Chapter 2

The wedding took eleven minutes.

I counted every single one.

Not because I was trying to be dramatic about it. I just needed something to hold onto that was not the look on the registrar's face. He kept glancing at me the way people look at a child standing too close to the edge of something dangerous. Like he wanted to say something but had been paid not to.

I understood the feeling.

There were two witnesses whose names I never caught. There was Roland standing near the back with his hands folded and that smile of his that never changed no matter what was happening around him. And there was a framed photograph of Damien Voss sitting on a small table to my left because the actual Damien Voss was currently unconscious in a hospital bed across the city and could not be expected to show up to his own wedding.

The photograph had been enough for the paperwork apparently.

I said the words. I signed my name. The registrar handed me my copy of the marriage certificate with both hands, slowly, like it was fragile.

And that was it.

Eleven minutes.

I was somebody's wife.

I repeated it in my head on the car ride to the estate just to hear how it sounded.

It sounded like a bad joke with no punchline.

The car was black and long and so expensive looking that I sat very still the entire ride, afraid to disturb anything. The driver did not speak. I watched the city shrink behind us as we moved further north, the noisy streets getting quieter, the buildings getting bigger and further apart, until we were on a road lined with tall trees and the only sound was the engine.

Then the estate appeared.

I had seen photographs of it before. I thought I was prepared.

I was not prepared.

It was massive. White stone walls and huge windows that caught the late afternoon light and threw it back like the house was showing off. There were gates at the entrance that opened automatically as the car approached, like even the gates knew better than to make Damien Voss wait for anything.

Two women were standing at the top of the front steps.

The first one was older, maybe mid fifties, with silver hair and soft eyes that looked like they had done a lot of crying recently and were trying to be done with it. She came down the steps the moment the car stopped, before I even had my bag properly in my hand, and she took both of my hands in hers.

"Sera," she said. "I am Vivienne. Damien's mother. I am so glad you are here."

Her hands were warm.

I had not expected warm.

"Thank you," I said, because it was the only safe thing I could find.

The second woman had not moved from the top of the steps. She was younger, maybe early thirties, with dark hair and the same sharp grey eyes I had seen in every photograph of Damien. She was looking at me the way a teacher looks at a student who has just walked in late to an exam.

Like she had already decided how this was going to go.

"My daughter Noa," Vivienne said quietly.

Noa gave me one slow nod. That was all. No smile. No welcome. Just that look that said I see you, I have questions about you, and I am not going to stop watching you until I get answers.

I nodded back and matched her energy exactly.

If she was going to size me up then she was going to find out fast that I had been sized up by experts my entire life and I was still standing.

Vivienne showed me around the house herself. I had expected a housekeeper to do it, someone efficient and detached who would point at rooms and recite rules. Instead Damien's mother walked beside me through those long marble hallways and told me stories. This is where Damien used to hide when he was eight and did not want to do his homework. This is the kitchen where he once tried to make his own birthday cake and nearly took off his eyebrow.

She was trying to make him real to me.

It was working and I wished it was not.

I listened to everything she said. I asked the right questions. I thanked her for each room.

And the whole time, without quite meaning to, I was noticing other things.

The heavy door at the end of the east corridor that Vivienne mentioned only once and moved past quickly. The security keypad near the main study. The way two of the staff members exchanged a look when Roland's name came up in conversation, just a flicker, gone in a second, but there.

I stored all of it in the back of my mind. I did not know why yet.

Sometimes you notice things before you understand why they matter.

The last door Vivienne stopped at was at the end of a quiet corridor upstairs. She turned to face me with an expression I could not fully read.

"His room," she said.

I looked at the door.

"You do not have to go in," she said. "Not tonight. Not ever, if you would rather not. I want you to know that."

She meant it. I could hear it in her voice. She felt guilty about this whole arrangement and she was trying, in the small ways available to her, to make it less awful than it was.

I thought about taking the exit she was offering. Going to the guest room. Sleeping in a strange bed in a strange house and starting fresh tomorrow.

Then I thought about eleven minutes and a framed photograph.

"I will go in," I said.

She touched my arm once. Then she walked back down the corridor and left me alone.

I stood at the door for a moment. Just breathing.

Then I pushed it open.

The room was dim and quiet. The curtains were drawn. The machines beside the bed made a soft steady sound, a gentle beeping rhythm that somehow felt more serious than a loud alarm would have. This was the sound of someone being kept alive one minute at a time.

I walked in slowly.

I stopped at the foot of the bed.

And I looked at him.

Here is what nobody had warned me about.

Every picture I had ever seen of Damien Voss showed a man who looked like he had never been uncertain about a single thing in his life. Sharp jaw. Cold eyes. The kind of face that belonged behind a massive desk while making decisions that affected thousands of people.

I had expected to find a pale, thin shadow of that man.

I did not expect him to still look like that.

He was still, yes. And pale from all those months without sunlight. But the shape of his face was exactly what I had seen in the photographs. Strong and precise and completely, almost rudely unbothered, like he was not dying at all. Like he had simply decided, for personal reasons, to stop attending things for a while.

I pulled the chair from the corner and sat beside the bed.

"Okay," I said quietly. "So. I am your wife now."

The machines beeped softly.

"I want you to know I did not have a lot of choices," I continued. "I am not saying that to make you feel sorry for me. I am saying it because it feels wrong to be in your house without you knowing how I got here."

Silence.

"Everyone says you are not going to wake up," I said. "So I am going to be honest with you in here because there is no one else to be honest with and also because you cannot repeat any of it."

I looked at his face.

"I think I walked into something I do not fully understand. My stepfather arranged all of this very fast. Too fast maybe." I paused. "And he looked too calm about it. Roland always looks calm but today was different. Today he looked like a man who had just won something."

The machine kept its steady rhythm.

"I just do not know what he won."

I sat back in the chair and let out a long slow breath.

Then I laughed a little at myself because here I was talking to an unconscious man about my feelings like he was a diary with excellent cheekbones.

I stood up to leave.

And that was when I saw it.

His eyes were open.

Not the blank, empty open the nurses had described to me earlier. Not the involuntary kind that meant nothing.

These eyes were open and they were focused and they were looking directly at me.

My whole body went cold.

Damien Voss stared up at me from that bed, sharp and present and completely awake, like he had been listening to every single word I just said.

Then, in a voice that was low and rough from seven months of silence, he spoke.

"Who are you."

It was not a question.

It was an accusation.