All Chapters of They called her unstable then she took everything : Chapter 1 - Chapter 5

( Marlowe )Nobody in this house ever burns a candle down crooked. I noticed that my first winter here how the staff trim every wick to the same height, how the flames stand so straight and obedient they barely flicker when the doors open. It took me three years to understand why that used to bother me.Because I was learning to do the same thing. Stand straight. Stay lit. Never gutter, no matter the draft."You remember Congressman Halloway," Thorne said, his palm settling at the small of my back, steering me toward my seat like I might wander off without him.I didn't remember him. I smiled the smile I'd rehearsed so many times it no longer felt like a lie, just a language I'd become fluent in. "Of course. Lovely to see you again.""Marlowe." He took my hand like it might snap. "Thorne tells me you've been resting. Good. A woman shouldn't run herself into the ground the way you used to."The way you used to.Six words, and I felt them lodge somewhere under my ribs. As if ambition ha

(Marlowe)It wasn't him.I stood at the top of the stairs with the deal sheet still crushed in my fist, my pulse loud enough that I could feel it in my throat, and watched Thorne cross the entry hall with Dr. Voss half a step behind, black bag in hand, the way he always carried it like a man arriving somewhere he'd already been paid to belong.Relief came first. Then, right behind it, something closer to shame, for how badly I'd wanted it to be someone else. Someone I hadn't even met yet."Marlowe." Thorne looked up and found me on the landing, and whatever had been on his face in the hallway earlier that night was gone, smoothed back into the version he wears for company. "Sorry to wake you. Elias wanted to check in after the gala. Given everything."Given everything. As if the gala had been a fever I'd caught, instead of something done to me in a crowded room with a hundred witnesses."I wasn't asleep," I said, and came down anyway, because staying on that landing felt too much like

(Marlowe)The earrings were my mother's. Thin gold hoops, nothing extravaganza kind of thing she wore to the grocery store and to gallery openings with equal indifference. After she died, they were one of the only things of hers I asked for by name. I wore them the way some people carry a rosary. Not for luck. Just to keep a piece of her close enough to touch.I took them off Tuesday night, set them in the dish on my vanity the way I did every night of my life, and Wednesday morning there was only one.I told myself I was overreacting. I checked the vanity, then the bathroom counter, then got down on my knees on the bedroom floor and ran my fingers along the baseboards like a woman hunting for a lost contact lens, certain it had simply rolled somewhere logical.It hadn't.By noon I'd pulled apart my closet, unmade the bed, gone through every coat pocket twice. Nothing. That small gold hoop had existed in this house for four years without incident and then, overnight, stopped existing