married to my killer

chapter 3

NAOMI POV

That night, I lay awake next to Julian in the Voss family house, thinking about what I needed to do next.

The wedding was over. We were married. I had eleven months before the version of this year I remembered would end with my death, and I still didn't understand why my husband's family needed me dead instead of simply divorced. I only had one real advantage: I remembered things that hadn't happened yet.

I decided to test that advantage that first night, in a small way.

Julian fell asleep almost right away, one arm slung over me. I lay there in the dark, going back through everything I remembered about this exact night, the first time I lived it.

The first time, a member of the household staff had knocked on our door around eleven o'clock. Her name was Carla. She'd worked for the Voss family since before Julian was born. She'd asked whether I wanted my wedding dress sent to the dry cleaners that night or in the morning. I remembered telling her the morning, because I was too tired to think about it. I remembered her saying "of course, ma'am," in the careful, practiced tone of someone who had spent thirty years learning exactly how much personality she was allowed to have in this house.

This time, I decided to change my answer, just to see what would happen.

I got up before Carla could knock, and opened the door myself.

"Tonight, actually," I said. "If that's alright. I'd rather not look at it."

It was a small thing. It shouldn't have mattered which night a dress went to the cleaners. But Carla's face changed for a second without confusion, more like she was recalculating something, the way you would if a person you'd known for years suddenly did something you didn't expect from them.

"Of course," she said, after a pause. She took the dress without asking why. But she looked at me for one extra second on her way out.

I closed the door and stood there with my heart beating faster than it should have over something this small.

That was when it really hit me: whatever this was, this second chance, it wasn't something I could walk through exactly the way I remembered it. The moment I did one small thing differently, people noticed. And that meant my memory of the future, the only real advantage I had wasn't going to stay reliable. The more I changed, the less I'd be able to trust what I thought I already knew was coming.

I didn't know yet how much that would matter. But it kept me standing at that door for a long time after Carla's footsteps had faded down the hall.

Eventually I got back into bed. Julian shifted in his sleep and pulled me against him without waking up.

The next morning, I went looking for information.

I couldn't go to the storage unit where my father's old paperwork was kept across town, and disappearing the day after my wedding would look strange. So instead, I went to the guest office in the east wing of the house, where I remembered finding something once before, by accident.

It was full of old filing cabinets and an archive of acquisition records the Voss family's lawyers kept on hand. A small index card taped inside one cabinet door explained why: the records were being kept because of something called an "unresolved legacy liability." I didn't know what that meant yet. But the records went back further than any business deal Julian had ever mentioned to me.

I was looking for anything with my father's company's name on it. Something that had no reason to be sitting in this house at all.

I didn't find that. But I found something else.

Tucked inside a folder labeled only with a set of initials I didn't recognize, resting on top like someone had left it there on purpose, was a business card.

Marcus Cole. Independent Financial Review.

I didn't recognize the name. But something about it still made me uneasy, the way an unfamiliar word from a dream can feel important even when you can't explain why. I turned the card over. Nothing on the back. No date. Nothing to tell me who it belonged to, or why it was sitting there instead of filed away properly.

I put it back exactly where I'd found it. If I'd learned anything in the last twelve hours, it was that nothing in this house was as unwatched as it looked.

A few minutes later, Julian found me standing in the doorway of the office. He was holding two mugs of coffee, one of them made exactly the way I liked it, because he'd remembered. He always remembered things like that. It was still the most confusing part of all of this how easily he did small, kind things, while somewhere down the road, his family was going to let me die.

"You're up early for a woman on her honeymoon," he said, handing me the mug.

"Couldn't sleep."

"At all?"

"A little. Not really."

He glanced past me into the office. "Old files. Half of it's older than I am. My father won't let anyone digitize it. He thinks some things are safer on paper."

"Safer how?"

"No idea. I stopped asking about his paperwork when I was like nineteen." He took a sip of his coffee, still looking past me at the cabinets. "What are you doing here, anyway? It's seven in the morning."

"Just looking around. I like knowing where things are."

"That's a weird thing to say at seven a.m."

"I'm a weird person at seven a.m."

"You and my father, then. He's exactly like that. Drives everyone insane." He laughed, and pulled me toward the kitchen by the hand that wasn't holding coffee. "Come eat something. You're not allowed to skip breakfast on day two."

"Since when is that a rule?"

"Since right now. I just made it up."

I let him lead me out of the room. I didn't look back at the folder.

But I already had a new piece of the puzzle: a business card left inside a file about a mysterious "legacy liability," in a house belonging to a man who liked knowing exactly where everything was kept.

Someone in this house already knew more than they should. I needed to find out who, before they found out the same thing about me.