Wrong sister, Right man

chapter 11

**Mia**

"Stapler," I said.

It was the only word I could find. I was standing in the dark study holding one up like a badge, while my husband filled the doorway in his shirtsleeves with the hall light behind him.

Damian looked at the stapler. Then at me. Then, very briefly, at the desk, where his tablet had gone dark. It had timed out about four seconds before he walked in. I'd counted. I have never been so grateful for a power-saving setting in my life.

"Mine ran out," I said. "I couldn't sleep. I wasn't looking for anything."

"I didn't say you were."

"I know. I'm just saying it."

"You're saying it a lot."

"Yes. I'm aware."

Something moved across his face. I couldn't tell if it was suspicion or amusement, or if with him there was even a difference. He stepped aside to let me pass, and I went by close enough to smell the soap on him, and I did not run. I'd like credit for that.

"Mia."

I stopped on the stairs.

"It's a good stapler," he said. "Keep it."

I kept it. I sat on my bed with the thing in my lap for an hour, staring at the wall.

*HARLOW STREET / W. REYES.* Every month. For years.

I could have gone back down and asked him. The clause said *past,* and this was money that had moved last week, wasn't it? I could have made that argument. I could have been right.

But I knew what would happen if I did. He'd go quiet, the way he does, and say *I can't tell you,* and I'd have to decide whether to believe him. And I'd just found out he'd been paying the father of the woman I watched fall on his office floor.

I wasn't ready for either of those answers.

So I did the one thing I'm good at. I filed it. I pushed it in with the note and the man in the gray coat, in the drawer in my head where I keep things I can't solve yet, and I told myself I'd watch. Just watch. Eventually somebody would make a mistake.

I should have remembered that I'm not the only one who's good at waiting.

---

The Harvest Ball happens every year on the last Saturday of October, in the old Marlowe Hotel ballroom, and everyone in this city who has money goes to it to be seen not caring about money. I'd been to it twice. Both times I'd stood by the dessert table with my father's business partners, being polite to men with thin smiles.

This time I was the one on the guest list that people whispered about.

"You look nice," Damian said.

We were in the back of the car. He'd sent the driver, who is, in fact, named Ames, and I'd decided not to bring it up. The dress was dark green, which I'd picked out myself and told no one, because it was nearly the same color as the ruined order, and I was tired of letting that week own me. It was simple. Long sleeves, high neck, a back that dipped lower than I'd expected. When I came down the stairs, Damian had been standing in the hall with his jacket over his arm, and for a second he'd forgotten to arrange his face.

"Nice," I said.

"It's a start."

"What's a better word?"

He looked out the window. "I'm still deciding."

I turned toward my own window so he wouldn't see me smile.

The ballroom was a sea of gold and candlelight and hundred-dollar flowers, and the moment we walked in, I felt it. The ripple. Heads turned the way grass turns in wind. A woman in diamonds put her hand to her throat. A man I vaguely knew from my father's club said, loud enough to carry, "That's the Carter girl."

"Don't," Damian murmured.

"Don't what?"

"Look at them. They're waiting to see if you do."

I lifted my chin. "Then I'll look at the ceiling."

"The ceiling is acceptable."

His hand found the small of my back, light, steering, and my whole spine woke up. It was nothing. It was what any husband does at a party. But I'd spent a week with this man and hadn't been touched by him once except for a single finger on a thread, and I was suddenly aware of every inch of skin his palm covered.

*Stop it,* I told myself. *He's paying a stranger's father. He lied to you. Stop it.*

We worked the room. That's the only way to put it. Damian had an order to it, a lap of the ballroom with a stop at each person who mattered, and a short, polite, unreadable conversation at each. I followed his lead and said as little as I could. Nobody mentioned the office. Nobody mentioned my sister. Everyone looked at me like I'd turned out to be a different kind of animal than they'd expected.

"You're good at this," I whispered, around the fourth handshake.

"I'm terrible at this."

"You haven't blinked."

"I've been practicing since I was nineteen."

