Chapter1:The Anniversary Surprise
Isabella Hart stood outside Daniel Reed's apartment building at six-forty-five in the evening, balancing a grocery bag in one arm and a bottle of champagne in the other, and rehearsed the speech she'd been practicing in her head for two weeks.
Five years, Daniel. Five years, and I know where this is going. So let's just say it out loud tonight.
Inside the bag: the ingredients for his favorite meal veal scaloppine, the recipe she'd stolen from her grandmother and perfected over three disastrous attempts. The champagne was the good kind, thirty dollars a bottle, because tonight wasn't an ordinary night.
Tonight was their five-year anniversary.
And Isabella had decided, somewhere between her morning coffee and the elevator ride up to his floor, that she was done waiting. If Daniel didn't propose tonight, she would stop hinting. She would stop leaving bridal magazines on his coffee table "by accident." She would simply ask him herself, like the modern, self-sufficient woman she'd worked so hard to become.
The building's doorman, an older man named Gus who had watched her arrive at this entrance a thousand times, tipped his cap.
"Evening, Miss Hart. Mr. Reed isn't expecting anyone, far as I know."
"That's the idea, Gus." She smiled. "Anniversary surprise."
"Ah." His grin was warm. "Lucky man."
She rode the elevator to the twelfth floor, her heart beating faster than the elevator's soft jazz warranted. In her purse, tucked between her wallet and her phone, was a small velvet box of her own not a ring, but a watch. A ridiculously expensive watch she'd saved four months to afford. A statement. I'm serious about you. Match me.
Daniel had given her a key two years ago. She'd never used it unannounced. There was something about the weight of that key in her palm tonight that felt like crossing a threshold into the rest of her life, maybe. Into a future with a house in the suburbs and two kids and a dog she'd pretend she didn't want.
She slid the key into the lock as quietly as she could, lips already shaping into the smile she planned to wear when he turned around.
The apartment was dim. The only light came from the kitchen, where a single pendant lamp glowed over the counter, and from the hallway that led toward the bedroom. A bottle of wine cheap, half-finished stood open on the counter beside two glasses. One lipstick-marked.
Isabella paused in the doorway.
A friend, she thought automatically, the way she'd been trained to think by five years of loving someone. Linda from accounting. They had that project due.
Except Linda from accounting wore nude lipstick, the professional kind, and this stain was a deep, dramatic red that Isabella recognized with a strange, floating detachment, because she'd watched her little sister apply that exact shade in a hundred bathroom mirrors, complaining about how expensive it was, asking to borrow Isabella's mascara as payment for the compliment.
Victoria.
The thought arrived fully formed and refused to leave.
Isabella set the grocery bag down on the counter without a sound. Her hands had gone cold. Somewhere down the hall, she could hear them
voices behind the bedroom door, low and warm, tangled together the way voices get when two people have forgotten the rest of the world exists.
Then laughter.
A woman's laughter, breathless and familiar, rising into a giggle that dissolved into something softer. Something intimate.
Isabella's champagne bottle slipped from her fingers and hit the carpet with a muffled *thud*. She didn't pick it up. She couldn't. Her body had stopped taking instructions, every nerve rerouted toward that door, toward those voices, toward the sound of her sister saying her boyfriend's name.
Daniel, stop....
You don't actually want me to stop.
Isabella didn't remember walking down the hallway. Later, she would try to reconstruct it the number of steps, the pattern of the hallway runner beneath her shoes, whether she'd thought about turning around and she would find nothing. No decision. No moment of choice. Just motion, as if she'd been pulled forward by an undertow she'd been too trustful to feel.
The bedroom door wasn't fully closed. It stood open two inches, maybe three, and through the gap she could see the lamplight, warm and golden, spilling across the bed she'd lain in a hundred times.
She heard her sister laugh again. Heard Daniel's low voice answer.
Five years,Isabella thought distantly. I was going to make veal scaloppine.
Her hand found the door.
The last thing Isabella Hart believed in was the version of her life she had built with two people she trusted most in the world.
Then she pushed the door open and watched that life end.
