Wrong sister, Right man

Chapter 6

Mia

The house was even bigger from the inside, which I wouldn’t have thought possible.

Nobody met us at the door. The driver set my two suitcases on the marble floor of the front hall and said, “Goodnight, Mrs. Blackwood,” and the name landed on me like a bucket of cold water. Mrs. Blackwood. I actually looked around for his mother.

Damian hung his jacket on a hook that looked like a piece of sculpture and said, “I’ll go over the rules.”

“The rules.”

“They’re short.”

They were. He stood at the bottom of a staircase wide enough to drive a van up and delivered them to a spot just above my head, the way people talk when they’ve rehearsed and don’t want to see the audience.

“East wing is yours. West wing is mine. The kitchen is shared. Mrs. Pell cooks on weekdays and comes at eight. She has a key and she doesn’t gossip. Breakfast is at seven.”

“I don’t eat at seven.”

“Then you’ll sit with a coffee at seven.”

“Is that a rule or a hostage situation?”

He didn’t answer that. “One more. The door at the end of the west corridor stays shut. It isn’t dangerous. It just isn’t available.”

“A locked room.” I tried to keep my voice flat. “In the house of a man I met five days ago. Okay.”

“It’s an office.”

“A locked office.”

“It’s private.” Something moved under the words and was gone. “And you’ve asked for privacy yourself. Clause fifteen.”

I had. God help me, I had.

He said goodnight like a man ending a meeting and went up the west stairs, and I stood in the hall with my suitcases and my left hand closed into a fist so the ring wouldn’t fall off.

My room was the size of my whole apartment. Big bed, white sheets, bare walls, a window that looked out on the dark shape of the river. It was the room of a very expensive hotel that had never had a guest.

Then I saw the nightstand.

My lamp was on it. The ugly green one from my apartment, the one I’d had since college and refused to throw away because it had a good switch. My own pillow sat on the bed in its worn flannel case. My books were stacked on the windowsill in the exact order I’d left them. Someone had even brought the chipped blue mug I drink my coffee out of.

There was a note propped against the lamp, in Ms. Adler’s slanting handwriting. Your things from the apartment. Mr. Blackwood’s instruction was “everything she’d miss.” —A.

I read it twice. Then I sat down on the bed, still in my wedding dress, and looked at that mug for a long time.

It would have been so much easier if he’d been a monster.

I didn’t want to think about it. I took the ring off instead, and held it up under the lamp. It really was too big, loose enough to spin on my finger, and it had been bothering me for hours. I dug through my work bag, past the pens and the swatch book and a half-eaten roll of mints, and found what I was looking for: a spool of white thread. I carry one everywhere. It’s a habit from the factory. Buttons come off, hems come down, and no one else ever has a needle.

I wound the thread around the back of the band, round and round, until the ring sat snug when I pushed it on. It looked ridiculous up close, a diamond-sized problem fixed with a nickel’s worth of cotton. But it held. A textile planner’s solution.

I fell asleep on top of the covers, still in the dress.

I woke at ten past two with a mouth like cardboard and no idea where I was. Then I remembered, and lay there a minute listening to the house. It makes a particular kind of silence, a big house with one other person in it. Not empty. Waiting.

I went downstairs for water, barefoot, with my shoes in my hand out of some idiotic politeness. The kitchen was white. White counters, white cabinets, white floor. It looked like no one had ever cooked an egg in it. The fridge held a carton of milk, a jar of olives and a lemon. I drank a glass of water standing at the sink in the dark and thought about Dolly, and my father, and the dog in the handbag, and my sister standing somewhere in a different city with a man in a green jacket.

That’s when I heard the sound.

It was very faint, from somewhere upstairs. A low, steady rhythm, mechanical, like a heartbeat made of metal. I held still. It ran for maybe a minute, then stopped, and the silence afterward was louder than the sound had been.

I should have gone back to bed. I’m aware of that. Instead I went up the stairs, the west ones this time, and stopped on the landing where the corridor ran away from me into the dark.

He was at the far end of it.

Damian, in shirtsleeves, with his tie gone and his collar open. He was standing in front of the last door, the one that stayed shut, with one hand pressed flat against the wood. His head was bowed. He wasn’t doing anything. He wasn’t knocking or reaching for a key. He just stood there with his palm on that door like a man listening for someone on the other side.

I stepped backward and my heel found the edge of the top stair. It creaked.

He didn’t turn around. I saw his shoulders go a little tighter, that was all.

I went back down, quietly, and I didn’t say a word to him about it. I’d already decided that whatever was behind that door wasn’t mine to ask about. I’d written that rule myself.

Damian

The fourth step creaks. I’ve been meaning to fix it for eleven years.

I heard her come up. I heard her stop. And I didn’t turn around, because if I had, I’d have had to say something, and every sentence I could think of was wrong.

It was a bad day. Not the wedding. The wedding I could have handled. Walter, in the last row.

He’d promised me he wouldn’t come. He’d given me his word in that hospital room, with the oxygen hissing and his daughter’s name sitting between us like a third person, and I’d believed him. Then I looked up in the middle of my own vows and there he was in a wheelchair with a blanket over his knees, a nurse behind him, looking pleased with himself. Breaking a promise was the only sign he was still himself. I nearly lost my place. I know that she saw it. She saw everything. She holds her face very still, Mia Carter, and watches everyone with it.

Then there was the ring.

I’d approved it from a photograph, on a Tuesday, between two calls. The size was on a card. I never looked at the size. I put it on her finger in front of forty people and felt it slide, and I knew exactly whose finger it had been made for, and so did she, and she didn’t say a word. She made a fist, and kept it that way for the rest of the day, so I wouldn’t have to be ashamed.

I’ve been shamed in boardrooms. I’ve been sued. I’ve never had anyone protect me like that. It’s unpleasant. I don’t know where to put it.

And she thinks I’m a bastard. I know she does. She saw me in the corridor with Celeste on the floor and drew the only conclusion a reasonable person could draw, and I let her. It was easier than the truth, which belongs to a man in a wheelchair who made me swear. I gave my word three years ago in a hospital corridor, and I’d give it again tomorrow. It’s the one thing I’ve ever been good at, keeping my word. I don’t know how to be good at much else.

Behind the door under my hand is the only room in this house I never let anyone design. I don’t open it often. I don’t know what I’d say if she asked.

She hasn’t asked. She wrote a rule so she wouldn’t have to.

I wish I could say that was a relief.

The old floorboards settled as she went downstairs, one step, then another, and the house went quiet again. I took my hand off the wood. There was a faint print of it left in the grain, the way there always is.

“Goodnight,” I said to the door, because there was nobody around to hear me do it.

Then I went to my room, and I did not sleep.