Lessons in Being Vanessa

Lily's POV

Nobody in the elevator said a word for the rest of the ride.

When the doors opened on the third floor, Ethan stood up out of the wheelchair by himself. His legs shook, but he didn't fall. He walked the ten steps to his room with one hand on the wall, and I walked right behind him in case he needed me.

He didn't. He made it to the bed and sat down hard, breathing like he had just run a mile.

"Bright Care Nursing," he said. "The company that sent a nurse to drug me also owns the car that picked up my fake fiancée's real self from my front door."

"That sentence made my head hurt," I said.

He almost laughed. Marcus didn't.

"Sir, there's more," Marcus said. "Bright Care isn't a real company. It has no office, and the phone number goes to a voicemail that's always full. The money behind it comes from another company, and that one comes from another one. I need a few more days to find out whose name is at the bottom."

"Then take a few more days," Ethan said. "But be careful. If Richard finds out you're looking, he'll know I'm not as weak as I look."

Marcus nodded and left. Then it was just me, Ethan, and Duke, who climbed onto the foot of the bed like he owned it.

Ethan looked at me for a long time.

"What?" I asked.

"Saturday," he said. "You're going to sit at a dinner table with the people who sold you to me. Vanessa will be there, and so will her parents. My grandmother will be watching every move you make, and Richard will be smiling at you across the table and hoping you fail."

"Thank you," I said. "I feel so much better now."

"You should be scared," he said. "Scared people pay attention. So come here and pay attention."

I sat down in the chair by the bed, but he shook his head and pointed to the edge of the mattress beside him.

"Closer," he said. "Husbands and wives sit close. If you jump every time I touch you, my grandmother will see it from across the room."

I moved to the bed. The mattress dipped under me, and my arm pressed against his. He was warm, and he smelled like soap and the cold air from the window. I made myself breathe normally.

"First lesson," Ethan said. "Vanessa calls her mother Mom, never Mother. She calls her father Daddy, even though she's twenty-five, and he hates it."

"Mom and Daddy," I said. "Got it."

"She drinks white wine, never red. She thinks red wine stains her teeth. She doesn't eat bread, and she checks her face in every shiny thing she walks past, spoons included."

I laughed before I could stop myself. "Spoons?"

"Spoons," he said. He wasn't smiling, but his eyes were. "Second lesson. When Vanessa wants something from me, she touches my arm, like this."

He took my hand and put it on his arm, just above the wrist. My fingers sat on his skin, and I felt his pulse jump under them. Or maybe it was mine.

"And when she's angry with me," he went on, "she doesn't touch me at all."

"So I should touch you," I said.

"All night," he said. "You're supposed to be the happy wife who just got her husband back."

My face went hot. I tried to take my hand back, but he held it there.

"Third lesson," he said, and his voice dropped lower. "Don't look at me like that at the dinner."

"Like what?"

"Like you're scared of me."

"I'm not scared of you," I said.

He turned his head, and suddenly his face was very close to mine. I could see the small scar on his chin from the crash and the gray in his blue eyes.

"Then why are you shaking, Lily?" he asked.

I didn't have an answer. I didn't trust my voice to give one. For a second, I thought he was going to kiss me. For a second, I thought I might let him.

Then Duke barked at the door, and we both jumped apart.

Rosa knocked and came in with a tray of tea. She looked at us sitting so close together on the bed, then looked at the floor and smiled a little. She put the tray down and left without saying anything.

Ethan cleared his throat. "That was good," he said. "If Rosa believed it, my grandmother will too."

"Right," I said. My heart was still pounding. "Good practice."

We didn't talk about it after that.

For the next three days, Ethan taught me everything he knew about Vanessa. He told me how she held her fork and what she said when she didn't like a gift. He told me the name of her horse, her favorite store in Paris, and the friend from school she never forgave. I wrote it all down in a notebook and read it every night on the sofa until the words blurred.

I called Noah every evening. He was getting stronger. He told me the hospital food was terrible and that a nurse named Carla let him have two puddings when nobody was looking. Every time I heard his voice, I remembered why I was doing this.

On Friday night, the night before the dinner, Marcus came back.

He didn't knock this time. He walked straight in and closed the door behind him. His face was gray, and he was holding a folder against his chest like it might bite him.

"I found the bottom of the chain, sir," he said.

Ethan sat up. "Is it Richard?"

"Your uncle's name is on it," Marcus said. "But he isn't the only owner of Bright Care. There's a second name."

He opened the folder and held out a single page. Ethan read it, and I watched all the color leave his face. Then he turned the page around so I could see it too.

There were two names at the bottom. The first was Richard Blackwood.

The second was Margaret Sinclair.

I stared at the paper until the letters stopped making sense. The woman who had found me crying in a hospital cafeteria, the woman who had paid for my brother's heart, had helped pay the nurse who was poisoning my husband.

And tomorrow night, I would be sitting at her table, calling her Mom.