I Married My Sister's Killer

Chapter 13 — The Night Before Everything

We send the files to Margaux Hendricks at eleven forty-seven at night.

Damian sends them from an encrypted server. I sit beside him in the basement room while he does it — the room with the corkboard, the eight years of documentation, Iris's photograph in the corner. When the confirmation comes through, we both just sit there for a moment.

"She'll have it reviewed by morning," Damian says.

"And then?"

"And then we wait for her to move."

I nod. I know what waiting means: the hardest part. The part where you've done everything you can do and the outcome is no longer in your hands.

I stand up. Cross the room. Stand in front of the corkboard and look at it one last time before this version of things ends — before the evidence leaves this room and becomes someone else's weapon.

"Wren."

I turn.

Damian is standing too, closer than I realized, and there's something in his face that he isn't controlling the way he usually controls everything.

"I need you to know," he says, "that whatever happens next — whatever Hendricks does, whatever Calloway does when he finds out — I am not going to let anything happen to you."

I look at him. "You can't promise that."

"No," he admits. "But I'm promising it anyway."

The room is very quiet. The monitors are off. The only light is from the lamp on the desk, and it turns everything warm and close and nothing at all like the house I moved into two months ago.

"I didn't come here to be protected," I say.

"I know." He takes one step toward me. "You came here to find the truth. You found it. Now I'm asking you to let me —" He pauses. "Let me be something else, too."

I look at him for a long time.

I think about Iris. About the fact that she would have something to say about this — something dry and sharp and accurate, some observation that would make me laugh and also tell me exactly what I already knew. She was good at that.

I think she would tell me: you're already half in love with him. Stop performing outrage about it.

"Don't make promises you can't keep," I say finally.

"Then tell me which ones I can."

I step toward him.

The distance between us closes.

For the first time in this house, in this marriage, in this long terrible search — I let it.

Upstairs, in the study, Iris's photograph is tucked in the drawer where I put it the first night I arrived. Tomorrow, things will move. Calloway will learn what's coming. Marcus will have to choose a side. The world will change.

Tonight, I am standing in a basement room with the man I married for revenge, and I am not thinking about revenge at all.

I hope she understands.

I think she does.