Chapter 4

The rules were still in my pocket when I woke up.

I had fallen asleep in my clothes without meaning to, somewhere between staring at the ceiling and going through the breakfast conversation for the hundredth time, and I woke up with the folded paper pressed against my hip and the city blazing outside the window and the full weight of where I was landing on me all at once.

I sat up.

I pulled the list out and read number seven again.

In all matters within this residence and in public, you will defer to Mr. Voss. His word is final.

His word is final.

I had spent seven years deferring to Daniel. Not because he demanded it. That almost would have been easier to see. It happened so gradually I didn’t notice I was doing it until it was just who I was. I chose restaurants he liked without thinking about it. Watched what he wanted to watch. Laughed at the right times and stayed quiet at the right times and shaped myself around him so smoothly that somewhere along the way I stopped being able to tell where I ended and his idea of me began.

And he had still gone looking for someone else.

I put the list on the nightstand and got up and went to the window and stood there with my arms crossed and looked at the city spread out below me and thought about how much I had given that man and how little any of it had mattered in the end.

My phone was on the bed where I had left it.

Fourteen missed calls. Nine from Daniel, which I deleted without listening to. Three from Gwen, my older sister, which meant Daniel had gotten to her first, which was exactly the kind of thing he would do. Spin it before I could get there. Turn it into something manageable. A fight. A misunderstanding. Space.

Two from a number I didn’t recognise.

I called Gwen.

She picked up before the first ring finished.

“Nora oh my God. I have been calling you since last night. Daniel rang me and said you’d walked out after a fight and I have been sitting here going out of my mind, where are you, are you okay, what is happening –”

“I’m okay,” I said.

“You do not sound okay.”

“I know.”

“Nora.” Her voice dropped. “He said it was a fight. He said things got heated and you needed space. He sounded –”

“He sold me Gwen.”

Silence.

Dead, complete silence.

“He what,” she said.

“He had a debt. Three million dollars. He hid it for two years and when he ran out of options he signed my name on a contract to clear it. There was a car outside at nine o’clock and I got in it and that is where I am.” I stopped. I couldn’t tell her the rest. Not where I was, not whose apartment I was standing in. The rules. Outside parties. “I’m somewhere safe. I’m not hurt. But I need you to understand that this was not a fight.”

Gwen didn’t speak for so long I pulled the phone away from my ear to check the call was still connected.

“I’m going to kill him,” she said finally. Very quietly. The quieter Gwen got the more dangerous she was and right now she sounded extremely quiet.

“Get in line,” I said.

“Tell me where you are and I will come right now –”

“I can’t. Not yet. I need you to trust me. Six months and then I’m out of here and I’ll explain everything. I just need you to not call Daniel back and not tell him you’ve spoken to me.”

“Six months of what, Nora, what did he sign you into –”

“I’ll explain later. I promise. Every day. I’ll call you every day.”

She made a sound that told me she hated this and was going to agree to it anyway because she knew me well enough to know I wasn’t going to give her more right now.

“Every day,” she said. “Or I find you myself.”

“Every day,” I said.

I hung up and sat on the edge of the bed with the phone in my lap and thought about Daniel calling my sister before that car had even turned the corner. Already managing the story. Already building the version of events where he was a man whose wife had overreacted and needed space.

The audacity of it made my hands shake all over again.

I put the phone down and made myself breathe and then I got up because lying in this room all day was going to make me insane.

I found the rest of the apartment the way you find things when you’re too angry to sit still and too trapped to go anywhere. I walked corridors and opened doors and discovered that Damien Voss’s home was considerably larger than I had understood from the night before. There was a library with floor to ceiling shelves and two armchairs and a window that looked over a different part of the city than my room did. There was a gym. A cinema room with a screen that took up the entire far wall. A kitchen that was twice the size of the one I shared with Daniel and looked like it had never once been used to make something ordinary.

I was standing in the library running my finger along the spines of the books when I heard Damien’s voice from down the corridor.

I should have kept walking. I know I should have.

I didn’t.

I moved toward the sound and stopped just outside a door that was sitting slightly open. Through the gap I could see the edge of a desk, a window, his hand flat on the surface while he talked.

