WHY CHOOSE HER

FLAME OF THE FALLEN Chapter One: The Quiet After Imogen still wore the ring on Tuesdays. Nobody had told her that grief kept a schedule, but hers did. On Mondays she was angry, on Tuesdays she was numb, and by Wednesday she pretended the whole thing had happened to someone else. Today was Tuesday, which meant the ring stayed on her finger and the silence stayed in the house. And the house was far too quiet. Three weeks ago it had been full of his aftershave, his laughter, his lies. Now it held only the hum of the fridge and the ticking of a clock she had forgotten to take down. She had found the messages on a Sunday morning while he slept beside her, and she had read every single one before waking him. She hadn't cried then, and she hadn't cried since. The weeks since had been a strange, flat country. Luca had packed a bag that same afternoon and left, and in the days that followed he had called forty-one times. She knew the number because she had counted, the way people count stairs in the dark. Her mother had phoned every evening, her voice tight with the effort of not saying *I told you so* about a man she had never once warned her against. Her friends had sent flowers, then wine, then long, careful messages that began with *No pressure, but* and ended with *thinking of you*. The engagement party, which had been booked for the first Saturday of the month, was cancelled in four short emails that Ava had written on her behalf, and Imogen had not read a single reply. People kept telling her that time would help. Nobody could tell her when it would start. She sat on the edge of the sofa in the half-dark, turning the ring slowly on her finger and watching the diamond catch the last of the streetlight that bled through the curtains. She felt so heavy, so swallowed by pain, that all she wanted to do was ask him one question: "Was I not enough for you, or was I too much for you?" The whole scene refused to leave her mind. The pain and the disgust sat in her lap like a trophy in a box, something she had been handed and could neither open nor put down. She picked up her phone and went through their conversations again, something she had done a billion times already. She was hunting for clues, for any sign that she had ignored the red flags, or whether she had simply been blindfolded by love. She scrolled past months of messages, then a year of them, then two. But there was nothing. All she saw were flawless messages and impeccable love notes. There were ethereal moments of the two of them on video, laughing in kitchens and on beaches and in the back of taxis, and the sweetest words of affirmation he always sent whenever she felt insecure. *You are the most beautiful thing in any room, Imogen. I don't know how I got so lucky.* She read that one three times. Then she read the other messages, the ones she had found on that Sunday, the ones sent to a woman whose name she had decided never to say aloud. The same man had written all of them. That was what she could not make sense of. The warmth in both sets of words was identical, as if he had only one voice and spent it freely on whoever happened to be listening. Nothing. No traces, no clues, no nothing. She sat there, sternly staring at the screen, searching for clarity so that she could climb out of the pit of shame and despair she had fallen into. On the coffee table, the cup of coffee her maid, Ava, had made before Imogen came downstairs sat untouched and unconsidered, a skin forming on its surface, as bitter and useless as a cup filled with salted butter. She dropped the phone onto the cushions with a sound that was almost a verdict. "Enough," she said to the empty room, and the empty room, being what it was, did not argue. A soft cough came from the kitchen doorway. Ava stood there with a tea towel in her hands, small and neat in her grey uniform, her grey-streaked hair pinned back the way it always was. She had worked for the family for eleven years, and in all that time Imogen had never once seen her look surprised. She looked, now, as if she had been standing there for a while. "You've not touched the coffee, Miss Imogen." "I'm sorry, Ava. I wasn't thirsty." "You weren't thirsty yesterday either." Ava folded the towel into a square, then into a smaller square. "Or the day before. I'm only saying. A person can't run on silence." "Is that what I'm doing?" "It's what the house is doing," Ava said gently. "It's catching." She hesitated, which was also unlike her. "Mr Luca's things are still in the east wardrobe. Shall I box them up? I can have it done by morning, and nobody need look at them." Imogen felt the question land somewhere beneath her ribs. The east wardrobe. Seven suits, the watch he had left on the dresser, the cashmere jumper she had bought him in Edinburgh. She opened her mouth to say yes, and what came out instead was, "Not yet." Ava nodded as though that were exactly the answer she had expected, and perhaps it was. "Then I'll leave the bath ready," she said, and went back into the kitchen without another word. It was only later that Imogen would remember the way the woman's eyes had flicked, just once, toward the phone on the sofa. She left the living room and took the stairs one at a time, taking her time over each of them, her