Your Husband's Sweetheart System Is Fake but My Controlling Stake Is Real

The first time I heard about the system, Daniel read it to me from the breakfast table like a man reciting a weather report. We were in the solarium of the Marchetti estate, a house that had belonged to his mother's family since before the First World War. The glass ceiling was fogged with September rain. I was drinking coffee and reviewing the third-quarter projections for Bellhaven Logistics, the company my husband had inherited and nearly driven into the ground before I took over as chair. "There's a blue screen," he said, "floating over the table." I looked up. There was no blue screen. There was only the copper coffee pot and the Financial Times folded beside his plate. "It says I have two hundred and forty life points. If I don't complete the daily affection task, I lose ten points." "Affection task," I repeated. "It wants me to bring Elena flowers. White lilies. It says the gesture must be witnessed by at least one family member to count." Elena was his new executive assistant, hired six weeks ago against my explicit recommendation. I had done the background check myself. She had worked at three firms in four years and left each one after an unexplained promotion or an unexplained dismissal. Neither reference would speak on the record. A system that picked a sweetheart for my husband and told him to bring her flowers in front of witnesses was not a system. It was a casting decision. "Daniel," I said, "there's no screen." He smiled at me with the patience of a man explaining gravity to a child. "You can't see it because you're not the host. But it's real. It gave me the morning briefing. It says my favorability rating with you is forty-two. It says I need to raise it to sixty or I'll lose the bonus quest." "The bonus quest." "A weekend at the lake house. With Elena. To unlock my inner potential." I set down my cup. "You're telling me a floating screen is ordering you to take your assistant to our lake house." "It's not ordering. It's guiding." He touched his temple. "It knows things, Claire. It told me about the Henderson deal before the board did. It told me about your father's surgery before you told me. It's been right every time." That was the part that made me go cold. The Henderson deal had been confidential. My father's surgery had been confidential. Someone had fed my husband information and dressed it up as magic. "Read me the rest," I said. "Claire, you're making this into something it's not." "Read me the rest, Daniel." He looked at the panel only he could see, and he read. The daily tasks. The penalty for refusal. The reward structure. The "heroine aura" that would be activated once his favorability with Elena exceeded eighty. The "loyalty lock" that would prevent him from speaking about the system to anyone outside the household. "Does it say anything about me?" I asked. "It says you're the obstacle." "To what?" "To my growth." I stood up. The rain had thickened; the glass ceiling had gone the color of old pewter. Behind me, in the hallway, I heard the housekeeper setting out silver for a lunch nobody was going to eat. "Daniel," I said, "I want you to call Dr. Verhoeven." "I don't need a neurologist. I need you to stop being so rigid." "Then I want you to call the family office. Because if you're going to act on instructions from a screen that nobody else can see, we need to talk about your role at Bellhaven." His face changed. For one second, the patient smile slipped, and I saw the thing underneath it, the thing I had been ignoring for months. He wasn't confused. He was excited. He had been given permission to want what he already wanted, and he was going to use it. "You can't threaten me with the company," he said. "I'm not threatening. I'm minutes-taking. This conversation is now a board matter." He laughed. "You've always been like this. Everything is a board matter." "Everything is," I said. "That's why the company still exists." I walked out of the solarium and up the back stairs to my study, and I locked the door, and I called Priya Raman, who had been my forensic accountant since the year Daniel's father died and left us with a spreadsheet full of holes. "Priya," I said. "I need a full workup on Elena Vasquez. Phone records. Travel. Any financial footprints. And I need an inventory of the east wing." "The east wing," she said. "That's the part of the house Daniel uses as an office." "Yes," I said. "I think someone has been wiring my house." By the time the forensic team arrived, the rain had stopped. Daniel was in the city, at a lunch he had described as unavoidable. Elena had taken the afternoon off. The house was quiet in the way houses are quiet before they are searched. I stood in the east wing and watched the technician unspool a length of cable from behind a bookshelf. It ran to a small device, the size of a matchbox, mounted under the window trim. "Audio and motion," he said. "Wi-Fi capable. It feeds to a relay somewhere in the house. We'll trace it." I nodded and said nothing. I was thinking about how many conversations had happened in that room. How many times Daniel had taken a call in his "office" while I sat two walls away, reviewing documents he wasn't supposed to see. "Mrs. Marchetti," the technician said, "there's another one upstairs." "Where?" "In the master suite. Under the bedside table." I went up. The room was the way I had left it that morning, the bed made, the curtains half drawn. The little device was exactly where he said it would be, a black dot under the lip of the table, pointed at the bed. I stood there for a long moment. Then I took out my phone and took a photograph of it, and sent it to Priya, and went back downstairs to draft the first page of what would become, by the end of the year, a seventy-page report. The name on the relay was not Elena's. It was the name of a company I had never heard of, registered in a state I had no connection to, with a mailing address that turned out to be a storage unit in a town forty miles north. The registered agent was a lawyer who did piecework for a number of small firms. It took Priya eleven days to trace the second layer. "Claire," she said on the phone. "Sit down." "I'm sitting." "The company was formed eighteen months ago. Initial funding came from a trust in the Marchetti family name. The beneficiary of that trust is not you and not Daniel." "Who is it." "Daniel's mother." I said nothing. My mother-in-law had been dead for six years. "The trust," Priya said, "was set up to provide an allowance for a person named in the trust documents as a family dependant. I have the name, but I want you to read it yourself." She sent me the file. I opened it. The dependant was listed as Elena M. Vasquez, age twenty-eight, of the same town in which my husband's mother had kept a summer house that had been sold, supposedly, to a developer. I read the name three times before the letters resolved into something I could hold in my mind. I had never met my husband's half-sister. Nobody had ever told me she existed. That night I sat across from Daniel at a dinner I had asked the kitchen to serve in the smaller room, the one where we ate when we were fighting. He came in late, dropped his coat on the chair, and poured himself a glass of wine without offering me one. "The forensics team found something in the east wing," he said. "They did." "Don't you want to tell me what?" "No," I said. "I want you to tell me who Elena is." He drank. He looked at the window. He looked back at me, and for a moment I thought he was going to lie, and then he didn't. "She's my sister," he said. "My mother's child. From before she married my father. She was given up, and my mother tracked her down years ago, and she asked me to look after her if anything happened." "Your mother died six years ago." "She made me promise." "And what was she supposed to be looking after you for?" He frowned. "The system, Daniel." "It's real." "It's a production," I said. "Somebody hooked a microphone and a hidden speaker into your house and hired an actress to be your assistant and wrote you a script. You've been reading lines out of somebody else's play." His hand tightened on the glass. "You don't know that." "I know the relay. I know the trust. I know the registration. I'm going to know the rest of it by next Tuesday." "You're wrong," he said, and his voice had gone high and young. "It told me things. It knew about the Henderson deal. It knew about your father." "Because someone is listening in this house," I said. "Because someone with access to your calendar and your phone and your bedroom has been feeding you the information and then telling you the blue screen told you first." He got up. He walked to the door. He stopped with his hand on the frame. "If you're right," he said, "then I've been talking to someone in this house for six months, and it wasn't you, and I don't know who it was." "Yes," I said. "That's where I am too." He left. I sat alone in the small room with a cold dinner and a very long list of things I was going to have to prove, and one thing I already knew. His mother had not left him a system. She had left him a leash.