The Wrong Night

Aya’s POV

“Wake up, Aya,” said Ilana, very softly. “Everyone’s here.”

My head felt full of wet sand.

I opened my eyes. A white ceiling. A crystal chandelier. Gray morning light coming through a wall of glass, and beyond it the whole city of Seattle, wet and silver, with Lake Union lying flat as a mirror at the bottom.

This wasn’t my bedroom.

I tried to sit up. My arms were slow. My mouth tasted of chalk.

Then I smelled it.

I’m a perfumer. I have a nose that can pick cedar out of a crowded elevator and tell you whether the oakmoss is real. The room reeked. Man’s cologne, sandalwood and bergamot, too much of it. Stale champagne. Hotel bleach. And under it, sharp and faint and bitter, a smell like crushed aspirin.

It was coming from the glass on the nightstand.

“Aya,” said a man’s voice next to me, thick and confused. “What the hell?”

I turned my head.

Eitan Blake lay on the other side of the bed with his tie undone and one arm flung over his eyes. My sister’s fiancé. The man who had put a ring on Ilana’s finger three hours before I fell asleep.

He was asleep on top of the covers, in his tuxedo.

I was in my dress. The green silk one. The zip was down a few inches, and one strap had slipped off my shoulder.

“It’s not what it looks like,” I said, and my voice came out a croak.

A camera flashed.

I flinched. The room was full of people. I hadn’t seen them yet, the way you don’t see the water until you’re already in it. Ten. Twelve. The engagement party guests, still in their party clothes, crowded in the doorway of the penthouse suite with their phones raised. A photographer from the society page. A woman in a red dress pressing both hands to her mouth.

And at the front, in a row, like a firing squad, my family.

Elliot Sterling, gray and stiff, with his hands in his pockets. Diane, his wife, perfect in pearls, her lips pressed into a white line. And Ilana, in pale pink, with her hair falling in soft curls and tears already standing in her eyes.

“I woke up an hour ago,” Ilana whispered, to the crowd. “I couldn’t find him. I called and called. Somebody said they saw him come up here with, with”

She couldn’t finish. She covered her face.

“Ilana.” I got my feet on the floor. My knees shook. “Ilana, I don’t know how I got here. I had one glass of champagne. You gave it to me. You said it was for luck.”

“Stop it,” said Diane.

“I don’t remember...”

“Of course you don’t.” Diane’s voice was cool as glass. “That’s what they always say.”

Eitan sat up. He looked at me. He looked at the room. His face went gray. “I didn’t,” he said. “Ilana, I swear to God, I don’t remember anything, I didn’t...”

“Don’t,” Ilana sobbed. “Don’t, Eitan. Not in front of everyone.”

She was good. I’d known her since I was twelve years old, since the week my mother died and Elliot Sterling opened his front door and said, You’ll stay here now, and I have never once seen her cry at the right moment. She was crying now. Perfectly. A single tear ran down the side of her nose.

I looked at her hands.

They were steady.

“Get her out,” Elliot said. His voice was low and rough and very quiet, and every head in the doorway turned. “Everyone. Out. Now. This is a family matter.”

They left. Not fast. Some of them were still filming. The door swung shut on a rustle of silk and whispers, and then it was just the five of us in a white room with a city outside.

Elliot didn’t look at me. He looked at the carpet.

“Twelve years,” he said.

“Elliot. Please. Listen.”

“I took you into my home. I fed you. I put you through school. I gave you a job. I let you call my daughter your sister.” He drew a long breath. “And you did this. On the night of her engagement. In front of the whole city.”

“I didn’t do anything.”

“The photographs say otherwise.”

“The photographs say I’m on a bed. I’m dressed. I’m wearing my shoes.” My voice cracked. “Elliot, look at the glass. There’s a drug in it. I can smell it. Someone put something in the champagne.”

“She’s blaming the champagne now,” said Diane.

“Diane, please...”

“Mrs. Sterling.”

I stopped.

Diane Sterling took one step toward me. She’s fifty-one, with pale blue eyes and hair the color of good butter, and she wears a perfume I made her myself, a soft white iris with a dry cedar base. I have smelled it every day of my life. Now, beneath it, at the cuff of her sleeve, I caught a different note.

Bitter. Chalky.

I opened my mouth.

“You have until noon,” said Elliot. “Your things will be in a bag at the gate. Your company badge is cancelled. Your keys are void.” He finally lifted his eyes. They were red at the rims. He looked like he’d aged ten years in ten minutes. “You’re no daughter of mine.”

“I never was,” I whispered. “You made sure I knew it.”

He flinched.

I shouldn’t have said it.

Ilana gave a little gasp. Diane’s mouth went white. Eitan, by the bed, lifted his head and stared at me with a look I couldn’t read.

“Get out,” said Elliot.

I picked up my shoes. My hands shook so hard I dropped one. I picked it up again. I walked toward the door with the whole room watching, and at the threshold, I stopped, because a man stood there.

I hadn’t seen him. He’d been behind the others. Tall, dark, in a black suit that fit like it had been drawn onto him, with a face that gave away nothing at all. His eyes were gray and very steady. He was looking at me.

My heart stopped.

Because I knew him.

Five weeks ago, in a bar called the Copper Door, in the rain, at two in the morning, I had sat on a stool beside a stranger who ordered a whiskey and didn’t say a word, and I had told him every single thing I’d never told anyone. And then I’d gone home with him. And he’d left before I woke, with no note, no name, no number.

Ezra, he’d said. Just Ezra.

He was standing in the doorway of my sister’s engagement party.

He said nothing. He didn’t move. But a look crossed his face so fast I almost missed it. Not shock. Not pity. A look of a man who had just seen the last piece of a puzzle drop into place.

Then Ilana slid past me, her pink dress brushing my hip, and leaned close.

I felt her breath on my ear. It smelled of mint and champagne and a bitter chalk.

“You should have stopped asking about Mama Hannah,” she whispered. “Mum told you to stop.”

My mother’s name.

The floor tilted.

She drew back, sweet as sugar, and squeezed my hand in front of the whole hall.

“Goodbye, Aya,” said my sister. “I’ll pray for you.”