Wrong sister, Right man

chapter 9

**Mia**

I got home at 8:15, which sounds like a normal time until you consider that I'd spent the entire drive talking myself out of turning around.

The note was in my coat pocket. I could feel it against my hip the whole way, like a stone in a shoe. Nine words. I had counted them on every red light.

The house was quiet when I came in. Mrs. Pell had left a plate under foil with a sticky note on it that said *EAT* in handwriting that did not invite discussion. I ate standing at the counter, cold chicken and rice, and didn't taste any of it. Then I went upstairs, locked my bedroom door, which felt ridiculous in my own house, and took the note out and laid it flat on the bed.

*Ask your husband where the Harlow Street money went.*

What money? Harlow Street was the plant my father had nearly lost twice. There wasn't any money. That was the whole point of the deal. Blackwood money was supposed to be the first real cash that building had seen in ten years.

Unless someone wanted me to think there'd been more than that.

I read it again. I turned it over, like there might be a clue on the back. There wasn't. Just clean white paper and a printer's flat black ink, and the creeping feeling that someone had been very patient about all of this.

I put it in the inside zip of my work bag, under the hole punch, where nobody would look. Then I lay on top of the covers in my clothes and stared at the ceiling until the clock on the nightstand said 11:52, and I gave up on sleeping.

---

The kitchen at midnight is a different room.

Mrs. Pell's light was off. The only glow came from the little lamp over the stove, so the whole place looked gold and soft, and the big glass windows had turned into black mirrors. I filled the kettle and stood waiting for it with my arms wrapped around myself.

"You're up."

I didn't jump. I was proud of that. I turned around slowly, and Damian was in the doorway in a plain gray T-shirt and dark sweatpants, barefoot, with his hair a mess like he'd run his hands through it a hundred times.

I'm going to be honest. I hadn't known he owned a T-shirt.

"I couldn't sleep," I said.

"Neither could I."

"Do you ever?"

"Not much." He came in and stopped on the other side of the island, with the whole width of the marble between us. "What are you making?"

"Tea."

"There's coffee."

"At midnight? Are you trying to kill me?"

The corner of his mouth moved. "It's only a thought."

"It's a terrible thought."

The kettle clicked off. I reached for the mug, the chipped blue one, still upside down on its towel. He'd put it back there. Even now, after everything, somebody had kept it on that exact spot.

"Sit," he said.

"I'm fine."

"Mia."

He said my name the way he says everything, like each word cost him something and he'd decided to pay. I sat. He took the kettle out of my hand, and I stared at him.

"What are you doing?"

"Making you tea."

"You don't make tea."

"I can make tea."

"You have staff to make your tea."

"It's midnight," he said. "My staff are asleep, and I'm told this is a very simple process."

I folded my arms and watched. And I want it on record that Damian Blackwood, a man who moved forty million dollars on Tuesdays, stood in his own kitchen reading the box of tea bags with the concentration of a surgeon. He put the bag in the cup. He poured the water. He looked at the mug as if it might bite.

"How long?" he said.

"Three minutes."

"It says four."

"It's lying."

"The box is lying?"

"The box has never had good tea. Three minutes."

He set the timer on his phone. We stood there in the gold light and didn't talk, and the quiet wasn't the awful kind. It was stranger than that. Two people who'd been shouting at each other for days, both barefoot, listening to a kettle tick as it cooled.

The timer went. He fished the bag out with a spoon, dropped it in the sink, and pushed the mug across the marble toward me.

I took a sip.

It was terrible. Weak and slightly scorched, like he'd stood the water on the heat a second too long. I held it in my mouth for a moment, and I looked up, and he was watching me with an expression I'd never seen on him before. It took me a second to name it.

He was nervous.

"Well?" he said.

"It's a four," I said.

"A four."

"Out of ten."

His eyebrows went up. "Out of ten."

"It's how I rate things. I rated my first apartment a six. I rated my father's third wedding a two. I rated Ryan—" I stopped.

His whole face went still. It wasn't cold, it was careful. "Go on."

"A nine, once. I was wrong about that one." I took another sip, because it gave me something to do. "I'll rate the tea a five if you do it again tomorrow."

"A five."

"Two points for effort."

He looked at the mug. Then at me. Then he took a clean cup out of the cabinet, and a tea bag, and the kettle, and made himself one, too.

We drank in silence. His was just as bad as mine, and neither of us said so.