mind wading through flooded pain and stubborn denial. The banister was cool under her palm. Halfway up she passed the wall of photographs she had not yet found the courage to take down, and she kept her eyes on her own feet until she was past them. In the bedroom she stepped out of her shoes and set them neatly behind the bed. Then she walked into her closet to remove her robe and her lingerie, folding the silk the way her mother had taught her, as though tidiness could hold the rest of her together. Before she went through to the bathtub, she stopped in front of the mirror. It was a wall of mirror, floor to ceiling, the kind of thing Luca had once called an indulgence and then spent hours admiring himself in. She stood in front of it and made herself look. She wanted to know whether it was something about her looks, her body, her face, that had made Luca do what he did. She was so determined to find the fault in herself that she almost wanted to find one. A flaw would at least be an explanation, and an explanation was something she could survive. But the longer she stood there, the more she reflected, and the more she realised that she was still this gorgeous, soothing black nymph, with the most finely detailed features anyone had ever seen. There was her golden curly hair, falling in loose spirals past her shoulders. There were her blue eyes, startling against the glossy, glowing black of her skin, a gift from a grandmother nobody in the family ever spoke about. There was her flawless face with its well-placed dimples, and her gapped front teeth, the one imperfection she had long ago decided to love. She was curvy and elegant, and she looked like a flame sculpted into a statue, the kind of woman everyone would die to catch a glance of. And none of it had been enough to keep him. She stood there for a long time, still hearing how he had begged in the days after she found out. "I messed up, babe, I'm so sorry. Love, it was never you. I know you loathe me right now, but I am so sorry." On and on, the same words in a dozen different orders, each one softer than the last. She remembered the Sunday morning with a clarity that felt almost cruel. The light had been thin and pale through the bedroom curtains. His phone had lit up on the nightstand, and she had only meant to silence it. She remembered the way her thumb had moved before her mind did, and the name on the screen, and the first message, and then the second. She remembered sitting on the cold floor of the bathroom with her back against the door, reading, while on the other side of the wall he slept on, breathing evenly, a man with nothing on his conscience. When she finally woke him, she had not shouted. That was the part she could not forgive herself for. She had held the phone out in her open palm like something dead she had found in the garden, and she had said his name, very quietly, and watched his face change. First came confusion, then calculation, and only last, a long way behind them, came shame. In those few seconds she had seen him decide which of his voices to use. "Imogen, it isn't what it looks like." "Then tell me what it looks like," she had said. He had not been able to. He had only sat there, in the rumpled sheets she had bought for him, with his mouth opening and closing like a man drowning in six inches of water. All she had wanted was a reason. A reason behind the action, behind the scenes she had never been invited to see. She looked into her own eyes in the glass, and her voice came out smaller than she expected. "Am I the error? Am I the problem, huh?" The tears that had been stored and refrigerated behind her eyes for three weeks finally arrived. She cried, truly cried, after three weeks of guilt, of blaming herself and holding the blame up to the light, of pushing the feeling down every time it rose. She finally dropped the bag of grievances she had been dragging behind her, and with every tear that rolled down her cheeks, the bag got lighter. When it was over, she was shaking, and her face was wet and swollen and still beautiful. She turned away from the mirror awkwardly, the way a person leaves a room after a funeral, and walked, calm now in the way of the very tired, to the bathtub. Sweet Ava had already filled it with warm water and scattered it with flowers, as she did every evening, without being asked, without ever mentioning it. Imogen had never thanked her properly. She added it to the list of things she meant to fix. She sank into the water and scrubbed herself hard, so hard, determined to remove the dirt, the smell of his lies, the hollow words and shallow expressions, everything she had witnessed in that relationship and failed to name. She scrubbed until her skin stung. Then, finally, she let go. She leaned back, closed her eyes, and let the water carry the rest of it away, rinsing every part of her body, until the flowers drifted around her like small, indifferent boats. Eventually she stepped out of the tub, wrapped herself in a towel, and let out a long, uneven sigh. She walked back into the closet and took an aimless gown from the wardrobe without looking at which one it was. It happened to be cream silk, the colour of something that has been through a fire and come out the other side. She walked back