All Chapters of EYES OPEN: Chapter 21 - Chapter 30

His apartment feels different at night.Same space, same clean lines, same bookshelves, but the city lights coming through the windows replace the morning light and everything is warmer and lower and closer somehow, like the walls have moved in slightly while nobody was watching.He pours wine without asking, I take the glass without protest.We end up on the couch, facing each other, shoes off, the kind of settled that happens when two people stop performing relaxed and actually become it."Tell me something nobody knows about you," I say.He considers it seriously, which I appreciate because a lesser man would deflect with a joke. "I almost did not go into property development," he says. "I spent a year after university trying to write a novel."I stare at him. "Seriously.""Seriously.""What kind of novel?""Terrible," he says. "The kind a twenty three year old writes when he thinks suffering is the same thing as depth."I laugh properly. I don't like like I'm performing because it

I call Stanley at 7 am.He picks up immediately, which tells me he did not sleep either."Camille," he says. "Thank you for calling.""You said it was not about the divorce," I say. "So talk."A breath. "I need to see you in person, not over the phone.""Stanley, it is seven in the morning and I have had approximately three hours of sleep. Whatever you need to say you can say it now."A pause. "Derek has been lying to you about more than Vivienne."I look at Rhys across the kitchen where he is making coffee, still in last night's clothes, watching me with that focused quiet attention."Define more," I say."The apartment," Stanley says. "The one you are living in, Derek does not own it outright. There is a second name on the deed, has been since before you got married. He never told you."I go very still. "Whose name?"A pause that lasts two full seconds too long."Vivienne's," Stanley says.The kitchen is completely silent except for the coffee machine.Vivienne's name is on my apart

Rhys pulls over.Not gradually. He signals, checks the mirror, and pulls the car to the kerb with the controlled precision of a man who needs to not be driving right now.He cuts the engine.We sit in the sudden silence of a side street with the lawyer still on speaker and the word Mercer hanging in the air between us like something physical."Say that again," I say."Tasha Mercer," the lawyer repeats. "The statement was signed four days ago. She claims to have witnessed an incident between Rhys and the complainant at a private gathering approximately two years ago. The statement describes physical aggression in detail."Four days ago.Four days ago Tasha was sitting in her kitchen telling me she was on my side. Four days ago she was running searches on Petra Haynes for me, feeding me information, being my person.Four days ago she was also signing a legal statement against the man I was falling for."Is the statement usable?" Rhys asks. His voice is completely flat. "Given the filing

Nora comes over at noon with her laptop and an energy that means she has not slept and does not care.She spreads printed documents across Rhys's coffee table like a woman setting up a war room, which is essentially what this is, and Joel arrives twenty minutes later with food nobody asked for and the quiet usefulness of someone who understands that showing up is its own language.I sit cross legged on the floor opposite Nora with my own laptop and we work in parallel, two women pulling threads while the men eat sandwiches and try to be helpful without getting in the way."Claire Ashworth's bankruptcy filing lists her total assets at eleven thousand," Nora says. "Her legal bills from the Rhys litigation alone were four hundred thousand. Someone absorbed that debt.""Vivienne?" I ask."Vivienne does not have that kind of money independently," Rhys says from the couch. "Her income is from the gallery. Comfortable but not four hundred thousand comfortable.""So who does?" I ask."Old mon

We spend the rest of the afternoon building the case.Rhys's lawyer arrives at four, a compact precise man named Graham who has the energy of someone who has seen everything and is only mildly surprised by any of it. He sits at the kitchen table with Claire's folder and his own laptop and works through the documents with the focused quiet of a surgeon.Nora makes coffee and does not stop moving, cross referencing Claire's financial records against Martin Raymond's publicly available business history and finding matches that make her say things under her breath that I choose not to repeat.Joel sits with Rhys on the couch and they talk in low voices and I give them that, the specific privacy of two men who have been friends long enough to not need an audience for the important conversations.I take my own laptop to the window seat and I work.I have been thinking about Vivienne.Not with anger, not anymore, but with the specific analytical focus I use when I am trying to understand a p