chapter 3

Point of View: Elena

"Where did you get that cufflink," I asked, before I had decided it was a question I actually wanted answered.

Alexander looked down at his own wrist like he had forgotten it was there. We were standing in the private elevator of his building, the one that required a key card instead of a floor number, on our way up to sign the last of the paperwork before the wedding two days from now. Silver, engraved with a small compass rose, worn smooth at one edge the way things get worn when someone rubs their thumb over them without noticing.

"It was a gift," he said. "Why."

"No reason."

It was not no reason. I had seen that exact compass rose once before, a year ago, in a ballroom I had only gotten into because Priya's catering company needed an extra pair of hands and I had needed the extra hundred dollars badly enough not to ask questions. A blackout masquerade, they had called it, every guest required to wear a mask until midnight, no names allowed until the lights came up. I had spent that whole strange, glittering night talking to a man I never saw clearly, a voice low and unguarded in a way I had assumed only existed in the dark, a stranger who had asked me what I wanted to build with my life like the answer actually mattered to him. He had worn cufflinks like that. I had held his hand once, just once, tracing the edge of one with my thumb while we talked about things I had never told anyone, not even Priya.

I had left before midnight. Before the masks came off. Before I could learn whether the man underneath was someone I would still want in daylight.

I had told myself for a year that it did not matter, that he was probably nothing like the voice, that some things are better left as one perfect unfinished night.

Standing in this elevator now, I was no longer sure I believed that.

"You're staring," Alexander said.

"I'm memorizing the terms of our arrangement," I said, which was a lie so thin I could see through it myself.

The elevator opened onto the fortieth floor, and the moment passed the way tense moments do around him, swallowed by the next piece of business. Daniel met us with a folder of seating charts and vendor confirmations, rattling off names of photographers and florists like a man reciting a grocery list, and I let myself be pulled into logistics because logistics did not ask me to explain a feeling I could not explain to myself.

We sat across from each other at the same glass table where I had signed away eighteen months of my life six days earlier. Alexander answered questions about guest lists in that same flat, efficient voice he used for everything, and I found myself watching his hands instead of his face, the way he turned his pen over exactly the way the man in the mask had turned over a champagne glass, unhurried, deliberate, like time belonged to him and no one else.

"You keep looking at me like you're trying to solve a problem," he said, once Daniel had stepped out to take a call.

"Maybe I am."

"Which problem."

I almost told him. The words were right there, ready, a whole ballroom's worth of them. But saying it out loud made it real in a way I was not ready for, not with a marriage contract already signed and a wedding two days away and every reason in the world to believe I was imagining a resemblance out of nothing more than loneliness and bad timing.

"Whether I actually own a dress that will survive being photographed three hundred times in one evening," I said instead.

He almost smiled. I was starting to recognize the shape of it now, the half second before he caught himself and put the ice back over his face like a man closing a window against weather he did not trust.

Priya called while I was still standing in my kitchen with my coat half off, and I made the mistake of answering before I had decided what I was going to say.

"You sound strange," she said, before I had spoken a single word. "What happened."

"Nothing happened."

"Elena. I have known you since we were nineteen. You only use that voice when something happened."

So I told her. The elevator. The cufflink. The compass rose I had traced with my own thumb a year ago in the dark, certain at the time that I would never see it again, certain it belonged to a stranger I had invented half of anyway.

Priya was quiet for a long moment, which from Priya was its own kind of alarm bell.

"You never told me you left before midnight," she said finally. "You told me you talked to some guy and went home. You didn't tell me you gave him your whole heart in one night and then just walked out on him."

"I didn't give him anything. We talked. That's all it was."

"Elena."

"It doesn't matter now anyway. Whoever he was, he's not the man I'm marrying in two days. Alexander Sterling doesn't talk like that. He negotiates. He doesn't ask what you want to build with your life like it's the only interesting question in the room."

Even as I said it, I could hear how much I wanted it to be true, and how little I actually believed it.

"Be careful," Priya said. "Whatever this is. Please just be careful."

I promised her I would, the way you promise things you already suspect you cannot keep.

That night, back in my own apartment for what I already suspected would be one of the last nights it would ever really be mine, I pulled out the one thing I had kept from that gala, tucked in the bottom of my jewelry box for a year like a secret I was not ready to look at directly. A single silver cufflink, dropped and forgotten on the ballroom floor near midnight, the mate to the one still worn smooth on Alexander Sterling's wrist.

I turned it over in my hand until my fingers ached, and I understood, with a certainty that felt like the floor tilting under me, that I was not marrying a stranger in two days.

I was marrying the one man I had never been able to forget.