downstairs and moved past the sofa to the shelf, where the remote for the glass doors lay beside a vase she did not remember buying. She pressed the button, and the doors slid open onto the lake. The air that came in was cold and clean, and it smelled of wet stone and distant pine. The lake lay below the terrace in the last light of the evening, wide and black and perfectly still, with a thin ribbon of silver where the moon had begun to climb. Imogen stepped out in her bare feet. The stone of the terrace was cold enough to hurt, and she was glad of it, glad of anything that proved she could still feel. The house had been her grandmother's, and then her mother's, and then, in the quiet arithmetic of old families, hers. She had grown up believing it was the safest place on earth. The lake had been her playground as a girl, her confessor as a teenager, and her witness the night she had first said *I love you* aloud to a man. Standing at its edge now, she realised she had never once come here alone with her sorrow. She had always brought someone, or something, to hide behind. The reeds whispered along the shore. Far out, a fish broke the surface and left a ring of ripples that widened and faded, as though the water were quietly rehearsing for what was about to happen. She went down the steps to the little wooden jetty that jutted out over the water. Luca had once proposed to her here. He had knelt on the third plank from the end, in the golden hour, with a ring box shaking in his hand, and she had said yes before he finished the question. She remembered thinking that nobody in the world had ever been this happy. She remembered believing it. She stood on that same plank now, the water lapping softly below her, and lifted her left hand into the moonlight. The diamond looked smaller than it used to. Everything did, she thought. Funny how a thing could shrink the moment you learned its price. "You were never the lie," she said to the ring. "He was." It was the first honest thing she had said in three weeks, and it surprised her enough that she laughed, a short, cracked sound that carried out across the water and came back to her changed. She worked the ring over her knuckle. It was tight, as it had always been; Luca had guessed her size and been wrong, and she had worn it anyway rather than let him be wrong. It came away with a small, reluctant tug, and for one moment the bare finger underneath looked pale and naked and strange, a finger that belonged to someone else. She closed her fist around the ring and drew her arm back. "That is a four-carat diamond," said a voice behind her. "It would be a terrible shame to feed it to the fish." Imogen spun around so fast that she nearly lost her footing on the wet boards. A man stood at the head of the jetty, perhaps fifteen feet away, where the wood met the grass. She had not heard him come. That was the first thing she noticed, and it frightened her more than his size did, though he was tall, and broad through the shoulders, and dressed in a dark coat that seemed to take the moonlight in and give nothing back. He stood with his hands in his pockets, perfectly relaxed, the way a person stands in a room that belongs to him. "This is a private jetty," she said. Her voice shook, and she hated it. "It is," he agreed. "Yours, I believe, for the moment." He had a low voice, clipped and cultured and unhurried, with the faint scrape of a man who rarely needed to raise it. "Forgive me. I did not mean to startle you. I was walking the shoreline and I saw the light from your house. People do not usually leave their doors open at this hour, not on this stretch of the lake." "Who are you?" Something moved at the corner of his mouth. It was not quite a smile. It looked more like a man amused to discover that someone did not already know. "Gideon Ashcroft," he said. "I bought the estate on the far shore in the spring. We are neighbours, Miss..." "Imogen." She said it before she could stop herself, and then wished she had said anything else. She knew the name. Everyone did. Ava had whispered it once over the kitchen counter, the way people whisper the names of storms: Gideon Ashcroft, the man who owned half the docks and most of the men who worked on them. The man whose lawyers were said to be afraid of him, whose rivals tended to retire suddenly and abroad, whose name had come up in three separate trials without once being written on a charge sheet. The papers called him a financier. The people who lived near the water called him something quieter. He was not what she had imagined. She had imagined someone older, someone coarser, someone who looked the way fear was supposed to look. Instead he was perhaps thirty-five, with a face that might have been carved by a patient sculptor, all hard lines and deliberate shadow, and eyes so dark they were nearly black. He was handsome, and she resented that. She had spent three weeks learning what handsome men were worth. "Imogen," he repeated, as though testing the weight of it. "A good name. Old. It means *maiden* in some versions, though I have never found you can trust an etymology." His gaze dropped to her closed fist. "May I ask what the ring did to deserve the lake?" "It's none of your business." "No," he said, without offence. "It isn't." The