CHAPTER THREE: IN HER SHADOW

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A month in the east wing turned me into something smaller than a person.

Six bedrooms. Three sitting rooms. A library full of books nobody read. The windows faced an interior courtyard with a fountain that did not run. I had one key, and it opened one door, and that door opened onto one corridor that ended at a locked set of double doors.

The staff brought my meals on a tray. For the first week I ate alone at a little round table by the window. By the second week I was eating standing up at the counter, because sitting at a table set for one, three times a day, was starting to do something unspeakable to me.

Vivienne had not left.

She was staying in a guest suite in the main house. Our parents had sent an "emergency bag" with her. It had turned into two trunks. Then a shipment of her easel and canvases. Mrs. Caldwell adored her. She had taken her to the horse show. She had introduced her to a shipping magnate's wife at a luncheon as the lovely girl we had hoped would be our Dante's.

I knew these things because the maid who brought my breakfast, a girl named Clara who was my age and would not quite meet my eye, let them slip sometimes. Not out of kindness. Out of the specific pleasure of telling a woman standing in a locked wing exactly how pleasant her sister's week was being.

Dante, I did not see.

Not once. For twenty-nine days I lived under the same roof as the man I was married to, and I laid eyes on him exactly zero times.

I had tried, in the first week, to apologize. I had written him a letter. I had sealed it and given it to Clara to deliver. The next morning the envelope reappeared on my breakfast tray. Unopened. Burned at one corner, as though someone had held a lighter to it, thought better, and dropped it.

I did not try again.

I read in the library because I did not know what else to do with my hands. I read every novel on the lower two shelves. I read a book about raising orchids. I read because if I stopped reading I started remembering, and if I started remembering I started hearing my sister's name whispered against my throat in the dark.

On the thirty-first day, something broke in me, and I went downstairs.

I unlocked my door, walked down the corridor, tried the double doors at the end, found them unlocked for the first time, and walked through them.

The main house was warm. There was music somewhere. There was the smell of bread baking. There was life happening in this house, and I had been living in a crypt attached to it for a month.

I followed the smell to the main kitchen, and that was where I met Mrs. Okafor.

She was my mother's age with silver streaks in her braids and a flour-dusted apron. She looked up from a mound of dough when I appeared in her doorway, and her eyes went very wide, and then very narrow, and then very soft.

"Oh, child," she said.

Just oh, child, in a voice no one had used with me in a very long time.

I started crying standing in her kitchen doorway in bare feet, and she walked across the room, wiped her hands on her apron, and put her arms around me.

She let me cry until the shoulder of her dress was wet. Then she sat me down at the butcher-block island and said, "You will tell me nothing. I will tell you nothing. We have never met. But every afternoon at three I take my coffee break in this kitchen, and if a woman happened to come down from the east wing at that time she would find the back door propped open to the herb garden, and no one would see her."

I did not know her. She did not know me. She knew enough.

Three o'clock became the only hour of my day.

I learned to make bread. I learned to shell peas. "This house eats its women," Mrs. Okafor said once, kneading dough with her fists. "Your husband was not always like this. He laughed, when he was small. A great many things got hard in this house all at once. He is a man who has decided cruelty will cost him less than kindness."

I did not have an answer to that.

On the thirty-fifth day, I baked a lemon cake. My grandmother had taught me the recipe when I was eight, and I had not thought about my grandmother in years because thinking about her hurt.

I left it on the counter when I went back upstairs.

The next morning, Clara brought my breakfast tray up and would not look at me. At the door, she hesitated.

"Mr. Caldwell asked who had made the cake."

My heart did something sharp. "What did Mrs. Okafor tell him?"

"She said one of the staff was practicing. She did not give a name." Clara finally looked up. "He ate two slices. He asked that the rest be sent to his study. He had not eaten a meal in this house in six weeks."

She closed the door.

I sat on the edge of my bed holding a cup of tea that had gone cold in my hands, and I understood, with a hot, hateful little flare in my chest, that I had just felt happy.

I had made a man happy by baking him a cake. A man who would not read my letter. A man who had held me down and said my sister's name into my hair.

I did not understand what was wrong with me.

I made another cake the next week. Olive oil and orange. He ate that one too.

By the end of the second month I had baked eleven things, and he had eaten all eleven, and I had not laid eyes on him once.

Then, on a Tuesday in the ninth week, I went downstairs at three o'clock and found Dante Caldwell standing in Mrs. Okafor's kitchen.

He was in a dark gray suit. His tie was already loose. He had a half-eaten slice of my orange cake in his hand. Mrs. Okafor had her back to me, washing something at the sink, and she did not turn around. She had set this up. She had decided for me.

He looked up.

He saw me.

The cake stopped halfway to his mouth.

For the first time in sixty-two days, my husband was looking at my face. His eyes were softer than I remembered. Startled. They raked over the apron I was wearing, over my hair in a long braid, over my bare feet.

He set the cake down on the counter very slowly, as though it might shatter.

"You," he said.

Mrs. Okafor turned off the tap and dried her hands. "I need rosemary from the garden," she said to no one at all, and walked out the back door.

The kitchen was very quiet.

"The cakes," he said. His voice sounded strange, as if he had not used it much lately either. "They were you."

"Yes."

"Why."

"I don't know. I used to bake with my grandmother."

He took one step toward me. I stepped back. He stopped.

"The letter you wrote me," he said.

"You burned it."

"I started to."

"That is the same thing."

He had the decency not to argue. He took another step. I made myself not move. He stopped two feet from me, close enough that I could smell him, soap and cold air and something darker.

"Tell me now," he said. "The thing you wrote. Say it."

I did not want to. I had already offered him the words once. I did not owe him a second attempt. But I was so, so tired.

"I didn't do what she said. I didn't lock her anywhere. I was dragged out of my room by two security guards I had known since I was ten and I was put in a car and I was brought here and I begged you, on your bed, to listen to me, and you said her name against my mouth. I just want to go."

His face did not move. But something in his eyes did. For one long moment, I thought he was going to say the thing. The thing that would unlock the door between us.

Then the kitchen door banged open behind him.

"There you are," Vivienne cooed. "Mrs. Caldwell has been looking for you for... oh."

Her eyes went from him. To me. To the apron tied around my waist. And she smiled, for one single unguarded second, before she tucked that smile away and pulled a trembling lower lip into its place.

"Dante." Her voice went soft. "What are you doing down here? With her?"

He stepped back from me so fast you would have thought I had burned him.

"Nothing. I was leaving."

He walked past me without looking at me. He walked past Vivienne and let her hand slip onto his sleeve as he went. She left her fingers there for a moment, the way a woman does when she is marking something.

At the doorway, she turned her head over her shoulder.

She looked at me. And she mouthed, very clearly, three silent words.

He's mine now.