The Stranger in My Bed

The lawyer slides the contract across the desk like he's dealing cards. Forty-two pages. My name printed on every one of them. Sienna Marie Hartley. "And the money?" My voice comes out steadier than my hands. "Wire transfer to Ridgemont Memorial within the hour of execution." He caps his pen. "Your mother's surgery gets scheduled for Thursday." Thursday. Four days. I press the pen to the signature line and it won't move. "Second thoughts?" The door has opened behind me. The voice is low, unhurried, the kind that never has to repeat itself. I turn. He's tall in a way that rearranges a room. Black suit, no tie, a face that belongs on the cover of something expensive. Nothing about him is warm. "Mr. Cross," the lawyer says, standing. "Sit down, Delaney." He doesn't look at the lawyer.He looks at me."You're Sienna." "You're my husband." I stand up too fast.My chair scrapes."Apparently." "In eleven minutes." He checks his watch. "Give or take." "I thought there'd be, I don't know. A courthouse. Somebody asking if I object." "Do you?" "To what part?" "Any of it." He unbuttons his jacket and sits in the chair beside mine, angled toward me, like this is a job interview and I'm already failing. "I object to a stranger buying my mother's lungs." "Heart," he says."Mitral valve.The lungs are fine.Dr.Prasad thinks she has eighteen months without the surgery and twenty years with it." The room tilts a little. "How do you know her doctor's name?" "I know a great deal." He crosses one ankle over the other."You work doubles at Marlow's Diner.Tuesday through Sunday.You clear four hundred and ten dollars a week after the house takes its cut of your tips, which is illegal, by the way." "Stop." "You were served an eviction notice nine days ago. Apartment 3C, Halloway Street. You've been sleeping in the break room since Monday because you gave your last three hundred to the pharmacy." My throat closes. "I said stop." "You have a scar on your left palm from a broken plate you didn't report because you couldn't afford the urgent care copay." He tips his head. "Should I go on?" "No." I sit down.My legs make the decision for me."Why do you know all that?" "Because I don't marry strangers." "You've never met me." "I've known about you for fifteen years." He says it flat.No drama.Which is somehow worse."Since the night your father died." Everything in me goes still. The lawyer clears his throat. "Mr. Cross, I'd advise—" "Get out, Delaney." The door closes. The room is very quiet and very bright, and I can hear the traffic forty floors below like water in a pipe. "Say that again," I whisper. "Which part?" "My father." "Thomas Hartley.Chief financial officer, Vance Holdings.Went off the Kettleman Bridge on November eighth, nine forty-one at night." Adrian's voice never changes."The coroner called it suicide.There was a note.Your mother identified the handwriting." "I was nine." My hands are shaking now and I don't hide it. "I sat in a plastic chair in a hallway for six hours and a woman gave me apple juice and told me my dad was sad." "He wasn't sad." "Don't." "He was scared." Adrian leans forward, elbows on his knees."He'd spent four months copying documents he wasn't supposed to see.He mailed a set of them on November seventh.They never arrived." "You're lying." "I'm not." "You are, because the police—" My voice cracks and I hate it. "The police said he climbed the railing. They said there were no other footprints, no witnesses, no—" "There was a witness." I stop breathing. "There was a car parked on the east approach with its lights off," he says. "Two men got out. One of them came back alone." "Who told you that?" "I did." Adrian holds my eyes. "I was in the back seat." The sound that leaves me isn't a word. "I was fourteen." He doesn't blink."I didn't understand what I was watching until I was nineteen.By then the man who did it had married my mother and taken my father's company, and I'd learned to smile at him across a dinner table twice a week." "No." I'm on my feet.The contract slides off the desk and pages fan across the carpet."No.You don't get to walk in here and hand me that." "I'm not handing you anything. I'm hiring you." "To be your wife." "To be in my house." He rises.He's a head taller than me and he doesn't use it, doesn't crowd me, just stands there."For one year.Eleven months from now this all comes apart and you'll have four million dollars and a mother with a working heart, and if you want to disappear after that, I'll help you do it." "And what do you get?" "A witness who has standing." Something moves behind his eyes, fast, gone."Spouses can't be compelled to testify against each other.Spouses inherit.Spouses live in the house." "Whose house?" "Mine now.His for twenty years." He bends and gathers the fallen pages, taps them square, sets them on the desk."He comes to dinner every third Sunday.He'll come to meet you." "You want me to sit across from the man who killed my father and pass him the salt." "I want you to look at him," Adrian says. "Because I've looked at him for fifteen years and I've stopped being able to see him. You'll see him." I'm crying. I don't remember starting. "Why me?" "Because you never believed the note either." He reaches into his inside pocket."You wrote to the district attorney's office when you were sixteen.Twice.They filed it under nuisance correspondence." "How—" "I've kept everything anyone ever wrote about your father." He holds out his hand. There's a key in it. Brass. Old. Longer than my thumb, the head shaped like a small flat clover, the shaft worn shiny in one spot as if somebody used it every day for a long time and then stopped. "What is that?" "East wing, end of the hall, third door. It's the only room in the house that locks." I don't take it. "What's in it?" "Everything I've collected." He turns the key so it catches the light."Bank records.Two hundred hours of audio.The original coroner's field notes, which don't match the filed report." My fingers close around it before I decide to. The metal's warm from his pocket. "Mrs.Harding runs the house," he says, buttoning his jacket."She's been there thirty years.She's kind to me and she is not on my side.Don't let her see that key." "You said your side has proof." "Proof isn't the problem." He walks to the door and holds it open for me, and the hallway light makes him look almost young. "The problem is that he already knows you're coming." "What?" "He sent flowers to your mother's room this morning. White lilies. The card says *Welcome to the family, Sienna.*" The key bites into my palm. "I never told anyone my name," I say. "I signed nothing. I haven't signed *anything* yet." Adrian goes very still. "Say that again." "I didn't sign." I hold up my empty hand. "You walked in before I could." And that's when the phone on the lawyer's desk starts ringing, and the screen lights up with a name I've only ever seen on the front page of a newspaper.