silence that followed was not uncomfortable, which unsettled her more than if it had been. She became aware of her bare feet, her damp hair, the thin cream silk that had seemed so modest indoors. She folded her arms across her chest. He did not look at her body. He looked only at her face, steadily, and the steadiness felt like being read. "You have been crying," he said. "That, also, is none of your business." "Also true." He tilted his head. "But I will tell you something that is, since you are standing on my side of the water's edge, in a manner of speaking. In my experience, the people who throw things into lakes are rarely throwing them away. They are throwing them at someone." He let that settle. "He is not here. The lake will not hit him back." Her throat tightened. She did not know why a stranger's calm, cold sentence should cut so much closer than Ava's tenderness or her mother's tears had done. Perhaps it was because it was not tender at all. It was simply true. "What do you want, Mr Ashcroft?" "Nothing," he said. "I was walking." He paused, and for the first time something shifted in his expression, a flicker too brief to name. "Though I find that is not entirely accurate. I have walked this shore every evening since April, and I have never once seen anyone on this jetty. Tonight I saw you." He took one hand from his pocket and held it out, palm up, not toward her but toward the water, as if offering her the lake itself. "Do what you came here to do. I will not stop you. But I would sooner you did it knowing what it is worth." "And what is it worth?" "Forty thousand pounds, give or take." He said it as lightly as another man might have mentioned the weather. "More than that to the right person, less to the wrong one. The price of a thing and the cost of a thing are different, of course. You will know which one that is better than I do." "You talk as if you've paid that kind of cost." "Everyone has, Imogen. Most people simply do not keep the receipts." He walked a few paces along the edge of the grass, not toward her, and stopped where the moon laid his shadow across the water. "I will tell you what I have learned, since you did not ask. When someone lies to you for a long time, it is tempting to believe that the lie was the proof of your worth. That you were so valuable, so worth keeping, that they could not tell you the truth for fear of losing you. It is a comforting story." His voice did not change. "It is also false. People lie because it is cheap, and because they believe you will pay." She felt the words move through her like cold water through a cracked pipe. "And what if I already did? What if I paid for three years?" "Then you have a very expensive education," he said, "and it is finished." A long silence. A wind came in off the lake and lifted the hem of her gown, and she was suddenly, absurdly conscious of how little she had on, of how far she was from the house, of the fact that nobody in the world knew she was standing here with a man the newspapers did not dare to describe. She should have been afraid. Part of her was. But the fear was oddly clean, like a held breath, and it sharpened everything around it: the smell of the water, the creak of the old planks, the careful stillness of the man who stood watching her as if he had all the time in the world and meant to spend it on this. "Why are you being kind to me?" she asked. "Kind?" For the first time he looked genuinely amused. "No. I would not make that mistake. I am being accurate. It is a rarer thing, and generally less welcome." Imogen stared at him. She could not decide if he was mocking her, or testing her, or doing something stranger than either. Somewhere out on the water a bird called once and fell silent. She looked at the ring in her fist. Then she looked at the man who was watching her with those black, patient eyes. She thought, absurdly, of all the people who must have stood where she was standing and been afraid of him, and of how odd it was that she was not. She felt only a deep, bone-weary anger, and underneath the anger, something small and bright and alive that she had not felt in three weeks. It might have been curiosity. It might have been the beginning of something worse. She drew her arm back again, and this time she did not hesitate. The ring left her hand in a short, glittering arc, caught the moon once, and vanished into the black water without a sound. A few small ripples spread outward from the place where it fell, widening, thinning, and then the lake was still again, as though nothing had ever happened to it. Her whole body trembled. She waited to feel something enormous, and instead she felt only the cold, and the breath going in and out of her, and the strange lightness of a hand with nothing on it. "Well," said Gideon Ashcroft quietly. "That was either very stupid or very brave." "Which one do you think it was?" "I never decide that in the first minute." He studied her a moment longer, and then, to her surprise, he inclined his head, a small, formal gesture, almost a bow. "Good night, Imogen. Lock your doors. This stretch of the lake is not as quiet as it looks." He turned and walked back across the grass, unhurried, and the dark took him in so gently that she could not have said at which