جميع فصول : الفصل -الفصل 20

I stood in the doorway and did not go in.I had been standing here for nearly a full minute, hand still on the doorknob, trying to decide whether what I was looking at was real.The apartment was exactly as it had been when I first arrived.Not cleaned up, not the rushed, imperfect result of someone shoving things back into drawers and calling it done. *Exactly as it had been.* The books were back on the shelf in what looked like their original order. The couch cushions were intact, no seam of stitching where the cuts had been. The kitchen drawers were closed. The take-out menus were back in the second drawer where Lilian kept them, which I only knew because I remembered putting them there myself a week ago.And the wall above the kitchen doorway was clean.I closed the door.Stood in the hallway.Opened it again.Still clean.I walked to the kitchen wall and pressed my fingertips against the paint. Dry. Not fresh-dry, either, but dry in the way of paint that had been there a while, w

Sleep didn't come.I read until the words stopped making sense, then read the same paragraph four times and gave up. The novel went on the nightstand. I lay on my back with the city doing its muted nighttime hum beyond the curtains and my own thoughts doing rather less muted things in my head.The grandmother arrived in two days.Then came the question of being seen. Dinner parties, events, appearing in photographs beside a man whose full name I'd only learned a few days ago. And underneath all of that, like something ticking in a locked room, the funeral. Seven days away. Seven days until I stood in a crowd and watched people grieve a woman who was, by one reading of things, still very much present.I gave up on sleep properly around five and started the novel again from the beginning—at least that way the paragraph made sense.By the time grey light started pressing at the curtain edges, I'd finished four chapters and developed a thorough appreciation for how quiet a well-built apar

I went back home, and Alexander told me we had to go pick up his grandma from the airport. I made my way to my room to get a change of clothes, but I found nothing. My clothes were gone.I looked for Margaret, but she was nowhere to be found. I knocked on Alexander's door."Come in."The room was larger than mine, which made sense given it was the main bedroom, but what I hadn't expected was how understated it was. No grand furniture, no statement pieces. Just clean lines and dark wood and books here too, the same lived-in shelves, the same disorder of a person who read without caring about aesthetics.His scent was everywhere.I noticed it before I noticed him. That same clean, woody something from the car, warmer now, settled into the room the way a scent only could after years of occupation.He was at the dresser, adjusting his cuff. He looked up when I came in, assessing me in the quick, efficient way he seemed to do everything."I can't find my clothes," I said. "I went to my r

I cracked the bathroom door open an inch and looked first.Alexander was already changed, grey sleep shirt, dark trousers, stretched out on top of the covers with one arm behind his head like he had every right to be there, which, I supposed, he did. His eyes were closed, his chest rising and falling in the slow rhythm of someone either genuinely asleep or performing it very convincingly.I slipped past him to the closet and shut myself in.The sleep clothes Genna had packed were nothing scandalous, soft cotton shorts, a plain camisole, but standing in that closet pulling them on, I was aware of every inch of fabric in a way I hadn't been in my life as Lilian, or my life as Eleanor, or any life at all until about six days ago.I smoothed the camisole down. Checked myself in the small mirror on the closet door. My reflection looked back at me with an expression I didn't entirely recognize, cheeks still faintly pink from the towel incident a few minutes earlier, eyes brighter than they

The garden was beautiful, and it took effort to look effortless.Rows of late roses still holding on past their season, a stone path worn smooth by generations of feet, a fountain somewhere out of sight trickling steadily in the background. I walked slowly, letting the quiet settle over me, grateful for a morning that asked nothing of me at all.Anna was waiting at the turn of the path.She didn't bother with a greeting. Just stepped into my way, arms folded, chin lifted in the particular posture of someone who had rehearsed what she was about to say more than once."I know what's between you and Alex is fake," she said. "And I'm going to prove it."I looked at her.There was something almost admirable about the bluntness of it, no pretence, no dancing around the accusation. Just the thing said plainly, the way you'd state a fact you were certain of."Okay," I said.She blinked, clearly having expected more resistance."No one deserves him more than I do." Her voice tightened, the car