Chapter 3

I didn’t sleep.

I lay in that bed and stared at the ceiling and went through it again and again and again the way you do when something has happened that your brain refuses to fully accept. Daniel at the table. His hands folded. His calm voice explaining what he had done like it was a business transaction he was briefing me on. Like I was a colleague and not his wife. Not the woman who had given him seven years and a painted hallway and every version of herself she had.

Every time I closed my eyes I saw his face.

Every time I opened them I remembered where I was and that was somehow worse.

I watched the city outside the window go from black to dark blue to that flat grey it turned just before sunrise. I watched it happen and I didn’t move and I didn’t sleep and by the time the light was fully up I had been lying there for hours and I was exhausted in a way that had nothing to do with tiredness.

I got up at seven. Showered. Put on the jeans and white shirt I had grabbed without looking when I was throwing things into the bag because my hands were shaking too hard to care what I packed. I sat on the edge of the bed and looked at the room around me. The high ceiling. The windows. The city spread out below like it belonged to someone.

It did belong to someone. That was the problem.

I was in Damien Voss’s home because my husband had put me here and I didn’t have a single answer about why or what came next or what any of this actually meant beyond the six months printed on a contract I had never agreed to.

I needed answers.

Today I was going to get them whether Damien Voss wanted to give them or not.

At eight o’clock exactly there was a knock on my door.

Claire.

“Mr. Voss would like you to join him for breakfast,” she said with that calm practiced smile.

I noticed it wasn’t a question. I was starting to understand that very little around here came in the form of a question.

I followed her down the hallway and into a dining room I hadn’t seen the night before. Long table, big windows, the whole city laid out behind them in the morning light. Damien was already sitting at the head of it with a coffee and his phone and the same composed expression he had been wearing when I walked into his office last night.

He looked up when I came in.

“You didn’t sleep,” he said.

“No,” I said. “I didn’t.”

I wasn’t going to pretend. I was done performing fine for people who didn’t deserve it. Daniel had gotten seven years of me performing fine and look where that ended up.

Damien put his phone down and gestured to the chair on his right. I sat. A cup of coffee appeared in front of me almost immediately, black, and I reached for the milk jug before I even thought about it.

“I take milk,” I said, more to myself than him.

“I know,” he said. “I asked for it to be on the table.”

I stopped.

I looked at him across the table. “You know how I take my coffee.”

“Yes.”

“We met last night.”

“I know.”

I sat back in my chair and looked at him and waited for more. He picked up his phone again like the conversation was finished. Like he hadn’t just told me something that made absolutely no sense and had no intention of explaining it.

“How,” I said.

“Eat something,” he said without looking up. “You haven’t eaten since yesterday afternoon.”

“How do you know that.”

“Because I know things, Nora.”

I stared at him. He kept looking at his phone. The city hummed outside the windows and somewhere in the apartment a clock was ticking and I sat there with a coffee I hadn’t asked for made exactly the way I liked it and felt the ground shift slightly under everything I thought I understood about this situation.

I poured my milk. I picked up a piece of toast because my body needed something even if my brain was somewhere else entirely. I ate it and looked at him and thought about everything I had found online the night before. Powerful. Ruthless. Not someone you wanted to owe anything to. A man who said he wanted everything and meant it.

What did he know about me and how long had he known it.

“We need to talk about the rules,” he said.

He set his phone down and looked at me and I looked back and I didn’t say anything. I just waited. Because I had questions of my own and they were going to come out before this breakfast was finished whether he was ready for them or not.

He reached into his jacket and produced a folded piece of paper and slid it across the table.

I picked it up.

It was a list. Typed, clean, maybe fifteen items. I read through them slowly. Be present at scheduled events. Don’t discuss the arrangement with outside parties. Don’t access his private offices or personal files. Keep a phone on at all times for contact purposes.

And then I got to number seven.

I read it twice.

Then I put the paper flat on the table and looked at him.

“You want me to be submissive to you,” I said.

“In certain contexts,” he said. He held my gaze and didn’t blink. “In public, at events, around my associates. You follow my lead. You don’t contradict me. You conduct yourself as someone who is here by choice.”

“And if I don’t.”