step he disappeared. She stood on the jetty a long time after he had gone. When at last she went back up to the house, her feet numb with cold, she slid the glass doors shut behind her and, after a moment's thought, turned the lock. In the kitchen the light was still on. Ava was at the sink, rinsing a single cup, her back very straight. She did not turn around when Imogen came in, though the door had been loud enough to wake the dead. "You were out on the water a long time," Ava said. "I wanted the air." Imogen leaned against the counter. The marble was warm from the oven, and she pressed her palms against it, drinking in the heat. "Ava, did you see anyone on the shore this evening? A man. Tall, dark coat." The cup stopped moving under the tap. It was only for a heartbeat, but Imogen noticed it, the way you notice a missed step in the dark. "No, Miss," Ava said. "I've been in here the whole evening. Is something the matter?" "No. Nothing." It was the easiest lie she had told in weeks, and she disliked how easily it came. "Just a neighbour. The new owner of the estate across the lake." "Ah." Ava turned off the tap. She dried her hands slowly, one finger at a time, and when she finally faced Imogen her expression was the same patient blankness it had always been. "Mr Ashcroft. Yes. I did hear he had come to the lake." She folded the towel. "You'll want to keep your distance from that one, Miss Imogen. I only say it out of care. Your mother would say the same." "My mother says that about everyone." "Then perhaps she is right about this one." Ava smiled, a small, tired smile, and for the first time in eleven years Imogen could not tell whether it was meant. "Good night, Miss. Sleep, if you can. I'll lock up." She collected her phone from the sofa on the way past, without quite deciding to, and she was halfway up the stairs when she realised that she had not told Ava his name. She stopped with her hand on the banister. She tried to remember whether she had said it, whether she had mentioned Ashcroft aloud at any point in the conversation. She went back over every word, and every word was as clean as a bone. She had said *a man*. She had said *the new owner of the estate*. She had not said the name. *Everyone knows the name*, she told herself. *The whole county does.* It was a perfectly reasonable explanation, and she held on to it all the way to the top of the stairs. In the hall the clock she had forgotten to take down ticked on, and in the dark beneath her the fridge hummed its low, empty note. She went into the bedroom and sat on the edge of the bed with the lamp off. The bare place on her finger felt cold, and strangely light, as though the ring had been the only thing holding her to the ground. On the nightstand, her phone lit up in the dark. She crossed the room and looked down at the screen. It was a message from an unknown number, three short lines, and she read them standing very still while the room seemed to tilt around her. *Don't trust the man at the lake.* *Ask Ava who she really works for.* *Luca did not leave you. He ran.* She read them again, slowly, as if the words might rearrange themselves into something kinder. They did not. She tried to ring the number, and it rang out into nothing. She tried a second time and a third. Then she sat on the edge of the bed with the phone gripped in both hands and made herself breathe the way her therapist had taught her, in for four, hold for four, out for four. *Ran from what?* Three weeks she had spent asking herself what she had done wrong, what she had lacked, what she had failed to be. It had never once occurred to her to ask what he had been afraid of. Luca was a man who had never been afraid of anything in his life. He had laughed at turbulence on aeroplanes, and at spiders, and at the dentist. Yet now that she turned the thought over, she remembered the last week before the Sunday. The way he had checked the locks twice before bed. The way he had stopped answering calls from certain numbers, and flinched when the doorbell rang. She had taken it for guilt. She had been so sure it was guilt. Perhaps it had been guilt. Perhaps it had been something else wearing guilt's coat. Down in the hall, so faintly that she might have imagined it, a floorboard creaked. Imogen did not move. She sat in the dark with her heart climbing into her throat and the pale square of the phone's screen fading in her hands, until it dimmed and went out and left her with nothing but the night, and the lake beyond the glass, and a bare finger she could not stop touching. Imogen crossed to the window and pressed her forehead against the cold glass. Across the black water, the light burned steady and yellow, in a window of the estate she had never once seen lit. A figure stood there, tall and motionless, a silhouette against the glow. He was too far away for her to see his face, but she felt his attention settle on her like a hand on the back of her neck. Behind her, the floorboard creaked again, closer now. “Miss Imogen?” Ava’s voice, soft and level, from the doorway. “I brought you some tea.” Imogen did not turn around. Her eyes stayed on the far shore, where the light flickered once, twice, as though someone had passed in front of it, and then went out. “Put it down, Ava,” she