It was the first time he'd volunteered anything about himself. I filed that too.

---

"Mrs. Blackwood."

I'd peeled away to find the ladies' room. It was somewhere down a long corridor of mirrors and potted palms, and when I came back out, a man was leaning on the wall by the door as if he'd been there a while.

Mid-forties. Silver at the temples, a tuxedo that fit too well, the kind of face people trust because it's so pleasant. He held two glasses of champagne, and he extended one toward me with a small, rueful smile.

"Arthur Voss. I wanted to introduce myself properly."

Every hair on my arms stood up.

"Mr. Voss." I didn't take the glass. "I've heard a lot about you."

"Not all of it flattering, I hope."

"None of it."

He laughed, delighted. "Your father said you'd be like this. He was right." He set the second glass on a passing tray without looking, as if he'd never intended me to take it. "May I walk with you? I'd like to say something, and I'd rather your husband didn't hear it first."

"I'm not interested in hearing it at all."

"Humor me. Two minutes."

I should have walked away. I know that. But something in how he said *your husband*, with a faint emphasis, like a bruise he was pressing on to see if it hurt, made me want to hear what he'd say next.

We walked slowly down the mirrored hall. I kept three feet between us.

"I admire what you're doing at Eastgate," he said. "The new schedule. Very elegant. I know a little about dye houses myself."

"Do you."

"Enough to know the Halloran order was a terrible loss. A shame. And right before your retool, too." He sighed. "These things happen to small mills. Bad luck, bad timing. The sort of thing a larger company can absorb, and a smaller one can't."

I stopped walking.

"Mr. Voss, are you telling me you know about the Halloran order?"

"Everyone knows. It's a small city." His eyes were warm. His smile never moved. "I'm only saying that when a family business is stretched, it can be a comfort to have friends. Real ones. I'd pay a fair price for the Harlow Street land. Better than whatever Blackwood is offering you. And I'd keep your people on. All hundred and forty."

*A hundred and forty.* I hadn't said that number to anyone but Bernie.

"Why would I sell you land I'm already contracted to share?"

"Because you're contracted to a man who hasn't told you what he paid for it."

The hall went very quiet.

"I don't know what you mean," I said, and my voice came out thin.

"No," Voss said gently. "I don't suppose you do. That's what worries me."

He stepped closer. Not much, a half step, but I was in a corridor with mirrors on both sides, and I had a sudden dizzying view of myself from four angles, small and green and cornered.

"Ask him about the first year of the Harlow account," he said, almost kindly. "Ask him who he's paying and why. A smart girl like you will find it interesting. And when you do, call me. My number's on this."

He slid a card into my hand. I hadn't agreed to take it. My fingers had closed on it by themselves.

"I won't call."

"You'll want to." He smiled. "Everyone does, in the end."

"Is there a problem?"

I didn't hear him come. I never do. One second the mirrored hall held only Voss and me, and the next there was a third reflection beside mine, tall, dark and quiet, in a black tuxedo with his hands loose at his sides.

Damian didn't look at me. He looked at Arthur Voss.

"Blackwood," Voss said pleasantly. "We were just talking about you."

"I'm sure."

"Your wife is delightful. You're a lucky man."

"Yes," Damian said. "I am."

He said it in the same flat voice he'd used all night. But something had happened to the temperature of the hall. I felt it in the back of my neck. Voss's smile didn't change, but he took a very small step backward, the way you do when you realize the dog you've been teasing isn't a lap dog after all.

"Well." Voss spread his hands. "I'll leave you to it. Mrs. Blackwood, a pleasure."

He walked away, unhurried, and the crowd swallowed him.

I let out a breath I'd been holding for what felt like a year.

"What did he say to you?" Damian asked.

*Ask him about the first year of the Harlow account.* The card was in my hand. My fingers were wrapped so tightly around it that the edge was cutting into my palm.

I could have told him. Right there, with him standing beside me, I could have said it all: the note, the tablet, Voss's offer. And I opened my mouth to do it.

And what came out was: "He wanted to buy the land."