“Then the arrangement becomes considerably more complicated for your husband.”

I put my hands flat on the table. I was angry and I was not going to pretend otherwise. “So when you say submissive you mean you want me to perform. Stand next to you and smile and let people think I’m here because I want to be.”

He was quiet for a moment that lasted slightly too long.

“Primarily,” he said.

I felt heat climb the back of my neck and I picked up my coffee and drank and looked out the window and got myself under control before I said something I couldn’t take back.

“Fine,” I said when I trusted my voice. “In public. For appearances. But I want something in return.”

“You’re in no position to negotiate.”

“I’m in every position to negotiate,” I said. “You need me to show up and smile and play a role. I can do that or I can make every single event you take me to a problem. Your choice.”

He looked at me. Something moved in his expression that I couldn’t fully read.

“What do you want,” he said.

“Answers,” I said. “Real ones. I want to know how you know Daniel. I want to know how this debt started and how it got to three million dollars and why, out of everything you could have asked for when you decided to collect it, you asked for me. Specifically. Me.”

The dining room was quiet.

Damien looked at me from across the table and for just a second something crossed his face that he didn’t manage to contain in time. It looked like guilt. It was gone so fast I almost convinced myself I had imagined it.

“Not today,” he said.

“Then when.”

“When the time is right.”

“You don’t get to decide – “

“Nora.” My name in his mouth stopped me cold. Not because he raised his voice. He didn’t. Because of the way he said it. Like it was something familiar to him. Like he had said it before, many times, in a way that had nothing to do with last night or the contract or any of this.

I stared at him.

He knew me. I didn’t know how or for how long or what it meant but he knew me and I could feel it sitting under everything like a floor I hadn’t known was there. The coffee. My name. The way he had looked at me when I walked in last night like I was something he had been expecting for a long time.

“How long have you known who I am,” I said.

He picked up his coffee. Looked out at the city.

“Eat your breakfast,” he said.

“Damien.”

“Give it time,” he said quietly. “Some things need to be said in the right order.”

I sat back. I looked at this man who knew my coffee order and said my name like it was familiar and wouldn’t tell me why and I felt the anger in my chest push up against something else. Something I didn’t have a name for yet and wasn’t ready to look at directly.

I picked up another piece of toast.

“I don’t give up,” I said. “I want you to know that. Whatever you’re waiting for the right moment to tell me, I’m going to find out one way or another.”

“I know,” he said.

“And I’m still angry,” I said. “About all of it. About Daniel and the contract and being here and the fact that you apparently know things about me that I don’t know about you. I need you to understand that the smile I put on at your events is a performance and underneath it I am furious.”

He looked at me then. Really looked at me.

“Good,” he said.

I blinked. “Good.”

“I don’t want someone who isn’t angry,” he said. “An angry woman is paying attention. An angry woman doesn’t miss things.” He paused. “You’re going to need to pay attention, Nora.”

I held his gaze and felt the ground shift again and thought about a man who wanted everything and had decided, for reasons he wasn’t ready to tell me yet, that I was part of it.

Daniel’s face came into my head. The distance of the last few months. The calls he always took in another room. The late nights that ran later and later and the explanations that got vaguer and vaguer and me, sitting across from all of it, telling myself it was stress. Telling myself it was work. Telling myself I just needed to try harder.

A thought pushed through that I had been keeping at the edge of my mind since last night.

What if the debt wasn’t the only thing Daniel had been hiding from me.

I looked down at the list of rules still sitting on the table between us.

I wasn’t ready to pull on that thread yet. But I could feel it there, loose and waiting, and I knew it was only a matter of time before I did.

I folded the paper and put it in my pocket.

“I’ll follow your rules in public,” I said. “But in here, in this apartment, I’m not performing anything for anyone. In here I’m just a woman who is very angry and has a lot of questions and is not going to stop asking them.”

Damien picked up his coffee.

“In here,” he said, “you can be whatever you need to be.”

I didn’t know what to do with that. So I finished my toast and looked out at the city and let the silence sit between us and told myself that today was just the beginning.

I was going to find out everything.

Every single thing he was holding back.

And when I did, I was going to decide what to do with it.