The Billionaire's Eighth Widow

Chapter 3

By the third night, Ivy's wall had stopped being a wall.

She'd covered it in butcher paper first, cheap stuff from the hardware store two blocks over, because she didn't own a corkboard and couldn't justify buying one when rent was due in nine days. Then she'd started pinning things to it with the same thumbtacks she used for sheet music - printed photographs, court filings she'd paid four dollars a page to access, obituaries with the polite, careful language of families who'd been asked, gently or otherwise, to keep things dignified.

Seven names. Seven photographs. Seven neat rows of dates that all ended the same terrible arithmetic distance from where they began.

Wife One: Corinne Ashworth Ashcroft. Married January. Died the following December - pneumonia, complications, eleven months.

Wife Two: Beatrix Lowell Ashcroft. Married April. Died the following March - fall from a second-story balcony, eleven months.

Wife Three: Camille Duval Ashcroft. Married June. Declared dead by drowning the following May - body never recovered - eleven months.

Wife Four: Renata Webb Ashcroft. Married September. Died the following August - accidental poisoning, spoiled shellfish, the papers said - eleven months.

Wife Five: Wife Six. Ivy had their names too, pinned in the same careful rows, causes of death sanitized into the specific bloodless language coroners used when they wanted a story to end quietly. A car that skidded on a dry road. A fall down a servants' staircase that hadn't been used in years. Eleven months, give or take a week, every single time.

And then Rosalind. Married in November. Dead the following October.

Eleven months.

Ivy stood in front of the wall with a red marker uncapped in her hand and didn't write anything for a long moment, because writing it down would make it undeniable in a way that simply knowing it hadn't quite managed yet.

Seven different causes of death. Seven different circumstances - an illness, a fall, a drowning, a poisoning, an accident, another accident, another fall. If you looked at any single one of them in isolation, the way the coroners had, the way the papers had, the way Diane and the pastor and the entire machinery of official sympathy had, you saw exactly what you were meant to see: a tragedy. A terrible run of luck. A man cursed, or careless, or simply unlucky enough to keep choosing women who died.

But laid side by side, in Ivy's own handwriting, in red marker on cheap butcher paper taped to the wall of a one-room apartment above a dry cleaner's, the causes of death stopped mattering. They were noise, dressed up to look like signal. What mattered - what no coroner and no journalist and no grieving family member had ever laid out next to each other in a single unbroken line - was the timing.

Eleven months. Every time. Never ten, never thirteen, close enough that a person could stand at a funeral and grieve without noticing the machinery underneath, but close enough to each other, across seven separate deaths spanning what had to be nearly a decade, that it stopped being coincidence somewhere around wife number three and became something closer to a schedule.

Why does it vary, she wrote on a fresh index card, and pinned it beneath the row of photographs. If it's the same hand doing this seven times - why work this hard to make each death look like something different?

She didn't have an answer yet. She wrote the question down anyway, the way Rosalind used to write down every question she couldn't yet solve, because a written question was a debt you eventually had to pay, and Ivy needed a debt like that hanging over her more than she needed comfort.

She'd been at this for three straight days. She taught her lessons - Mason's flat open strings, a nine-year-old's first attempts at "Twinkle Twinkle" that made her chest ache in a way she didn't examine too closely - and then she came home and became someone else entirely, someone who read court records and archived society pages and cross-referenced funeral home listings until her eyes burned and the numbers on the page started swimming into each other.

She'd found Corinne Ashworth's engagement announcement in an archived copy of a Connecticut society paper, a girl smiling in black and white with her whole unlived life still ahead of her, twenty-three years old and glowing, captioned A Golden Match: Ashcroft Heir to Wed Ashworth Debutante. She'd found Beatrix Lowell's obituary, four sparse paragraphs that used the word beloved twice and never once asked why a woman with no history of vertigo had fallen from a balcony she'd stood on a hundred times before.

By the time she found Renata Webb's death notice - survived by her brother, Marcus - Ivy had stopped being able to read the names as strangers. They felt, increasingly, like women she'd known. Women who'd sat where she was sitting now, in some version of this exact posture, cataloging something they weren't supposed to see.

Her phone rang at nine, cutting through the silence loud enough that she flinched.

Priya.

Ivy almost let it go to voicemail. The thought sat there for a full ring and a half - later, I'll call her back later - and then she remembered, with a cold, immediate lurch, exactly where that thought had gotten her the last time, and she picked up before the guilt could finish forming.

"Hey."

"You're alive." Priya's voice had the particular dry warmth it always did, the tone of someone who'd decided a long time ago that teasing was safer than saying I'm worried about you outright. "I was starting to think I'd have to file a missing person's report. When's the last time you left that apartment for something that wasn't a lesson?"

"I left yesterday. I went to the library."

"The library." A pause, the sound of Priya settling into a couch, a cello case probably still on her back from rehearsal. "Ivy. Please tell me you went to the library for something that isn't the Ashcroft thing."

Ivy's eyes moved, involuntarily, to the wall. Seven faces looked back at her.

"I'm fine, Priya."

"That's not what I asked."

