Chapter 1

ISABELLA

The sheets on my right side is crisp.

They have been crisp every single morning for twenty-three months.

I have never once wrinkled them, even during sleep.

I lie still and stare at the ceiling. 

I know this ceiling. I know every hairline crack in this plaster. I know the way the morning light hits the far corner at exactly six forty-two and crawls toward the window by seven. I know this room the way you know a place you always understood yourself.

This is not my home.

I have never once let myself forget that, even if I do he doesn't let me forget.

The arrangement was simple when I signed it. Two years as Ethan Sinclair's contract wife. His name and his ring in exchange for my family's survival. My father's debt cleared. My mother's humiliation ended. My younger brother's future secured. All of it wrapped in forty pages of legal language, some I didn't understand. I read it three times before I picked up the pen.

I walked out of that attorney's office with steady hands and a locked jaw.

I did not cry once.

Not when I signed my name on the dotted line.

Not when I packed one suitcase and moved into the guest wing of a penthouse belonging to a man who looked at me the way people look at furniture they didn't choose but decided to keep anyway.

Not on our first anniversary, which passed like any other Wednesday. Not on the nights I lay in this bed listening to the sounds of a life happening on the other side of the wall. A life that carries my name on its contract but has never once held anything else of mine inside it.

I don't cry now either.

I push the sheets back and stand. The morning light cuts through the floor-to-ceiling windows in pale gold slabs. I catch my reflection in the antique mirror I brought from home ... one of three personal things I allowed myself in this room. Dark hair. Dark eyes and that  particular composure that I am trying my best to put on, now it has become indistinguishable from my real feelings.

Six forty-seven. Ethan leaves at eight.

I dress with precision. Putting on a silk blouse, tailored trousers and a low heels. I look exactly like what I am ... a woman who belongs in this apartment. The fiction is seamless. We have both maintained it without effort, without argument and without ever once sitting across from each other and naming what we are actually doing to each other.

That is perhaps the most devastating thing about this marriage.

How easy the pretending has been.

Mrs. Sue has already come and gone by the time I reach the kitchen. There is coffee in the pot and a maintenance note from the building manager sitting on the counter. I file it in the household folder without breaking stride, there are forty-seven documents now, cross-referenced, updated every week without fail. Systems within systems. It is how I survive inside a life that was never designed for a person like me to survive in.

I move through the kitchen the way I move through everything in this apartment.

Quietly and efficiently. Without leaving fingerprints on anything that doesn't belong to me.

By seven I am at Ethan's desk, laying his schedule flat on the leather surface. Hois schedule contains board meeting at nine. Lunch at twelve-thirty. A call with the Singapore office at four. Which are all confirmed. I have also placed the standing florist order for the living room...white arrangements, his preference, which he mentioned once in passing eight months ago and has almost certainly forgotten saying.

He doesn't know I remembered.

He doesn't know most of what keeps his life running. That is by design. His design, not mine. Ethan Sinclair is a man who consumes the results of labor without ever pausing to examine where the labor came from. I stopped expecting otherwise before the first month was over.

I am straightening the last corner of his schedule when my fingers catch on the edge of the desk drawer.

It won't close properly.

Something is blocking it from the inside. I pull the drawer open to clear it.

And then I stop breathing.

It is a small gold teardrop earring sitting in the back corner of the drawer. It is eighteen-carat, I can tell from the weight of it even before I pick it up. A tiny diamond set at the lowest point. The kind of piece bought from a boutique on Fifth Avenue that has become popular recently. Ethan has never once taken me there. Not for our engagement, or for Christmas, or even for any of the forty-something events I have attended on his arm in the past two years, not that I held out hope for it.

I pick it up between two fingers.

It is not mine.

I know every piece of jewelry in this apartment and this earring doesn't belongs here.

I turn it over and set it back in the drawer exactly where I found it. I close the drawer and smooth out the schedule while aligning his pen beside it.

I walk back to the kitchen and pour my coffee and I sit at the island with both hands wrapped around my mug.

My hands are completely steady though cold.

That is the thing about twenty-three months of invisibility...an advantage I will say. You stop being surprised by evidence of your own erasure. The flinching stops. The sharp intake of breath stops. What replaces all of it is something colder and far more useful.

You start noticing the pattern.

I have been seeing the clues for weeks. The hotel charge on the household account I shouldn't have noticed if he didn't want me to, but he did and thats why he put that charge on the account I have access to. A name that has been floating around this house though behind closed doors. Especially the small things he does.

Together they have form a pattern so clear it would embarrass me if I had allowed myself hope.

I had not allowed myself hope.

Tonight there is a board gala. I will be on Ethan's arm in a black dress and my grandmother's pearls and I will smile at the correct people and say the correct things and not one person in that room will look at me too closely.

They never do.

I will be invisible, the way I am always invisible.

I refill my coffee and stand at the window looking out at the city and I make myself one promise.

Tonight, at the gala, I find out whose ear that earring belongs to.

And then I will know exactly what I am dealing with or the decision to take.