Chapter 5

I made it back to my room.

That was the most I could say about it. I made it back and I got the door closed behind me and then my legs just stopped working and I ended up sitting on the floor with my back against the door and my knees pulled up to my chest and my face buried in them.

A year.

He had been doing this for a year. A year of coming home to me. A year of eating my food and sleeping in my bed and kissing my forehead in the morning and saying I love you like it was true. A year of me lying awake at night thinking something was wrong with me. Thinking I wasn’t enough. Thinking if I could just figure out what he needed, what I was missing, what I could do differently, maybe the distance would close.

I had been trying to fix myself for a year while he was with someone else.

I pressed my face harder into my knees and I cried. Not the quiet kind, not the controlled kind, not the kind where you keep it together enough that you could pretend later it hadn’t happened. The real kind. The kind that hurts your chest and your throat and makes it hard to breathe and doesn’t care about dignity or composure or any of the things I had been holding onto since last night.

I cried for the year. For every morning I woke up and decided to try harder. For every dinner I made and every question I didn’t ask because I didn’t want to be difficult. For every night I reached for him and felt the distance and told myself it was stress, it was work, it was just a rough patch, every marriage had rough patches. For seven years of being a good wife to a man who was somewhere else the entire last year of it.

I sat on that floor until I had nothing left.

Then I just sat there. Hollow. The kind of empty that comes after everything has come out and there’s nothing left to feel and you’re just a person sitting on a floor in an apartment that belongs to a stranger staring at the carpet.

Then someone knocked on the door.

I didn’t move. “I’m fine.”

Nothing for a second. Then Damien’s voice, very quiet, through the door. “I’m coming in.”

“I said I’m fine.”

The handle turned.

I scrambled up off the floor and got a few steps back and swiped at my face with both hands even though there was absolutely no version of this where I didn’t look exactly like what I was – a woman who had just spent an hour crying on a floor. He opened the door and looked at me and I looked at him and neither of us pretended.

He was holding a glass of water.

He held it out without saying anything.

I took it because I needed something to do with my hands and because my throat hurt and because refusing it would have taken energy I didn’t have anymore.

He didn’t come fully into the room. He leaned in the doorway with his hands in his pockets and looked at me and said nothing and somehow that was the right thing. I didn’t need words. I had been drowning in words since last night. His silence was the first thing that felt like it had any room in it.

I drank the water. Sat on the edge of the bed. Looked at the carpet.

“Why did you help him,” I said.

He didn’t answer right away. I looked up.

“You knew,” I said. “You knew about the cheating, you knew about the debt, you knew all of it. And instead of – I don’t know, instead of whatever else you could have done, you made a deal that put me here. So I want to know why. Not the contract version. The real reason.”

He came into the room then. A few steps. Enough that I had to look up to keep his face.

“I’ve known about Daniel for longer than a year,” he said. “The debt, the cheating, the way he’s been running his business. I’ve had people watching him for a while.”

“Why.”

He looked at me. Held my gaze for a long moment. “Because of you.”

I stared at him.

“Daniel wasn’t the one I was interested in,” he said. “He was a means to an end. The end was getting you here.”

I stood up because I needed to be on my feet for this. “How do you know me. We had never met before last night. I had never heard your name before Daniel said it at that table. So how.”

“Three years ago,” he said. “The Hartley Foundation gala. You were there with Daniel. Green dress. You spilled champagne on a man twice your size and when he got in your face about it you told him he should have moved faster.”

I remembered that night. I remembered the dress, the champagne, the man going red in the face while I held my ground even though my heart was hammering. I had been terrified and I had not shown it and I had been proud of myself for that afterward.

“I remember that night,” I said. “I don’t remember you.”

“I know,” he said. “I was across the room.”

“You were watching me.”

“Yes.”

I looked at him. At this man standing in the middle of my borrowed room telling me calmly that he had noticed me at a party three years ago and had been watching from a distance ever since. That he had tracked my husband’s debt and his cheating and his failing business and had waited until the moment he could arrange to have me brought here.

“You engineered this,” I said. “The whole thing.”

He didn’t deny it. He just looked at me steadily and let me say it.

“You could have done anything,” I said. “You could have called the debt in a hundred different ways. You chose this one. You chose me specifically.”

“Yes,” he said.

“Why.”

He was quiet for a moment. “Because you told a man twice your size that he should have moved faster and you didn’t flinch when he got in your face. Because you were the most interesting person in that room and you had no idea. Because I watched you for three years from a distance and everything I found out made me more certain, not less.” He paused. “Because I wanted to know if you were as remarkable up close as you were from across a room.”

The room was completely quiet.

I didn’t know what to do with that. My brain was full and my chest was full and I had nothing left to process one more enormous thing with. I sat back down on the edge of the bed and pressed my hands between my knees.

“Did you know he would sell me,” I said. “Or did you suggest it.”

His jaw tightened. “I told him I would accept you as payment.”

I nodded. I had already known. I had known since the coffee this morning, since the way he said my name, since the look on his face when I walked into his office last night. None of this was an accident.

“Okay,” I said.

“Nora – “

“I said okay.” I was so tired. Every part of me was exhausted in a way I had never felt before. “I just need tonight. I’ll be fine tomorrow.”

He stood there looking at me for a moment and I looked back and I didn’t have anything left to give this conversation. He seemed to understand that because he didn’t push. He just turned and walked to the door and before he pulled it closed he reached over and turned the hallway light down so it wouldn’t come in under the gap.

It was such a small thing.

I don’t know why it got to me the way it did. After everything. After the contract and the rules and the admission that he had engineered all of it. One small careful thing like turning down a light.

I sat in the half dark after he left and I thought about a green dress and a man watching from across a room for three years and a husband who had been lying for one.

None of my life had been what I thought it was.

The question was what I was going to make it now.

Because I was done letting other people answer that for me.