His Perfect Wife Was A Stranger

Discharge

The doctor cleared him two days later, with a list of restrictions Nathan had no intention of following and a warning about the risks of head trauma that Ella wrote down word for word, like she planned to enforce every line of it.

"You're not going back to the penthouse," she said, folding the paper into her bag as they waited for the discharge nurse to bring the final paperwork. "I already have somewhere arranged. A friend's flat in Islington, nobody in your family knows it exists."

"You've been planning this."

"I've had two days and nothing to do but think." She glanced at him, something careful in her expression. "I know it feels like I'm making decisions for you. I promise that's not what this is. I just don't know how else to keep you alive long enough for you to make your own."

Nathan almost smiled, except the words landed with more weight than either of them probably intended. He'd spent two days replaying his own voicemail in his head, the version of himself that had sounded so certain and so frightened at once, and he still didn't know what to do with the shape of that fear.

"Fine," he said. "Islington. But I need to stop somewhere first."

"Where?"

"My father's study. If there's something in there worth killing me over, I want to see it before anyone has a chance to move it."

Ella went very still. "That's the single worst idea you've had since you woke up, and you woke up not knowing your own wedding date."

"Probably. But Julian ran because of whatever's in that study, and you've spent two years, no, sorry, I've spent a year I don't remember, chasing shadows because nobody will just tell me the truth. I'm done waiting for someone to hand it to me."

"Your father will have people watching that house."

"Then we go now, in daylight, while he thinks I'm still recovering and harmless. Nobody expects the man with a head injury to make a move this fast." Nathan swung his legs over the side of the bed, testing his balance, wincing at the pull in his ribs but staying upright. "You said yourself I used to notice things nobody else did. Let's find out if that's still true."

Ella studied him for a long moment, something complicated moving behind her eyes, worry braided together with something that looked almost like recognition, like she was seeing a piece of the husband she remembered surfacing through the fog.

"If we're doing this," she said, "we're doing it my way. In and out in under ten minutes. If anything feels wrong, we leave immediately, no arguments."

"Agreed."

The house looked exactly as unremarkable as Nathan supposed a house belonging to one of the wealthiest men in London should not look, all restrained brick and clipped hedges, nothing about it hinting at the scale of what it protected. Ella parked two streets away and led him in through a side gate that apparently she'd used before, judging by how easily she navigated the code on the lock.

"You've done this," Nathan said.

"Once. I didn't get far." She didn't elaborate, and something in her clipped tone told him not to ask.

The study was on the ground floor, tucked behind the library, and the door was locked, but Ella produced a thin metal tool from her jacket and had it open in under a minute, movements practiced and precise in a way that made Nathan look at her differently.

"Who taught you to do that?"

"A version of you that apparently thought it might be useful someday." She pushed the door open. "Turns out he was right."

The study smelled like leather and old paper, shelves lined with box files and a heavy oak desk positioned to face the door, the kind of arrangement that spoke of a man who never wanted his back exposed. Nathan moved toward the desk, some instinct pulling him there without conscious thought, and pulled open the bottom drawer.

Locked.

"Move," Ella said, and had it open in seconds with the same tool.

Inside was a single folder, thick with paper, and beneath it a hard drive, small and unmarked. Nathan pulled the folder out with hands that had started shaking again, some part of his body remembering danger his mind couldn't access.

The first page was a spreadsheet, dense with numbers, subsidiary accounts he didn't recognize routed through offshore holdings with names that meant nothing to him. But the second page stopped him cold.

It was a death certificate. Vivienne Ashford's name, dated eight months ago, cause of death left deliberately vague, a coroner's signature Nathan didn't recognize beneath a hospital he'd never heard of.

"She's dead," he said. "Ella, she didn't move abroad. She's dead, and someone's had a death certificate sitting in my father's desk drawer for eight months."

Ella took the paper from him, her face draining of color as she read it. "Nathan, this isn't just fraud anymore. If your father buried this, if he's the reason there's no public record of her death, then whatever Vivienne found before she died, it's the same thing that put you in that car."

A sound came from the hallway outside, footsteps, unhurried, confident, the kind of walk that belonged to someone who owned the house.

"We need to go," Ella whispered, already sliding the folder into her bag along with the hard drive. "Now."

But the footsteps stopped directly outside the study door, and the handle began to turn before either of them could reach the window they'd planned as their exit.

Nathan turned to face whoever was about to walk in, his heart hammering hard enough that he could feel it in the still-healing bruises along his ribs, and for the first time since waking up in that hospital bed, he felt something other than confusion.

He felt certainty.

Whatever happened next, he was done pretending he didn't want the truth.

The door swung open.