---

Here's what I should have done. I should have gone to bed, or asked him straight out about the note. I had every right. The clause said *past.* Not *present.*

But he was standing three feet away in a T-shirt with sleep still in his face, and I kept thinking about the way he'd read that box. And somewhere in my chest something had started to loosen that I'd welded shut four days ago.

"Damian."

"Yes."

"Why did you move my things?"

He went very still. "Which things?"

"In my room. The books. The lamp. The photograph of my mother." My voice came out smaller than I wanted. "Someone went through my apartment and picked out the things I'd miss. Not the nice ones. The ones I'd *miss.* Nobody asked me for a list."

"No."

"So how did you know?"

He set his cup down. He looked at the cup instead of at me. "You've got a small apartment," he said. "You'd lived there six years. I assumed there'd be things."

"That's not an answer."

"It's a true one."

"Damian."

"Ms. Adler went through it," he said, finally. "With the photographs you'd posted. And I went through the list. There was a chipped blue mug in every picture of your kitchen." He cleared his throat. "I thought you'd want it."

That was it. That was the whole explanation. A man who'd studied photographs of my kitchen to find the one thing I'd be sad to lose.

I couldn't speak. I stared at the marble. Something hot was building behind my eyes, and I was *not* going to let it get out.

"I'm going to bed," I said, and stood up too fast.

"Mia."

"What?"

He had come around the island. I hadn't heard him. He was standing close, not touching, with both hands at his sides like he'd been told not to, and in the low light I could see a small scar through his left eyebrow I'd never noticed before.

"Your hand," he said.

I looked down. My left hand was curled on the edge of the counter, and the ring was on it. Too big, still. Wound at the back with a neat tight whorl of thread, white against the gold, exactly the way I'd done it the first night.

"You fixed it," he said.

"It was falling off."

"I know. I'd have had it resized."

"I didn't want it resized." I turned the band a quarter turn, nervous. "It doesn't fit, so it's not a lie. It's honest, at least."

He didn't say anything for a long moment. And then he did the thing I'll think about for years. He lifted his hand, slowly, so I could stop him, and touched the thread with one fingertip. Just the thread. Just that small white knot. And his finger brushed the side of mine.

I forgot how to breathe.

"It's good work," he said, very low.

"It's thread."

"It's good thread."

I laughed, a shaky, ridiculous little laugh, and he looked up, and our eyes caught. He was so close that I could see the gold flecks in the brown. Close enough that I could have leaned forward. Close enough that I thought about it for exactly one stupid, dizzy second.

"Good night, Damian," I said.

"Good night."

I went up the stairs without looking back. I made it to my room, shut the door and slid down it until I was sitting on the floor.

It's a four, I told myself. The tea was a four. That's all this is. I was *tired.*

I did not believe a word of it.

---

**Damian**

I stood in the kitchen until the light over the stove clicked off on its timer.

My finger was still warm. I looked at it, like there might be something written there.

I rinsed both cups. I put the chipped mug back on its towel, upside down, exactly where it had been. I turned off the lamp.

And then, because it was after midnight and nobody could see, I let myself stand there in the dark and do something I hadn't done in years.

I smiled. Properly. The kind that hurts your face a bit, because the muscles have forgotten.

*A four,* I thought. *Two points for effort.*

I'd been rated before. By boards, auditors, shareholders. By a woman named Celeste, once, who gave me a ten and then a zero in the same week. Nobody had ever scored me out of ten for a mug of bad tea, and I discovered in the dark that I wanted a six.

I was crossing the hall to the stairs when I passed her coat.

It was hanging on the hook by the front door, where she'd left it, a gray wool thing a size too big. And poking out of the pocket, just the corner, was a square of white paper, folded.

I stopped.

I know what a letter looks like when someone's gone to the trouble of hiding it. I know how that fold sits. Ms. Adler had shown me four photographs that morning, and I'd noticed the same crisp white paper tucked into one of the gray coat man's pockets.

I could have taken it. I could have unfolded it right there. She was asleep upstairs. It would have taken ten seconds, and I'm not proud of how long I stood there with my hand open.

But she'd said *you don't get a diary,* and I'd agreed. She'd said *I signed a contract, not a leash.* And I'd meant it when I said *fine.*

So I took my hand back. I put it in my pocket, which was where it belonged.

Whatever she'd found, she hadn't told me. She'd stood in my kitchen an hour ago, with all that gold light on her face, and asked me about the photograph of her mother instead.

I went upstairs and lay awake, knowing that my wife had a secret, and that I had one of my own, and that neither of us was going to be the first to say it.

It was the loneliest feeling I'd ever had. And for the first time in eleven years, it wasn't entirely lonely.