The Debt Collector’s Wife

CHAPTER 3: HIS HOUSE, HIS RULES

The penthouse didn’t feel like somewhere a person lived.

That was Mara’s first thought when Roman brought her up on the Friday morning, two days after she’d signed her name on Spencer Cameron’s desk. It felt like somewhere a person conducted themselves. Every surface clean, every piece of furniture chosen with the kind of deliberateness that left no room for accident. The kind of place that looked like a photograph of itself.

She stood in the entrance with her two suitcases and tried not to let that bother her. But it bothered her.

“Mr. Cameron is out until this evening,” Roman said, setting her key card on the console table by the door. “The kitchen is fully stocked. Your room is the second door on the left down the main hall. His is at the end.” He paused, just briefly. “There’s a housekeeper, Clara, who comes Tuesdays and Fridays. She already knows the situation.”

“Which situation is she aware of exactly,” Mara said.

“That you’re his wife.” Roman looked at her steadily. “That’s the only situation that exists.”

He left her with that.

She gave herself ten minutes to stand in the entrance hall feeling completely out of place and then she picked up her suitcases and got on with it.

Her room was large and impersonal in the way of very expensive hotel rooms, all neutral tones and clean lines and a bed that probably cost more than her monthly rent. There was a walk-in wardrobe that was mostly empty, a bathroom with heated floors that she discovered by accident when she stepped out of her shoes, and a window that looked out over the east side of the city in a way that would have been genuinely beautiful if she’d been here for any other reason.

She unpacked slowly. Hung her clothes in the wardrobe where they looked slightly apologetic against all that empty space. Put her toiletries in the bathroom. Placed the small framed photo of her and Danger on the bedside table, the one from three Christmases ago where they were both laughing at something their mother had said, back when their mother was still there to say things.

She sat on the edge of the bed and looked at the photo for a moment.

“I know,” she said to Danger’s laughing face. “I know.”

By noon she had explored every room she was able to.

The penthouse was larger than it had looked on approach, spreading across the entire top floor in a layout that felt considered rather than sprawling. An open kitchen that merged into a dining space and then a living area with floor to ceiling windows on three sides. A home office with a glass door, locked. A second sitting room that looked like nobody ever sat in it. A gym she walked through quickly.

A plain door. Nothing distinctive about it except that when she tried the handle it didn’t move.

She stood there for a second and then kept walking.

JJ called at one.

“So,” she said, skipping hello entirely. “How bad is it.”

Mara was in the kitchen, eating toast she’d made from bread she’d found in a refrigerator stocked so precisely it looked curated. “It’s fine,” she said. “It’s a very expensive apartment.”

“And the man who owns the very expensive apartment.”

“Out until tonight.”

“Right.” A pause. “How are you actually, Mara. Not the version you’re about to give me.”

Mara looked out the window at the city spread below. From this height everything looked orderly, all clean geometry and purpose. Nothing like how it felt from street level.

“I’m fine,” she said. “I will be fine.”

“Those are different sentences.”

“JJ.”

“I’m just noting it.”

“I know you are.” Mara finished her toast. “I’ll call you tonight after I’ve talked to him.”

“Call me before if anything feels wrong.”

“You said that already.”

“I’m saying it again.” A beat. “I looked him up some more, by the way. Spencer Cameron. There’s almost nothing. Which is worse than finding something bad, in my opinion.”

“I know.”

“A man with that much money and that much nothing online is a man who’s very good at making sure there’s nothing online.”

“JJ. I know.”

“I’m just—”

“Noting it, yes. I heard you.” But Mara said it gently because JJ was scared and doing what JJ did when she was scared, which was research and repeat until the fear had somewhere to go. “I’ll call you tonight.”

She hung up and stood in Spencer Cameron’s kitchen with the city below her and the locked door at the end of the east hallway sitting in the back of her mind like something she’d forgotten to finish.

She found the library by accident at around three.

A room she’d dismissed initially as another sitting room turned out to go deeper than it appeared, a wall of shelving that turned a corner and opened into a proper reading space with two armchairs and a window seat and several thousand books arranged in an order that wasn’t alphabetical and wasn’t by color and that she couldn’t immediately decode.

She stood in the middle of it and looked around and felt something other than displaced.

She pulled a book from the shelf at random. An old one,She turned to a random page and read three paragraphs and put it back because she couldn’t concentrate and she knew it.

She pulled a different one. Read the first line four times.

Put that one back too.

She sat down in one of the armchairs anyway and just stayed there for a while, not reading, just sitting in the quiet of someone else’s library in someone else’s home on the first day of six months she’d sold for her brother’s life, and let the afternoon move around her.

