Chapter Six

Saffron's POV

The first thing Nyx did when she moved into my house was open every curtain.

"It's so dark in here," she said, spinning in the middle of the living room with her arms out. "Like a funeral home. Who chose this wallpaper?"

"My mother."

"Of course she did."

I stood by the door with two of her suitcases, and a driver stood behind me with four more. There would be eleven by the end of the day. I counted them the way I used to count the days on a calendar when I was a boy, hoping that if I counted carefully enough, something would change.

Isolde had chosen the curtains. Heavy, deep green, lined with a pale gold thread. She had picked them out in the second year of our marriage, standing in a fabric shop with a swatch pressed to her cheek, asking me if they were too serious. I had said they were fine. She had looked at me like I'd given her a present.

Now Nyx tugged them open, and the afternoon came in all at once, and the room looked bare.

"Leave the green ones," I said.

"Why? They're ugly."

"Because I said so."

She looked at me a second too long. Then she shrugged and walked off toward the kitchen, her heels clicking across the marble. "Fine. But I'm putting my own things in the bedroom. All of it."

I did not answer.

By the end of the first week I could have written a list. She slept until noon. She ordered breakfast at one and complained that the cook's eggs were too plain. She filmed herself walking up and down the staircase in three different dresses and posted all of them. Her followers loved the house, she said. They called it a palace. They called us power couple goals, and she read out the comments over dinner in a singsong voice while I stared at my plate.

She spent, too. I did not look at the statements until the end of the second week, and when I did, I had to read the total twice. Jewelry, shoes, a handbag that cost more than a car. A vacation she had booked for us, to a resort I had never heard of, in a month I had no time for.

"You need to slow down," I told her.

"Slow down what?"

"The spending."

She laughed. "Saffron, baby. I am the face of this relationship. You have no idea what the exposure is worth. Do you know how many people watched my video of you picking me up from the airport?"

"No."

"Four million." She blew me a kiss. "You're welcome."

That night I lay in the dark with her beside me, one arm thrown over my chest, her perfume everywhere. She was asleep in minutes. I was awake until the sky started to turn gray.

I kept waiting for the silence to stop hurting. It had not. At night the house made noises it never used to make. The refrigerator hummed. The pipes ticked. Somewhere in the walls, the wind pulled at something loose. When Isolde was here, there had been other sounds under all of that. A cupboard closing. A kettle starting. A soft hum from the kitchen, always the same four notes, her not knowing she was doing it.

On the tenth morning I tasted the soup.

Our cook had made it, following the recipe Isolde had left in a drawer, and I knew before the first mouthful that something was wrong. It tasted like warm water with salt. I put down the spoon and pushed the bowl away.

"Is something wrong, sir?" the cook asked.

"No."

"It's the same recipe."

"I know."

I went outside before she could say anything else. The garden at the back of the house was hers. She watered it herself because she never trusted the gardener to do it gently, and I used to watch her from the study window with a pen in my hand and not write a word. Now the roses were brown at the edges. The basil she had planted in a clay pot by the back door had gone black and soft.

I stood there looking at it for a long time.

My mother's call came in while I was still standing in the dead basil.

"Where is the heir?" she said, without hello.

"Mother."

"You have been living with that woman for two weeks. Two. And the board is asking me, every day, whether we should expect an announcement. I do not like being made to look foolish, Saffron."

"She is not my wife yet."

"Then make her one. Quickly."

"It's been two weeks."

"It took your grandfather less than one to get your father started." The line crackled with her disapproval. "I will be at the house on Sunday. See that she is presentable."

She hung up. I stood there holding the phone, and a small, tired voice in my head said, she would have been presentable. She was always presentable. You were the one who made her sit through every Sunday as though it were a sentence.

I shut it up. I had a lot of practice.

That evening I came home early and walked through the house without turning on the lights. Nyx was out. She had left a note on the kitchen counter saying she would be late, that a photographer had called, that I should eat without her. I did not eat. I went upstairs, into the dressing room, and started going through the wardrobe because I could not think of anything else to do.

It was my own jacket that I picked up. The charcoal wool one I had worn the day she signed. I had given it to the housekeeper to send to the cleaner and she had hung it back without taking out the pockets.

My hand slid in out of habit.

Paper.

I knew what it was before I pulled it out. It was folded in half, creased down the middle, the way she always folded them. I stood very still. I had not found one in weeks, and I had not looked for one in years, though I had taken them all home and kept them in a shoebox in the study.

I unfolded it.

Her handwriting. Slanted, neat, so careful it looked like she had practiced it. Four lines.

Come home early tonight. I made your favorite. I have something to tell you. Good news, for once.

Under it, smaller, where she always wrote it, a single letter. I.

The date was the day she left.

I read it again. Then a third time. My hand started shaking in a way that had nothing to do with anger, and I realized I had stopped breathing. Good news, for once. I thought of her in the doorway in the cream dress. The cold soup on the table. The way her left hand had moved to her stomach when she cried. I thought, what was she going to say?

"What's that?"

I looked up. Nyx stood in the doorway of the dressing room, still in her coat, her car keys hanging from one finger. I had not heard her come in.

"Nothing," I said.

"It doesn't look like nothing." She crossed the room, plucked the note out of my fingers before I could close my hand, and read it. Her mouth curled slowly. "Aww. Did she leave this for you?"

"Give it back."

"It's so pathetic." She laughed, bright and cruel. "Good news. What was it, a new recipe?"

"Nyx. Give it back."

She smiled at me, held the paper up between two fingers, and walked to the little fireplace in the corner of the room where the housekeeper had left a lit candle on the mantel. I took one step.

She touched the corner of the note to the flame.

It caught immediately. She dropped it onto the stone hearth, and I stood there and watched the fire crawl up the page, over every careful line, until the last thing I could see in the orange light was the word good, and then nothing at all.