"That's all?"

"That's all."

I felt it as it left my mouth, the second lie, smaller than the first and so much easier. Damian's eyes searched my face for a long moment. I thought he'd push. I thought he'd say *You're lying,* and I would have had to either hold it or break.

"All right," he said.

That was all. He took my elbow, gently, and turned me back toward the ballroom, and he did not look at my closed hand. And I felt, absurdly, like crying. I'd wanted him to push. I'd wanted him to be a man who would make me say it.

Instead he'd let me keep it. He'd let me lie. Because he'd promised, over a breakfast table, that I wouldn't be a parcel. And he was keeping that promise even now, even to his own cost.

*That's not how a toxic man behaves,* a small voice said in my head.

I told it to shut up.

---

We'd made it back to the ballroom floor when I felt Damian's hand stop.

It didn't drop. It just stopped, all at once, like a clock. The fingers on my elbow went hard as wire. I looked up, and his face had gone blank, perfectly blank, and so pale that I thought for a second he was ill.

He was looking across the room.

I followed his eyes.

She was standing by the tall windows at the far end, alone, with a glass in her hand. Slim. Dark hair pinned up, a few strands coming loose by her neck. A dress the color of dried roses. I had seen her exactly once before, and I'd never forgotten how she looked, on her hands and knees on a marble floor with her hair in her face.

Celeste.

I'd imagined, a hundred times, what I'd feel when I saw her again. Pity. Anger on her behalf. A hot clean fury at the man next to me.

What I felt was nothing like that.

She looked small. That was the first thing. Small, and tired, and impossibly young to be standing alone at a party like this. She wasn't glaring or crying. She wasn't doing anything. She was just standing there, watching him, with an expression so bare and open and sad that I felt it like a hand on my chest.

Then her eyes moved to me.

She didn't look angry. She looked at my dress, my hair. Then lower. To the hand on Damian's arm, and the gold ring on my finger, wound around with a neat white knot of thread.

She smiled.

It was the gentlest smile. Tender, nearly. The way you'd smile at a child who'd put on her mother's shoes. And she lifted her glass an inch toward me, a tiny salute, as if to say, *I know exactly what you don't.*

Then she turned and walked out through the terrace doors, and the curtain fell closed behind her.

Beside me Damian let out a breath, ragged, like a man coming up from underwater. His fingers loosened on my arm.

"Who was that?" I said, which was a stupid thing to ask, because I knew exactly who it was.

"Nobody," he said. "An old mistake."

Beautiful lie. Terrible delivery. His hand was shaking.

I looked at the curtain. I looked at him. And for the first time since a wet Tuesday in September, standing in a hallway with a ruined sister and a shelved proposal, I didn't know who the villain was.

---

**Damian**

I got Mia home at one. I walked her to her door, and I said good night, and I did not say any of the six hundred things in my head.

*I'm sorry you saw her.*

*I should have told you she'd be there.*

*She isn't who you think. I can't tell you why.*

*I know you lied to me about what Voss said, and I let you, and it's the most selfish thing I've ever done.*

I said, "Good night."

She said, "Good night, Damian." She hesitated in her doorway. Her eyes were very dark, and a little bit afraid, and for one wild moment I thought she was going to ask.

She didn't.

I stood in the hall until her light went out. Then I went down to the study, and I took out my phone, and I scrolled to a number I'd sworn I'd never dial again.

It rang four times.

"Damian." Celeste's voice was soft and amused, unhurried, as familiar as a scar. "I wondered how long it would take you."

"What are you doing here?"

"Going to a party. Seeing my father's friends." A pause. "She's lovely. I see why you picked her."

"Stay away from her."

"I haven't done anything."

"Celeste."

"Oh, darling." She laughed, low. "You *know* I haven't done anything yet."

The line went dead.

I stood in the dark with the phone in my hand. Out in the hall, the old house settled around me, and above me, in a small green dress thrown over a chair, my wife was breathing in her sleep, and she had no idea what was coming for her.

And neither, God help me, did I.