walking into a glass tower as though she owned the building.

As though she owned everything.

“No,” I whispered. “No. The story doesn't end like this.”

I washed my face in the bathroom with cold water. The woman in the mirror looked pale and frightened, with a smear of pink still under one nostril. I scrubbed the smear away.

I couldn't tell anyone. 

Who would I even tell? Mother would call a doctor. Father would call me hysterical. Adrian would laugh at me, and then he would go back to his bar.

Nah, I couldn't tell anybody.

***

At two in the morning, the front door opened.

Adrian stumbled in smelling of whiskey and somebody else's cigarettes. He dropped his keys twice before the keys landed in the bowl. He did not turn on the light.

I lay still in the dark bedroom and listened to him kick off his shoes.

The bed sagged even as his hand found my hip.

I had two choices. Push him away and lose him a little more. Or win him back.

I knew how to win a man back. I learned in my first life, in hotel rooms and borrowed apartments, from a man who taught me everything a man likes in the dark.

I sat up and pulled my nightdress over my head.

Adrian's breath caught just then. 

I pushed him onto his back and climbed on top of him. I used every move I remembered. The slow roll of my hips. My hair falling across his chest. My mouth at his ear, whispering his name the way he liked to hear his name.

He grabbed my hips hard enough to leave marks and pulled me down onto him.

He did not kiss me. He did not even look at me. His eyes stayed closed, and his fingers dug into my skin, and he moved under me fast and rough, chasing his own pleasure as though I was not even there.

He groaned, shuddered, and went still. Then he rolled out from under me and turned onto his side.

Everything lasted for four minutes.

I lay back on the pillow and made the soft, satisfied sound he expected. Then I stared at the water stain on the ceiling.

I remembered the bed I shared with Nathaniel. How it was wide and cold and silent. He touched me rarely. When he did, he was polite and quiet, and afterwards he went back to his study.

I had hated his bed.

So why did this one feel worse?

“Adrian.”

“Mm.”

“Promise me two things.”

He grunted into the pillow in response.

I continued anyway. “The firm becomes Cole Global on Monday. New cards. New sign. New everything.”

“Fine.”

“And you stop thinking small.”

“Whatever you want.”

His breathing slowed. Within a minute, he was asleep with his back to me.

I lay awake and listened to the radiator.

Then he murmured something into his pillow. It was one word. Soft. Almost tender.

“Isabella.”