CHAPTER SIX

Back at the Blackwell mansion.

Leslie returned from the salon late in the afternoon. Her hair was perfect now. Shiny. Styled. Expensive looking.

It made her feel like even more of a fraud.

She stood in the entrance hall for a moment after the driver dropped her off, looking at herself in the large mirror by the door. The woman staring back at her had perfect hair and hollow eyes and a face that had learned to show nothing.

She barely recognized her.

Eight months ago she had been a waitress who laughed too loud and cried at commercials and called her mother every single day. Now she stood in a mansion that cost more than her entire neighborhood and felt less like a person than she ever had in her life.

She turned away from the mirror and walked inside.

She heard the voices before she reached the sitting room.

Laughter. Coming from behind the partially open door.

Her stomach twisted.

She knew that laugh.

Victoria.

Leslie walked quietly toward the sound, her heels barely making noise on the marble. The door to the sitting room was partially open. Through the gap, she could see them.

Tony was on the couch. Victoria was next to him. Close. Too close. Her hand was on his arm. She was laughing at something he said.

And he was smiling.

Actually smiling.

Leslie had never seen him smile like that. Not once in their entire marriage. Not at a dinner. Not at an event. Not even in the rare moments when they were alone and there was no one to perform for. This smile was different. It reached his eyes. It changed his whole face.

He looked like a different person.

He looked like someone she might have actually liked, if she had met him somewhere else. In another life. In a world where he had not stood beside her at a gala and called her unfortunate in front of cameras.

And Victoria. Victoria was different in here too. The cruelty she wore like armor in public was gone. She was looser. Softer around the edges. She moved beside Tony with the easy confidence of a she-wolf who knows exactly which territory belongs to her and has never once doubted it.

This was her pack. This was her world. And Leslie was the intruder who had wandered in without knowing the rules.

“You’re terrible,” Victoria said, playfully hitting his shoulder.

“I’m honest,” Tony replied. His voice was warm. Relaxed. Nothing like the cold, sharp tone he used with Leslie.

“Remember that trip to Monaco?” Victoria leaned in closer. “When you got us kicked out of that casino?”

“They couldn’t prove anything.”

“Because I covered for you!” Victoria laughed again. “God, we had fun.”

“We did.”

There was a pause. A comfortable silence between them. The kind of silence that only exists between people who have known each other long enough to stop filling every gap with words.

Leslie had never had a silence like that with Tony. Every quiet moment between them felt like a held breath. Like waiting for something sharp to land.

Then Victoria said quietly, “I miss it. Us.”

Tony didn’t respond immediately.

Leslie held her breath, watching through the gap in the door. She told herself she should walk away. She told herself she didn’t care. She told herself that this marriage was fake and Tony meant nothing to her and Victoria was welcome to him.

She kept watching anyway.

“Things are complicated now,” Tony said finally.

“Because of her?” Victoria’s voice turned cold. “Your charity case wife?”

“Don’t call her that.”

The words surprised Leslie. She hadn’t expected that. She had expected him to agree, or to laugh, or to say nothing the way he usually said nothing when people were cruel about her.

But Victoria was not impressed.

“Why not? It’s what she is.” She sat back slightly. “Tony, you know you don’t belong with someone like her. She’s not one of us. She doesn’t understand our world. She never will.”

She’s not one of us.

The words landed differently than Victoria intended. Leslie felt them settle somewhere beneath her skin, somewhere she couldn’t quite name. Not one of us. It had always felt like a class thing, a wealth thing, a world thing.

But standing here in the corridor of this house, listening through a door, something about those words felt older than money. Deeper than status.

She shook it off.

“She serves a purpose.”

And there it was.

Those four words landed in Leslie’s chest like something cold and heavy. She serves a purpose. Not she is kind. Not she is trying. Not she deserves better than what we are doing to her.

She serves a purpose.

“For now.” Victoria’s voice turned soft. Seductive. “But eventually, that contract ends. And when it does, we could have what we had before. What we should have had all along.”

Leslie’s chest tightened.

Tony was quiet for a long moment.

She watched him. She watched the way he looked at Victoria, that particular kind of looking that happens when someone has memorized a face without meaning to.

He had never looked at Leslie like that.

Not once.

Then he said, “My mother.”

“Your mother made a mistake choosing that girl over me,” Victoria interrupted. Her voice dropped low and warm like dark honey, the kind of voice that wraps around a person and pulls. “And you know it. I know this family. I know this world. I know you.”

She leaned in, her fingers trailing slowly up his arm, her lips close to his ear.

“And I know how to make you happy in ways she never could.”

Tony’s jaw tightened. His hand moved to cover hers.

He didn’t pull away.

Leslie turned and walked.

She did not cry going up the stairs.

That was new.

Three weeks ago she would have. Two weeks ago she would have pressed herself against the wall halfway up and sobbed silently into her sleeve so no one would hear. One week ago she would have at least felt the burn behind her eyes, that familiar pressure that came before the tears.

Tonight there was nothing.

Just a quiet, flat stillness where the pain used to be.

She closed her bedroom door. Locked it. Changed into her old t-shirt and sweatpants, the ones she had brought from her real life, soft from too many washes, faded at the collar. She sat on the bed.

She stared at the wall.

And waited.

It did not take long.

Through the wall, from the direction of Tony’s room, she heard Victoria’s laughter first. Low and deliberate. The kind of laugh designed to be heard. Then Tony’s voice, too muffled to make out words but warm in a way it never was with Leslie. Then the sounds that followed, the shift and murmur of two people who had been doing this long enough to know exactly what the other one wanted.

Leslie reached over and turned on her bedside radio.

She found a station playing something soft and turned the volume up just enough.

Then she lay back on the pillow and looked at the ceiling.

She thought about her mother. Whether she had taken her medication today. Whether her brother had submitted his college application on time. Whether the debt collector had called again this week.

She thought about everything except what was happening three doors down the hall.

Because it did not matter.

It had never mattered. This marriage was a contract. Tony was a signature and a last name and an obligation she was enduring until the calendar ran out. Victoria was welcome to whatever was left of him.

Leslie was done spending her tears on people who had never once lost a night’s sleep over her.

Outside, the moon had risen full and heavy over the estate, pressing silver light through the curtains, flooding the floor in a pale glow that made the room look like something out of a dream. Leslie watched it without thinking about it. Just watched the light move slowly across the floor as the hours passed.

Somewhere around midnight she heard Victoria leave. The click of heels in the corridor. The soft close of the front door.

Silence settled back over the house.

Leslie turned off the radio.

She lay in the quiet and let herself feel the fullness of it. The enormous, heavy quiet of being the only person in a crowded house who was completely, entirely alone.

And then something strange happened.

In the dark, something stirred low in her chest. Not pain. Not grief. Something else entirely. Something that had no name she recognized. It moved through her like a current, warm and restless, and for a moment her fingers curled against the sheets, her nails pressing into the fabric with a sharpness that surprised her.

She looked at her hand.

Her nails were fine. Normal. Nothing had changed.

She exhaled slowly.

She was tired. She was overworked and underfed and emotionally hollowed out by eight months in a house that treated her like furniture. Her body was doing strange things because of it.

That was all.

She closed her eyes.

But sleep did not come easily. The moon outside was too bright, too full, pressing through the curtains like it wanted something from her. Like it was watching. Like it knew something she didn’t.

Leslie pulled the blanket over her head.

Tomorrow, she told herself.

Tomorrow she would figure out how to survive another day in this house.

She always did.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​