Two Empires, One Heart

Chapter 1

“A wife who truly loves her husband learns to disappear a little.”

Marcus said it the way he said everything, gently, like a gift instead of a warning. I was twenty four and sitting on the floor of his apartment with my head against his knee, and I remember nodding along, the way you nod at something that sounds wise before you’ve had time to actually think about it.

That was two years ago. I have had two years to think about it since.

This morning I packed his favorite dish into a container, jollof rice, his mother’s recipe, the one I finally got right after four months of trying, tasting and adjusting and tasting again at odd hours because sleep had become a thing that happened to other people. I put on the yellow dress he liked. I told the driver an address I had given exactly four times in two years of marriage.

Six months since I’d last walked through that door.

The lobby went quiet the moment I stepped in, and not the ordinary kind of quiet a room settles into when someone important walks through it. This was the quiet of people rearranging their faces.

“Mrs. Calloway.” The receptionist was already up, already crossing toward me faster than a simple hello required. “What a surprise. Let me walk you up myself.”

“That’s not necessary.” I lifted the container slightly, an offering, proof of my good intentions. “I know where his office is.”

“I insist.” Her hand landed on my elbow, light, already steering. “You must be exhausted from the drive, let me get you some water first.”

I hadn’t mentioned traffic. I hadn’t mentioned anything at all.

Near the elevators, two women had stopped talking entirely. One had her phone out, thumb moving fast, eyes flicking up at me and back down.

“I’m fine,” I said, and stepped past the hand on my elbow.

“Mrs. Calloway, really, if you’d just wait five minutes, I can call up and, “

“Call up and what?”

She didn’t answer. She fell into step beside me instead, voice climbing half an octave with every sentence, something about a meeting running long, something about bringing the coffee up herself. In four visits to this building I had never once seen this woman leave her desk.

The elevator opened before she finished her thought.

I stepped in. She stepped in after me.

“Fifth floor’s being renovated today,” she said, reaching past me toward the panel. “Let me take you to the conference room instead, I’ll have him come down, it’ll be much more comfortable, “

I pressed the button myself.

The doors closed on the rest of her sentence.

She stood beside me for four floors in a silence that had nothing professional left in it, her hands twisted together, her eyes fixed anywhere but on me.

The doors opened on five. She didn’t move.

I did.

“Mrs. Calloway, “ she said behind me, and whatever was left of her composure finally gave out entirely, “please, just wait, let me go first, “

I kept walking.

The hallway had gone unnaturally still. A woman at a filing cabinet saw me and turned the folder in her hands face down against her chest, quick, instinctive, the way you hide something you already know is evidence. Two men in an open doorway stopped mid sentence and watched me pass the way you watch something falling that you already know you can’t catch.

His office door was closed. I could hear voices behind it, his, low, and another underneath it, familiar in a way that tightened my grip on the container before my mind caught up to why.

The receptionist arrived behind me, out of breath, too late by a full building’s worth of hallway.

“Mrs. Calloway, don’t, “