“I don’t care what he says.” His voice was different on the phone. The careful measured tone he used with me was completely gone. This was harder. Colder. The voice of a man who was not performing anything for anyone. “He had his chance. He didn’t take it. That’s finished.”

A pause while the other person spoke.

“No. She doesn’t know yet.” Another pause. “Because it’s not the right time. When I decide it’s the right time I’ll tell her.”

I pressed myself flat against the wall outside the door and stopped breathing.

She doesn’t know yet.

What didn’t I know.

“Keep watching him,” Damien said. “I want to know every place he goes. Every person he sees. Everything.”

The call ended.

I stood there in the corridor for a few seconds and then I walked back to the library and sat down in one of the armchairs and tried to think clearly.

He was having Daniel watched.

And there was something he knew. Something he was holding back from me, waiting for what he called the right time, something about Daniel that went beyond the debt and the contract and all of it. I had felt it at breakfast. The way he went still when I asked questions. The guilt that crossed his face and disappeared before I could properly see it.

Daniel wasn’t just hiding three million dollars.

The late nights. The phone calls he always took in the other room. The way the last few months had felt like sharing a house with a stranger. The distance that I had spent months trying to close, trying harder, being more patient, being quieter, being whatever I thought he needed, and none of it making any difference because you cannot close a distance someone is deliberately keeping.

I sat in that armchair and I made myself think the thing I had been holding at arm’s length since last night.

Daniel was cheating on me.

I felt it land in my chest when I let myself actually think it. Not as a fear, not as a maybe, but as a thing that was probably true. And the fact that it was probably true meant that Damien Voss, who I had never met before last night, had known about it before I did.

I was on my feet before I had finished the thought.

I walked down the corridor and knocked twice on his office door and opened it without waiting.

He looked up from his desk. He went very still when he saw my face.

“Is Daniel cheating on me,” I said.

The office was quiet. He looked at me from across the desk and I watched his jaw tighten and I watched something pass across his face that he couldn’t control fast enough to hide it. It looked like guilt. It looked like he had been dreading this exact moment.

He didn’t say no.

He didn’t say anything.

And that was my answer.

I gripped the doorframe. I needed something to hold onto and that was what was closest. He was up and around the desk in a few fast strides and stopped in front of me and I held up my hand.

“Don’t,” I said. “Don’t touch me and don’t say my name and don’t tell me you’re sorry. Just answer me. How long.”

He looked at me. He looked like a man who understood that there was no version of this that was okay and wasn’t going to insult me by trying to find one.

“A year,” he said.

A year.

A whole year.

I laughed. I couldn’t help it. It came out wrong, sharp and broken, and I pressed my hand over my mouth and stood there in his office doorway with my eyes burning and my chest heaving and I refused to cry. I had cried enough last night. I was not standing in front of this man and crying over Daniel Lawson again.

A year of him coming home and sitting across from me at dinner and sleeping next to me and looking me in the face. A year of me lying awake wondering what was wrong with me. What I wasn’t doing. What I should be doing differently. A year of trying harder for a man who was already somewhere else, with someone else, and coming home to me anyway because I was convenient and I never asked too many questions.

“Who,” I said.

“Someone from his office,” Damien said.

Of course. Of course it was someone from his office. All those late nights. All those work dinners I wasn’t invited to.

“Does she know about me,” I said.

“Yes,” he said.

That one went through me differently. She knew. She had known the whole time that there was a wife at home and she had stayed anyway. And Daniel had let her stay. Had probably told her whatever he needed to tell her to keep her there while he kept me in the dark.

I stood there and breathed and did not cry and after a while I looked up at Damien standing in front of me and I said the only thing left to say.

“I’m going to need you to give me a minute.”

“Take whatever you need,” he said.

“I need you to leave your own office.”

He left.

I sat down in the chair across from his desk and put my face in my hands and I didn’t cry but I sat there for a long time and let the anger move through me in waves until it settled into something quieter and colder and more useful.

A year.

Fine.

He had taken a year from me without my knowledge.

I was going to take everything else from him on purpose.