All Chapters of The Wrong Night: Chapter 1 - Chapter 8

Aya’s POV“Wake up, Aya,” said Ilana, very softly. “Everyone’s here.”My head felt full of wet sand.I opened my eyes. A white ceiling. A crystal chandelier. Gray morning light coming through a wall of glass, and beyond it the whole city of Seattle, wet and silver, with Lake Union lying flat as a mirror at the bottom.This wasn’t my bedroom.I tried to sit up. My arms were slow. My mouth tasted of chalk.Then I smelled it.I’m a perfumer. I have a nose that can pick cedar out of a crowded elevator and tell you whether the oakmoss is real. The room reeked. Man’s cologne, sandalwood and bergamot, too much of it. Stale champagne. Hotel bleach. And under it, sharp and faint and bitter, a smell like crushed aspirin.It was coming from the glass on the nightstand.“Aya,” said a man’s voice next to me, thick and confused. “What the hell?”I turned my head.Eitan Blake lay on the other side of the bed with his tie undone and one arm flung over his eyes. My sister’s fiancé. The man who had put

Aya’s POV“Miss Aya,” said a voice behind me. “Don’t turn around.”I stopped at the gate of the Sterling estate with a duffel bag in one hand and my shoes in the other. It was eleven fifty in the morning. Rain dripped off the cedar trees on Medina Road. Behind me, the big white house sat on its lawn like a wedding cake, every curtain drawn.Somebody had put my bag by the mailbox. One bag. Twelve years of my life, and a security guard had zipped it for me.“Keep walking,” said the voice. “Slowly. I’m going to put a hand on your arm.”A thin, spotted hand closed around my elbow. It smelled of pipe tobacco and Brasso and old leather.Abel Finch had driven the Sterling car for forty years. He was seventy-three now, retired, stooped like a question mark, and he still came up to the gate every morning to check the post. When I was twelve years old, he’d taught me how to drive a stick shift in the back lot, singing hymns off-key.“Abel,” I whispered. “I didn’t do it.”“I know you didn’t.”“

Aya’s POV“Box two fourteen?” said the teller. “That box hasn’t been opened in twelve years.”“That’s right.”“You have the key?”I set it on the marble counter. My hand wasn’t steady. Beside me, Liron shifted her weight and kept her arms crossed, glaring at the ceiling as if daring the security cameras to try their luck.It was ten o’clock the next morning. The old Puget Building on Second Avenue is a granite bank with a brass revolving door, high painted ceilings, and floors that echo like a church. It smelled of polish and dust and paper, a smell I loved. I have never in my life been so afraid of a smell.The teller studied a screen. She was young, with a nose ring and kind eyes. “Rivers. Hannah. Renewed annually, paid in advance through the year twenty thirty.” She glanced up. “It looks like your mother set up a trust. The rent’s covered.”Fourteen years. She’d paid for fourteen years of silence, and I hadn’t known.“Right this way.”The vault was a cold gray room lined with steel

Aya’s POV“You fainted in my arms,” said Ezra. “I thought you should know.”“I remember.”“Do you?”“Some of it.” I pushed myself up against the pillows. The room was warm and quiet, with a gold afternoon lying across the bed. Someone had taken off my shoes. Someone had pulled a soft gray blanket over my knees. “I remember the bank. I remember Ilana. I remember you coming through the door like a man in a film.”“I’m not proud of that.”“It was a very good entrance.”He almost smiled.He stood at the foot of the bed with his hands in his pockets and his sleeves rolled to the elbow. He looked wrecked. His hair was ruffled. His jaw was dark with stubble, and his gray eyes had the flat, sleepless shine of a man who’d been staring at a screen too long.He kept looking at my stomach.He didn’t mean to. I saw him catch himself, every time. His gaze would dip, and jerk back up, and his hand would move in his pocket, as if he were holding on to a coin.Did he know?I pressed my palm flat again