Chapter 7: Things You Should Know

I kept tossing around with different thought and imagination of what my life has become.A lot of what ifs just keep popping up in my head and I just found it really hard to sleep. The last time I looked at the wall clock sitting on the wall opposite me, It was 2am. I tossed around a little bit longer before I could finally fall asleep.

I woke up at six forty three.

Not because of an alarm. I didn’t have one set. I just woke up the way you do in an unfamiliar place, that sudden sharp awareness that the ceiling above you is wrong and the sounds around you are wrong and the light coming through the curtains is hitting things at an angle you don’t recognise yet.

I lay there for a moment and stared at the ceiling of my room in Blackwood mansion and let the previous day settle over me slowly like something heavy finding its final resting place.

I was married.

I was actually married.

I got up, washed my face, and put on the simplest thing I could find in the wardrobe Damien had said would have basics. It did. Whoever had stocked it had decent taste and a reasonable idea of my size, which told me someone had done their homework at some point, which was a strange thing to think about. I pulled on dark trousers and a cream top and pulled my hair back and decided that was the best I was going to do on four hours of sleep in a house I had lived in for less than twelve hours. I look at myself in the mirror one last time before heading out to the dinning.

I found the dining room on the second attempt. I had taken a wrong turn somewhere near the library and ended up in a sitting room I hadn't seen during the tour before I went back and found the right corridor.

Damien was already at the table.

He was in a dark shirt, no tie, hair slightly less structured than it had been the day before. He had a cup of coffee in front of him and his phone in his hand and he looked up when I came in with that same controlled expression that I was already starting to think might just be his default face.

“Morning,” I said.

“Morning,” he said. “Coffee?”

“Please.”

He nodded toward the pot on the table and I sat down across from him and poured my own which felt like the right move. I wasn’t going to sit there and wait to be served in my own home, or whatever this place was to me now.

A member of staff appeared within about thirty seconds and placed a plate in front of me without asking what I wanted. Eggs, toast, fruit on the side. It was good. I ate without saying much because Damien wasn’t saying much either and the silence between us wasn’t exactly uncomfortable but it wasn’t comfortable either. It was just there, sitting in the middle of the table like a third person neither of us had invited.

At some point he put his phone down.

“Did you sleep?” he asked.

“A little,” I said. “You?”

“Enough.”

I took that to mean not much but that he wasn’t going to make anything of it. I respected that actually. I wasn’t in the mood for performing fine either.

We finished breakfast mostly in silence. It wasn’t unbearable. It was just two people who didn’t know each other yet sitting in a very large dining room in a very large house trying to work out what the morning after something like yesterday was supposed to look like.

When I put my fork down Damien folded his napkin and set it on the table and looked at me.

“When you’re ready,” he said. “I’d like to talk through a few things. Nothing complicated. Just things that needs to be done.”

“Now?” I said.

“When you’re ready,” he said again. Not pushy. Just waiting.

“I’m ready,” I said.

He took me to a room I hadn’t seen during the tour the previous evening. Smaller than the study, more lived in, a room with bookshelves that actually looked used and a window that looked out onto the side garden where the morning light was coming in clean and unhurried. Two sofas facing each other across a low table. It felt more like a room a person actually spent time in rather than a room that existed to impress visitors.

I sat on one sofa. He sat on the other.

He didn’t have anything in his hands, no phone, no folder, nothing. He just sat forward slightly with his elbows on the sofa edge and looked at me like a man who had thought about what he wanted to say and had decided to just say it.

“This marriage is going to require us to function,” he said. “Not perform. Not pretend. Just function. I think that’s manageable if we’re honest with each other about what this is and what it isn’t.”

“Okay,” I said. “What is it?”

“It’s an arrangement that benefits both our families. It is also, legally and in every practical sense, a real marriage. I don’t intend to treat it otherwise.”

“What does that mean day to day?” I asked.

“It means you have full access to this house. Every part of it. It means you have your own account for personal expenses, Helen will sort that out with you today. It means your privacy is yours and I will not interfere with it.” He paused. “It also means that when we are in public we present as a couple. Not for performance. Because anything less creates questions that neither of us needs right now.”

“I can do that,” I said.

He nodded. “I have a busy schedule. I travel sometimes. There will be weeks where you barely see me and weeks where my work bleeds into everything including evenings and weekends. I’m not going to apologise for that but I am telling you upfront so it isn’t a surprise.”

“I appreciate that,” I said. And I meant it. I would rather know than be left guessing.

“Is there anything you need from me?” he asked. “In terms of how this works.”

The question caught me slightly off guard. I hadn’t expected him to ask. I thought this was going to be a one direction conversation, here are the rules, here is what I expect, here is how this goes. The fact that he turned it around said something about him that I hadn’t anticipated.

“I need to know where I stand,” I said. “I can handle a lot of things but I can’t handle not knowing where I stand.”

He looked at me for a moment. “That’s reasonable,” he said.

“And I need to not feel like a guest in my own home,” I said. “Whatever this is, I need to feel like I actually live here.”

Something shifted in his expression slightly. Not much. Just enough. “This is your home,” he said. “I mean that.”

I looked at him. I wasn’t entirely sure I believed it yet but I believed that he believed it and for now that was enough to work with.

“Okay,” I said.

He sat back. “There’s one more thing.”

I waited.

“My work and the people connected to it will be in and out of this house. Colleagues, lawyers, executives. You’ll see familiar faces over time. Ethan Mercer, who you met yesterday, is here fairly often. Lucas Sterling as well.” He said it matter of factly, just information, nothing weighted about it. “I’m not asking you to be involved in any of it. But I didn’t want you to be caught off guard by the people coming and going.”

“I won’t be,” I said.

He nodded once and stood up and I got the sense the conversation was finished, not abruptly but cleanly, the way someone ends something when they feel it has covered what it needed to cover.

I stood up too and followed him toward the door. He stepped out first and then paused in the doorway and turned back to look at me like something had just occurred to him, like there was one more thing he had not said yet.

He opened his mouth.

And then his phone rang.

He looked at the screen and something in his expression shifted, just slightly, just enough for me to notice. He looked back at me once and then stepped fully into the corridor and answered it, his voice dropping low as he walked away.

I stood in the doorway of that small quiet room and watched him go and wondered what he had been about to say.