"It's research. It's not - I'm not doing anything reckless. I'm reading public records."

"You've been reading public records for three days straight, apparently, since you haven't answered a single text since Tuesday." Priya's voice had lost some of its lightness now, gone careful in a way that made Ivy's shoulders tighten. "I love you. You know I love you. But I watched you disappear into this same wall of grief after your parents, and I watched Rosalind pull you out of it because she was the only one who could, and now Rosalind's gone and you're doing the same thing again except this time there's no one left who can pull you out except me, and you're not letting me."

"I'm not disappearing."

"You canceled brunch. Twice."

"I had lessons-"

"Ivy." Just her name, flat, the way you'd say it to stop someone walking toward a ledge. "I'm not trying to fight with you. I'm trying to tell you that what you're doing - the theories, the files, whatever this is - it's starting to look less like grief and more like something that's going to eat you alive if you keep doing it alone. That's all. That's the whole speech."

Ivy sat down on the edge of her bed, the phone warm against her ear, and looked at the wall she hadn't planned on Priya ever seeing. Seven photographs. A red marker question she didn't have an answer to. A diary she hadn't told a single living person existed, hidden now in the drawer of her nightstand like something she was ashamed of instead of something that had cracked her whole understanding of her sister's death wide open.

She thought about telling her. The thought lasted exactly as long as it took to imagine Priya's face if she said the words out loud - someone sent me Rosalind's diary and a warning that I'm going to be the next one to die, - and pictured, with total clarity, the specific kind of alarm that would put in her best friend's eyes. Priya would try to stop her. Priya would call Diane. Priya, out of nothing but love, would become one more person standing between Ivy and the only thing that had made the last three days feel like something other than drowning: motion. Progress. A wall that was slowly, methodically, turning grief into a shape she could actually do something with.

"I hear you," Ivy said instead, which was true, and which was also nothing at all. "I'll call you this week. We'll get brunch."

"Ivy-"

"I promise." She meant it when she said it, the way she'd meant a dozen other promises to a dozen other people over the last seven months, promises that kept losing ground to whatever was directly in front of her. "I have to go, okay? I have an early lesson."

There was a silence on the line long enough that Ivy almost apologized, almost took it all back, almost said something honest for the first time in this entire conversation.

"Okay," Priya said instead, quiet now, the fight gone out of her voice and something sadder underneath it. "Take care of yourself. Please."

"I will."

The call ended. Ivy sat holding the phone for a moment after the screen went dark, feeling the specific, familiar shape of having just failed someone who loved her - smaller than the failure with Rosalind, survivable, but built from the exact same material. I'll call you back later. I have to go. I promise. The same three small lies, dressed differently, and she'd just told all three of them inside ninety seconds without even noticing she was doing it until the call was already over.

She thought about calling Priya back right then. Saying something true. She looked at the wall instead, and the wall won, the way it had been winning for three days.

She went back to the archive she'd been working through before the phone rang - a batch of scanned society pages from a database that charged by the hour, event photography from Ashcroft galas going back over a decade, the kind of glossy charity-circuit coverage that used to run in glossy magazines nobody read anymore except women exactly like Ivy at exactly two in the morning, looking for a pattern nobody else had thought to look for.

She'd already found and printed six of the photographs - one for each of the first six wives, each woman glittering on Lucien Ashcroft's arm at some ribbon-cutting or benefit dinner, each photograph representing, Ivy now understood with a kind of grim, exhausted clarity, roughly eleven months of a life that had already, unknowingly, started counting down.

The seventh photograph took longer to find. She finally located it in a charity auction recap from two years ago - Rosalind in deep green silk, laughing at something just outside the frame, her hand resting on Lucien's forearm with an ease that made something in Ivy's chest twist hard enough to steal her breath. She hadn't seen a candid photo of her sister looking that happy in longer than she wanted to admit. She printed it anyway, because the wall needed it, and pinned it beside the others.

Seven women. Seven galas. Seven versions of the same glittering room.

It was only once all seven photographs were up, side by side in a neat unbroken row for the first time, that Ivy noticed the man.

She almost missed him. He wasn't posed for the camera in any of the shots - he was background, always background, the kind of figure event photographers didn't bother framing around because he wasn't the point. A slim build, sandy hair, a suit cut expensive enough to blend into any room full of money without standing out in it. In Corinne's photograph he stood near a doorway, half-turned away. In Beatrix's, he was reaching for a canapé tray, unremarkable. In Camille's, in Renata's, in the two Ivy didn't yet have full names to attach beyond dates and causes of death - there he was again, always at the edges, always present, always exactly the kind of person a room full of wealthy strangers would look straight through.

And in Rosalind's photograph - the green silk, the laughing profile, Lucien's forearm under her sister's hand - there he was too, standing just behind them both, close enough that his sleeve was nearly touching Rosalind's shoulder, his face turned toward the camera this time, just enough that Ivy could make out the easy, practiced warmth of his expression.

Ivy sat very still.

Seven photographs. Seven different years. Seven different wives, at seven different events, in seven different corners of the same enormous house's social orbit.

The same man in every single one.