His Love Is a Cage with My Name on It

Chapter Eleven: Three Weeks

"Three weeks," I said.

Damian did not move. In the candlelight of that little room, with a dead woman's veil on its stand behind him, my husband closed his eyes like a man taking a blow he had walked toward on purpose.

"Three weeks," he repeated.

"The fern in the parlor died in nine days. I've been pouring your housekeeper's tea into it since the morning after Greta vanished." I stood up off the vanity stool with the diary against my chest. "So say the rest of it. You've had a hundred years of practice. How long do I have?"

"It isn't a countdown."

"It's exactly a countdown, or you wouldn't have asked."

He opened his eyes.

"The third time," he said, "you stopped drinking in June. You began dreaming in July. By September you knew everything, and in October you were dead, and I held you while it happened, and you told me it was worth it." His voice did not rise. That was the horror of it. "It is always four months from the first refused cup. You have three left."

The candles ticked. Somewhere below us the house shifted its old weight.

"Then we have three months to break it," I said.

"There is no breaking it. There is only the tea."

"No." I put the diary down on the vanity so hard the hairbrush jumped. "Look at me, Damian. Look at what you actually married this time. Three of those women woke up in a locked house with a husband who despised them and a housekeeper who drugged them, and they died alone with a secret. I've been here seven weeks and I have your key, your gallery, her diary, and you, standing in this room, telling me the truth for the first time in a hundred years. That is not the same board."

"You think this is different because you're stubborn."

"I think this is different because you opened the door." I stepped into him. He went rigid, but he did not step back. "You've spent a century being cruel to keep me breathing, and it has never once worked, and I think you finally know it. So try my way. Three months. You and me, against the thing in this house that keeps writing the same ending."

"And if I lose you again," he said quietly, "for the fourth time, because I let you talk me into hope?"

"Then you will have lost me exactly the way you always do. Only this time I'll have known your name at the end of it."

Something went out of his shoulders. Not surrender. Something worse and better: relief, the kind that has been carried so long the muscles have grown around it.

"Then we begin tonight," he said. "There are three things in this house I cannot search alone, because she watches me. Starting with the wine cellar, which has a room on the old plans and no door on the new."

"She. Iris."

"Iris." He picked up the candle. "Elara. From this hour, you drink nothing you have not poured yourself, you eat nothing off a plate that arrives already made, and you sleep with the diary somewhere she will never look."

"And you?"

"I'll do what I have done for a hundred years," he said. "I'll be unbearable to you in front of her, so she believes nothing has changed."

We went down the servants' stair together, and at the bottom, the candle showed us Madame Iris standing in the dark of the corridor with her hands folded and her weak-tea eyes on the diary under my arm.

"Well," she said pleasantly. "The fern told me, of course. Poor thing was quite dead by Tuesday."