STITCHED IN LIES

Chapter 13: Open Your Hand

In the corridor outside the ballroom, a hand brushed hers and slipped something in it. it was a man, a shadow in a tuxedo.

He passed by so quickly before she could register what had happened. By the time she turned, Chad was already walking away, his back to her, his stride unhurried.

She did not look down. Marcus stood ten feet away with his back to her, laughing with a minister. Across the foyer, a woman in emerald silk turned her head and watched Chad go. Shyne felt the small, light weight in her clutch settle against her hip like a held breath.

She did not open the clutch until the car ride was over.

In the car he kept both hands on the wheel, ten and two, and the radio off. Streetlights slid across his profile, even and unhurried. Under the table at dinner his fingers had closed on her wrist; now four pale marks were rising there. She tucked the wrist beneath the clutch and counted the turns to home, the way she counted everything: the lamps, the red lights, the seconds between his breaths.

Marcus drove them home in silence. A calm so complete it hummed. He parked, walked her upstairs with a gentle hand at her elbow, and closed their bedroom door with a soft, terrible click.

He took off his cufflinks one at a time and set them in the dish on the dresser, exactly in the center. He did not look at her wrist. He did not need to.

"You embarrassed me," he said.

"He asked me a question—"

"Which you answered like a woman who thinks she still matters." He said it kindly. He said everything kindly. "Tonight you were a guest, Shyne. Not a performer. You will remember that."

"I only—"

"Do you need me to repeat it?"

She closed her mouth.

He took off his watch and laid it face up beside the cufflinks. "I'm not angry," he said. "I want you to understand that. I'm only disappointed."

It was worse than shouting. Shouting could be argued with.

He held her gaze a moment longer, searching for something, and finding it, apparently, because he nodded. "Good," he said, and went into the bathroom to shower. The water began to run.

Shyne stood alone in the bedroom with her heart hammering and her wrist throbbing, and found, to her bewilderment, that she was not afraid.

She was furious.

It was a cold fury, deep and slow. It had been building for three years in some basement of herself, and tonight, for the first time, it had light to grow in. She looked down at her own hands. They were steady.

She thought of the voice that had risen across the dinner table, the one that said your mills are in the wrong place. It had come from somewhere beneath three years of silence. It had been hers. She had forgotten what it sounded like.

She opened her clutch.

Beside her lipstick lay a small white card. No logo. Four lines in a hard, upright hand.

Tower. Sixty-eighth floor.

Any hour. Any reason.

You don't need to explain.

—C.

She read it twice, and her eyes stung. You don't need to explain. Three years of explanations, justifications, apologies, receipts. And here was a stranger offering her a door and asking nothing for it.

The card was heavy cream stock with clean-cut edges, the kind she would have chosen for a lookbook. Someone had taken care over it. In three years, no one had taken care over anything meant only for her.

The water shut off.

Shyne closed her fist around the card. Behind her, the bathroom door opened, and her husband stood there in a white robe, hair wet, gray eyes already on her closed hand.

"What's that?" Marcus asked softly.

She did not breathe.

"Open your hand, Shyne."