CHAPTER TWENTY

Vanessa's POV

On a Tuesday, Northway Freight lost the largest customer on the company's books.

By Friday, Adrian had stopped sleeping.

The customer was a national retail chain with four hundred stores and a fleet of Northway trucks carrying the chain's stock up and down three states. On Tuesday morning, the chain signed with a rival carrier. Cheaper rates. Newer trucks. A press release with a photograph of two smiling men shaking hands.

On Wednesday, fuel prices jumped eleven percent.

On Thursday, Northway's finance director called Adrian four times. Adrian answered once.

By Friday, I knew the numbers better than I wanted to. Northway burned cash every single day. The trucks still had to run. The drivers still had to be paid. And on the first of December, Meridian Bridge Capital wanted the first interest payment on forty-five million dollars.

Six hundred thousand dollars.

Cole Global had a little over two hundred thousand in the bank.

On Friday night, I heard him on the phone with Marcus through the bedroom door.

“Thirty days,” Adrian said. “Ask Gideon for thirty days. Nothing more.”

Marcus laughed. I heard the laugh through the speaker, warm and easy, the laugh he used when he was about to take something from you.

“Gideon doesn't do thirty days, Adrian. Gideon does the first of the month.”

***

I woke at three in the morning on Saturday to find his side of the bed empty and the blue light of his laptop glowing under the bedroom door.

He sat at the kitchen counter in his boxers with three spreadsheets open and an untouched glass of whiskey beside the laptop. His hair stood up in tufts. He had not shaved since Wednesday.

“Come to bed.”

“Go back to sleep, Vanessa.”

“You need rest. Nobody thinks clearly at three in the morning.”

He turned on the stool.

“You want to know what I need?” His voice was quiet. Too quiet. “I need six hundred thousand dollars by the first of the month. I need a customer with four hundred stores. I need a time machine.” He laughed without humour. “And I need to stop listening to my wife.”

The words stung.

“Excuse me?”

“Northway. Northway. Northway.” He mimicked my voice, high and breathless. “Logistics is the future, Adrian. Do you want to be a king or a clerk, Adrian?” He slammed his palm on the counter. “You told me to buy!”

“And you paid the wrong price!”

“What was the right price, then? Tell me. You seem to know everything about Northway. Tell me the right price!”

I opened my mouth.

Nothing came out.

I did not know the right price. I had never known. In my first life, I had seen one headline in a magazine at the hairdresser's, and I had built my whole future on a photograph of Adrian shaking hands in front of a line of trucks.

The truth rose in my throat, cold and sour.

I had never read the article. I had never read past the headline.

“You don't know,” Adrian said slowly. “Do you? You had a feeling. You bet my company on a feeling.”

“You're the financial genius,” I spat. “You're the one who signed. Don't blame me because you never learned to read a balance sheet!”

He went white.

For one second, he looked exactly the way he had looked at my father's table, when Isabella asked him about bonds.

Then he picked up his phone and hurled the phone at the wall.

The screen exploded. Glass sprayed across the kitchen floor. The radiator banged once.

We stared at each other across the wreck.

“I'm taking a shower,” he said, and walked out.

***

I stood in the kitchen with glass around my bare feet until the water started running.

Then I tiptoed through the shards, into the bedroom, and stopped at the dresser.

His watch lay on the wooden top beside his wallet. Swiss. Rose gold. A small moon turning on the dial. Thirty thousand dollars.

He had bought the watch on the Friday the Meridian money landed. Before he paid the rent. Before he hired a single new analyst. Before he bought me anything better than a silver bracelet with a cheap clasp.

I picked up the watch.

The bedroom vanished.

***

Light. Hot white light, and the endless click of cameras.

A marble lobby. A podium with a microphone and a silver logo on the front. Cole Global. Three men and a woman in dark suits stood in a row behind the podium, board members, serious and still.

Adrian stood at the microphone.

Older. Leaner. Expensive suit. He was smiling the smile from the magazine covers in my first life, the smile of a man who owned every room he walked into.

He was speaking. I heard no words. Only the cameras.

Then the scene shifted.

Two security guards had him by the arms.

They walked him away from the podium, across the marble, towards the glass doors. His smile was gone. His mouth was open, shouting. Reporters surged towards him with microphones and phones held high. Mr. Cole! Mr. Cole!

And at the back of the lobby, beside a marble pillar, stood a woman in a dark coat with her hands folded in front of her.

Isabella.

She was not smiling. She was not frowning. She watched them drag my husband out of his own building, and her face showed nothing at all.

***

I came back sitting on the edge of the bed with the watch in my lap.

Blood ran over my lip. I tasted copper. My head throbbed behind my eyes.

In the bathroom, the shower was still running. Adrian was singing. Badly. Off key.

He had no idea.

I pressed the back of my hand to my nose and stared at the watch.

The bracelet had shown me Adrian ruined outside a glass tower while Isabella walked inside.

Now the watch showed me Adrian dragged from a podium while Isabella watched from the back of the room.

Every road ended in the same place.

Isabella.

My sister, with her quiet little face. My sister, who knew about the bank. Who knew about Father's plans. Who knew about Simon Leach. Who sat at Father's table and asked Adrian about bonds as though she already knew he would fail.

Because she did know.

When we were girls, Isabella spent every summer Sunday on Grandmother's back porch with the newspaper's financial pages spread across both their laps, while I sat inside trying on Mother's lipstick. Grandmother used to laugh at something Isabella said and call her clever. She never once called me clever.

The thought arrived whole and certain, and my stomach dropped.

She had come back too.

Isabella had come back from the first life. She remembered everything. Every deal. Every date. Every headline. And she had handed me Adrian with a smile, because she knew how his story ended this time.

She meant to destroy him.

She meant to take everything. Nathaniel's money. Adrian's future. Mine.

I sat still while the blood dried on my lip.

How did she know the future so well, when I knew only headlines?

Where did she keep her secrets? Who did she talk to? What did she touch every day?

I had held her emerald in my own hand once, on the day Isabella packed for the Blackwoods. She took the necklace back from me as though the necklace was the only thing she owned worth keeping.

And in my first vision, on the floor of this apartment, she had held the same necklace in her hand.

Grandmother's emerald.

In the bathroom, the water shut off.

I wiped the blood from my lip with the back of my wrist and put the watch back on the dresser, exactly where he had left the watch.

Adrian came out in a towel, steam rolling off his shoulders. He walked past me to his side of the bed, lay down with his back to me, and pulled the covers over his head.

He did not notice the blood on my wrist. He did not ask why I was sitting in the dark.

Within five minutes, he was asleep.

If Isabella had come back to destroy us, I would not sit in this apartment and wait for her.

“Then I'll destroy her first,” I whispered.