STITCHED IN LIES

Chapter 4: The Forty-First Floor

That afternoon she did something she had not done in three years. She went into the back of her closet, behind the beige and the cream and the carefully pressed gray, and she knelt on the floor and dug through a box of old things.

Under a stack of tissue paper she found a pair of black leggings she had bought online last winter on one of those many nights when Marcus was at a conference. She had never worn them. She had hidden them like contraband.

She held the fabric against her face. Took a long, deep breath, inhaling the smell of the fabric that almost didn’t smell the same.

It smelled faintly of the packaging it arrived in, plastic and cotton. And something happened in her chest at that moment that she had not been prepared for. It was not grief. It was want. A small, sharp want to move. To feel. To sweat. To be in a body and feel it actually still works. To take up a little more room in the world than the width of a doorway.

It frightened her more than the phone had because wanting came with a lot of consequences.

Wanting was how this sad movie called her life now, all started. It had started with wanting once before. She had wanted to be looked after, to be seen, to be cherished, and that wanting had been the door through which a man like Marcus Maine had walked.

I can want a thing, she thought, shaking. I can want it, and it can be mine.

Even though she did not yet believe it, she still went ahead to put the leggings in her bag.

The Wenthworth Tower rose over the city like a verdict. Sixty-eight floors of dark glass, owned by the one family nobody dared to cross. Wenthworths owned the ports, the power grid, half the banks, and the building the banks' lawyers worked in. When a Wenthworth sneezed, markets caught cold.

Shyne parked in the visitor garage in the cheap leggings, her heart beating like she was committing a heinous crime.

Her phone buzzed on the passenger seat.

Marcus.

Why is your car at Wenthworth Tower?

She stared at the screen. Shocked.

She had told him nothing. She had turned off location sharing the night before, carefully, quietly, while he slept, with her breath held like a thief.

How did he know I was here? Was I being followed?

Another message arrived before she could exhale.

I'll wait. Come home, Shyne.

The cold came up through her feet. Her fingers went numb. She could feel the old script rising, the apology, the swift sensible of course, I'm on my way, the whole machinery of a woman who had been taught that obedience was the price of peace.

She looked up through the windshield at the glowing forty-first floor.

Then, with a hand that trembled like a leaf, she turned the phone face down on the seat.

It was a very small thing. A phone turned over. Nobody in the world would have noticed.

But for the first time in three years, something inside Shyne Maine did not bend.

She got out of the car.