Spencer arrived at seven fifteen.

She heard the front door from the library and came out into the main hallway to find him setting his jacket over the console table, his back to her. He turned when he heard her.

“You found the library,” he said. There was a book in her hand she didn’t remember picking up. She’d been carrying it without noticing.

“It’s a good one,” she said.

He looked at her for a moment the way he tended to look at things “Are you settled.”

“Enough,” she said. “I had some.”

She stopped, And he waited.

“I had some questions,” she said. “About how this works. The day to day.”

Spencer moved past her toward the kitchen, not brushing against her but close enough that she caught the smell of cold air still on his jacket and something underneath it, clean and faint. She followed because there was nothing else to do.

He poured two glasses of water. Set one on the counter in her direction without asking if she wanted it.

“Ask,” he said.

“The housekeeper knows I’m here but not why I’m here.”

“Correct.”

“What about your staff. The people you work with.”

“They know I’m married. They don’t ask about my personal life.”

“Because they know better, or because you don’t have one.”

Something shifted in his expression. Closer to acknowledgment. “Both, probably.”

Mara wrapped both hands around the glass. “The public events. The ones in the contract appendix. How much notice do I get.”

“Enough to prepare. I’ll tell you what the context is, who’ll be there, what’s expected.”

“And what is expected, exactly. When we’re in public.”

Spencer looked at her across the kitchen counter. “That you’re my wife,” he said. “That’s all. You don’t have to perform happiness. You just have to be present.”

“Those can be the same thing.”

“I know,” he said, and there was something in the way he said it that suggested he wasn’t talking about public appearances anymore.

Mara let that sit and didn’t pull on it.

“The office at the end of the main hall,” she said

instead. “Is that off limits.”

“Yes.”

“And the room at the end of the east hallway.”

“Yes,” Spencer said.

“Both locked.”

She looked at him. He looked back and didn’t offer anything further, no explanation, just the flat fact of it. She’d expected that, she realized. She wasn’t sure what she’d expected him to say instead.

Dinner was an arrangement rather than a meal.

Spencer cooked, which she hadn’t anticipated. She offered to help and he said no without looking up and so she sat at the kitchen counter and watched him anyway and tried to figure out what kind of person this was.

The kitchen was where he was closest to ordinary. No performance in it, just a man making dinner at the end of a long day. She kept noticing the small things. That he tasted as he went. That he checked his phone once and put it face down immediately after. That he’d rolled his sleeves back up the same way they’d been when she first walked into his office and the consistency of it, that small repeated detail, did something irritating to her composure.

They ate at the kitchen counter because neither of them moved toward the dining table and she was glad of it. The dining table felt ceremonial. The counter felt like something she could handle.

He asked her about her job. She told him. He listened the way he did most things, completely, without the distracted half-attention most people offered during small talk. It was disconcerting in a specific way she didn’t have language for yet, being listened to that thoroughly.

She asked him something back, she didn’t plan to, it just came out.

“Where did you grow up,” she said.

He looked at her over his glass. “Why.”

“Because we apparently live together now and I don’t know anything about you.”

“You know enough.”

She recognized the echo of his own words from their first meeting and from his expression he knew she recognized it. Something in his eyes shifted, just slightly.

“Eastside,” he said. “Originally.”

Mara knew the eastside. Had grown up two neighborhoods over from it. She didn’t say that, not yet, but she thought about it.

“Long way from here,” she said.

“Yes,” Spencer said. “It is.”

They finished the rest of the meal without talking much and it wasn’t uncomfortable exactly but it had a weight to it, all the things neither of them were saying stacking up quietly in the space between them.

She helped clear the plates even though he didn’t ask her to. He didn’t tell her not to either.

She was heading down the main hall toward her room at just past ten when she stopped.

She wasn’t sure what made her do it. Tiredness, maybe. Or the specific restlessness of being in a new place that hadn’t become familiar yet. But she found herself turning left down the east hallway instead of right toward her room,she was standing in front of the locked door again.

She put her hand on the handle. Still locked.

She stood there for a moment in the quiet, just her and the door and the particular feeling of something on the other side of it that she couldn’t name.

She turned around to head back and almost walked into Spencer.

He was standing at the entrance to the hallway, Neither of them spoke for a moment.

“I was just going to bed,” Mara said.

“I know,” Spencer said.

She walked past him back into the main hallway and into her room and closed the door behind her and stood in the dark for a second, her heart doing something she didn’t particularly want to examine.

He hadn’t been angry. Hadn’t warned her away. He’d just watched her. The same way he always did.

Like he was waiting for something. Like whatever she was about to discover, he’d already decided he was ready for it.

That kept her awake longer than the locked door did.