Wrong sister, Right man

chapter 16

**Mia**

The Ferris Street dumpling shop has eleven tables, a fish tank nobody feeds, and a woman named Mrs. Lau who has never let me leave hungry. I'd been going since I was fourteen. I'd cried into her soup the day my first rejection letter came. I hadn't been back since the wedding.

Ms. Adler was already at the corner table in a gray suit, sitting very straight, with a pot of jasmine tea and a plate of pork dumplings she hadn't touched. I'd never seen her outside the Tower. She looked smaller without a desk.

"Mrs. Blackwood."

"Mia. Please, if we're doing this in a dumpling shop."

Something almost like a smile. "Mia."

I sat. Mrs. Lau appeared, looked at me, looked at Ms. Adler, set down a second plate and patted my shoulder twice, hard, the way you'd pat a horse.

"He's been coming here since he was seven," Ms. Adler said. "His mother brought him on Thursdays, after her last fitting. He still comes on the nineteenth of every month. He orders the pork and doesn't eat it."

I put my chopsticks down.

"I wanted you to know where I was taking you." She turned her cup a quarter turn. "I can't tell you what he's forbidden me to tell. I signed something, and I keep what I sign. But there are things I can say that aren't secrets. Only facts."

"Clause 15—"

"Stops *him* asking *you,* and you asking *him.*" A dry look. "It says nothing about me."

"You read the contract."

"I typed it." She folded her hands. "First fact. The money you saw on his tablet."

My stomach dropped. She knew.

"Walter Reyes has a bad heart and a hospital bill that would cost you a house. Those payments are Damian's own money. He opened the account under the Harlow Street name so Walter would think it was an old partnership pension. Walter's pride wouldn't take it any other way."

I stared at her. A chipped blue mug upside down on a towel. A conservatory called a pantry.

*Of course,* I thought. *Of course he disguised it.*

"Second. There are cameras in that office corridor. Damian had the footage within the hour of that day, two years ago. He has never shown it to a lawyer, a board member or a newspaper. Not when the photograph leaked. Not when the board demanded an explanation." She said the next part gently. "Not even for you. Ask yourself what a man protects when he lets the world believe the worst of him."

"Celeste."

"Or her father."

My chest hurt. I thought of Celeste in the café with her sleeves over her hands. *He didn't look back.* True, every word, arranged like flowers in a vase.

"Third," Ms. Adler said, and her voice changed. "I've worked for him nine years. I've watched him eat lunch at his desk and sign papers at midnight and sit three hours in a car outside a hospital because he couldn't make himself go in. He isn't cold. He's careful, because he's afraid of what happens if he stops."

Her eyes were wet. She blinked it away briskly, like swatting a fly.

"Then he met you, and he began leaving the office at six."

I had no breath at all.

"I'm not asking you to trust anyone. I'm asking you to watch what he does when nobody's looking. It's very different from the papers." She stood and left cash on the table. "Arthur Voss isn't the worst thing coming, Mia. You'll need to know whom you believe before it arrives."

Her hand rested briefly over mine. Dry, light, trembling a little.

"He'd never forgive me. Eat your dumplings."

She left.

I sat there a long time. Mrs. Lau brought a third plate and said nothing. The fish tank bubbled. I ate one dumpling, and it tasted of every Thursday I'd ever had, and I cried the quiet way, the kind that doesn't need a sound.

For a month I'd been building a case against my husband. Cold, cruel, toxic. I'd had evidence. I'd *seen* it.

I'd never once wondered what the camera saw from the other side.

When I could, I took out my phone. For the first time in weeks I had a text to send him that I didn't have to invent.

*I'm at Ferris Street. With Ms. Adler. We had dumplings.*

The dots came at once.

*Ms. Adler took you to Ferris Street.*

*Yes.*

A pause, longer than the dots had ever run.

*Are you all right?*

*Not really. But better than this morning.*

*Is Mrs. Lau still doing the pork?*

I laughed, wet, into my sleeve. *She is. Why don't you eat it?*

*Because it was my mother's order,* he wrote. *Every Thursday. She gave me the last one. I haven't been able to take it since.*

I held the phone against my chest for a moment.

Then I asked Mrs. Lau for a to-go box.

---

**Damian**

I got home at 6:10.

The box was on the kitchen island, with a yellow sticky note on the lid in her handwriting.

*Pork. Still warm if you hurry. The last one's for you. —M.*

I stood there with my coat on for a very long time.

It was the first time in thirteen years anyone had given me the last one.

I ate it standing at the counter. It was cold, and a little dry, and it was the best thing I've ever tasted.

Upstairs a door opened. Her footsteps crossed the landing, light and unhurried, and stopped at the top of the stairs.

"Well?" she called down.

I looked at the empty box.

"Nine," I said. My voice wasn't steady, and I let her hear it.

She was quiet for a moment. Then, softly, from the dark above me: "I'll take it."