Chapter 1

"I want everything out of the master bedroom by tonight."

Gabriel stood at the full-length mirror, unfastening his cuff links. His voice was calm.

They were deep blue sapphire cuff links. On the day we got married three years ago, I'd spent three hours wandering a flea market in the cold wind before I found them.

He'd worn them every day for three years, and the backs were rubbed to a shine. But this morning, he took them off without a second thought and tossed them into the crystal tray on the marble counter.

I was folding a freshly washed linen sheet, and my hands weren't quite steady. "Vivian's flight is at three tomorrow afternoon."

Gabriel kept knotting his tie. He watched me in the mirror, his eyes landing on my baggy gray sweater. "She can't sleep in a strange bed. The master bedroom gets the best light, and it needs a full day to air out. Also, she can't stand that sweet orange scent you always use. Throw it all out and get white tea instead."

He rattled off the instructions as smoothly as he had for the past ten years, every time they fought and he sent me down to the corner store for medicine.

"Where am I supposed to live?" I asked.

He turned around. His eyes swept over the smooth hem of my skirt, and he frowned.

He took two steps closer and, out of habit, smoothed down the turned-up edge of my collar.

His fingers were dry and cool and smelled a little like pine. Last night, with the storm raging outside, those same hands had gripped my waist and pressed me against the cold glass of the window again and again, making me say his name into the dark. Now his touch was perfectly restrained, as distant as an older brother's.

Back then, he'd treated me like a little sister.

"I had the housekeeper get the West Side apartment ready. It's close to the gallery where you're interning." He took a black key card from the inside pocket of his coat and set it on the nightstand. "I bought this penthouse so she'd have somewhere to come home to. Vera, don't make this hard for me."

The key card landed on the only photo of the two of us. We'd taken it by Lake Zurich the year before. In the picture, I'm turned toward the water, and he's standing half a step behind me while the wind blows his cashmere scarf over my shoulder.

The photographer who snapped it laughed and said we were a match made in heaven. Gabriel didn't deny it. He just tipped him an extra 200 francs.

I used to think that was his quiet way of admitting I was his wife.

"What if I don't move out?" I held his gaze.

Gabriel did up the last button on his coat and picked up his car keys. At my question, he paused and looked back at me with the faintest smile.

It was the kind of smile you give someone far beneath you.

"Vera, you've always done what you were told, ever since you were little." He walked over and brushed my pale cheek with the back of one finger. "She's coming home. After three years as Mrs. Moretti, you should know your place. You're a good girl, and good girls don't get greedy. Right?"

The touch was gone almost before I felt it, like a snowflake melting on my skin.

The front door opened and shut. The lock clicked into place with a cold, hard snap.

I stood there and looked around the empty room. Sunlight poured in through the tall windows and stretched the shadows long across the floor.

I went to the nightstand and picked up the key card.

Under it, the frame of our photo had a hairline crack along one edge. I didn't bother wiping off the dust. I just opened the drawer and took out a neatly folded document.

Printed at the top was the crest of the Zurich Federal Academy of Art.

"International Academic Exchange: Confirmation of Visiting Scholar Appointment

"Applicant: Vera Linden.

"Departure: Next Wednesday, 7:20 a.m."

I picked up a fountain pen and signed my name neatly in the final confirmation box. As I finished the last stroke, the ink bled into a tiny black dot on the page.

Ten years earlier, Vivian had hit Gabriel in the forehead with a tube of oil paint. She jabbed a finger in his face, said she never wanted to see him again as long as she lived, and stormed out. That night, Gabriel sat in the wreckage with blood running down his temple and stared coldly at me while I shook. "Go. Tell her that if she comes back and admits she was wrong, I'll act like none of this ever happened."

I ran three blocks and stood in the cold wind outside her friend's building for half the night. All I got for it was my sister's offhand "Tell him to drop dead."

The next day, it poured. Gabriel was burning up with fever, but he still clamped a hand around my wrist and made me deliver a handwritten apology.

I ran back and forth between them like a kite on a string. I hid their suitcases when they planned to run away together. I bought them birth control. I wiped up the blood after their fights.

Everyone thought I was Gabriel's most loyal little shadow.

Only I knew how much I craved those moments when I handed him an ice pack in some dim hallway and his palm happened to brush the back of my hand.

Three years earlier, he'd grabbed me outside the airport security checkpoint, his eyes red from no sleep, his voice hard. "We're going to City Hall."

In that moment, I thought God had finally taken pity on a nobody like me.

It turned out to be nothing but a dream.

My phone buzzed in my pocket.

The screen lit up with Vivian's latest Instagram story.

The caption read, "Counting down to home. Nothing beats the air back home!"

The photo showed a bouquet of white camellias next to a priority boarding pass for Gabriel's private jet service.

I turned off the screen, went into the walk-in closet, and dragged out a dusty suitcase.

In three years, I had brought pitifully little into this penthouse.

Gabriel didn't like clutter. My skincare had to live in a drawer. My flats weren't allowed to sit next to his dress shoes. The linen canvases I painted on had to stay stacked in the basement storage room.

I packed only the few trench coats I wore all the time, two sets of underwear, and every one of my sketches.

The big bed in the master bedroom was still rumpled from last night.

I went over to the bed, bent down, and pulled a beautiful dark green velvet box from underneath it.

Inside was a pocket watch I'd ordered from an auction house in Zurich last week. It was a 19th-century antique, with the Moretti family crest micro-engraved inside the case. On the back of the watch, a line in Latin read, "To my only home."

I'd meant to give it to him on our third wedding anniversary.

I stared at it for three seconds.

Then I opened the door and dropped the box, still sealed in its plastic wrap, down the garbage chute in the hall.

It fell a long way and hit the bottom of the chute with a dull thud.

Then everything went dead quiet.