Chapter 3: The Woman Wearing My Wedding Ring

I didn't sleep. I spent the night on Marta's old sofa in the guest room I wasn't supposed to use anymore, staring at the ceiling, replaying Ruth's voice until it stopped sounding like words and started sounding like static. By morning, my phone had lit up so many times I finally turned the sound off, and when I turned the screen back on, I understood why.

*UNKNOWN WOMAN INTERRUPTS ASHBOURNE ANNIVERSARY.*

*MENTALLY DISTURBED WOMAN CLAIMS TO BE ROMAN ASHBOURNE'S WIFE.*

I clicked the second one before I could stop myself, and there it was, a photograph of Roman with his arm around Camille, both of them smiling for a camera that must have been taken minutes after security dragged me out. Her face. His hand at her waist. My name reduced to two words in the caption. *Unidentified woman.*

I threw the phone across the room. It hit the wall and landed on the carpet, screen still glowing, still showing her face where mine should have been.

My studio called forty minutes later. I almost didn't answer.

"Tessa, it's Mrs. Halloway." My biggest client, a woman who had trusted me with her grandmother's letters for three years running. Her voice was careful, the kind of careful people use right before they disappoint you. "I'm going to need to postpone the restoration. Maybe cancel it altogether."

"Is something wrong with the work?"

"No, no, the work is beautiful, it's just." She paused. "We're trying to avoid unnecessary publicity right now. I'm sure you understand."

I understood. I understood completely, and it made me sick.

My calendar had looked full that morning. By lunch, it looked abandoned.

Three more calls came, all some version of the same sentence, and when I checked my email I found the article had been forwarded to nearly every client on my list, sent from an address I didn't recognize, with no message at all. Just the headline. Just my humiliation, delivered directly to the people who paid my rent.

Someone wasn't just letting this happen to me. Someone was making sure it followed me everywhere.

I was still staring at that email when the bell over my studio door rang.

I looked up expecting another cancellation. Instead, Roman stood in my doorway, no bodyguards, no assistant, just him, in the same dark coat from the night before, like he hadn't slept either.

"Get out," I said.

"You shouldn't be alone right now." His voice was quiet, controlled, the voice he used in boardrooms.

"Yesterday you didn't know my name."

"Today doesn't change that."

I laughed, and it came out broken instead of sharp. "Then why are you here?"

He didn't answer that. His eyes dropped to my hand, the scraped palm I'd forgotten to bandage properly, and before I understood what was happening he had crossed the room and reached for it, gentle, automatic, the same way he used to check my hands after I'd spent too long working with old chemicals.

I jerked away.

He froze, his hand still hanging in the air between us, and for a moment neither of us moved. That single frozen second told me more than anything he'd said in the ballroom.

Then his eyes moved past me, to the desk, to the marriage certificate still lying where I'd left it the night before.

His face changed. Barely. A tightening around the eyes, a stillness that hadn't been there a second ago.

"Where did you get this?" he asked quietly.

Not what is this. Not what are you talking about. Where did you get it.

I stared at him, my pulse loud in my ears. "You recognize it."

"Tessa."

"You just asked me where I got it. Not what it is. You already know what it is."

He didn't deny it. That was the worst part. He just stood there, jaw tight, saying nothing, and something in me finally broke open.

"Tell me one thing," I said. "Just one. Was any part of my marriage real?"

For a moment I thought he was going to answer. His mouth opened slightly, his eyes held mine, and I saw something behind them that looked almost like relief, like a man about to put down something heavy.

His phone rang.

He looked at the screen. I saw it too, just for a second. *Chairman's Office.*

He declined it.

It rang again immediately.

He answered this time, turning slightly away from me. "I'm with her." A pause, long enough that I could hear the faint shape of a voice on the other end, though not the words. His hand tightened around the phone. "No."

He hung up without saying anything else.

Whatever he had been about to say died behind his eyes.

"I have to go," he said.

"Roman—"

"Stop looking for answers in government buildings." His voice was flat now, final.

Then he was gone, the bell over the door ringing behind him, and I stood alone in my studio with my heart pounding and no answers at all.

I didn't notice the watch until I was locking up for the night.

It was sitting on the edge of my workbench, half hidden under a stack of restoration papers, the same watch Roman had worn every day of our marriage, the one his father had given him. He never took it off. Not to shower, not to sleep, not once in seven years.

I picked it up carefully, and that was when I noticed the back panel wasn't sitting flush against the case, like it had been opened and closed in a hurry.

I pried it open with a fingernail, the way I'd opened a hundred old lockets in my work, gently, patiently, and inside, folded into a square smaller than a stamp, was a photograph.

Not the studio portrait from our official wedding file, the one that apparently now belonged to Camille.

A different one. A private one, taken by no photographer at all, just the two of us at the lake house, laughing at something neither of us would ever remember, my head against his shoulder, his hand curled around mine.

On the back, in his handwriting, four words.

*Forever, Mrs. Ashbourne.*

I sat down slowly on my studio stool, the photograph trembling in my hand, and turned it over again, holding it closer to the light this time, and that was when I saw it. Beneath the four words, so faint it looked almost scratched away, another line, pressed so lightly into the paper it had nearly disappeared.

*Burn this before they find it.*c