Married to My Mourning

The First Night

His home did not feel like a home.

It felt like a statement.

Nora stood in the middle of the living room with one suitcase and a tote bag that had a small embroidered sunflower on it — Elena had given it to her last Christmas — and felt the absurdity of herself in this space. The penthouse was vast and monochromatic. Gray and charcoal and the cold blue of city light coming through windows that ran floor to ceiling. Everything was clean in the way that suggested not minimalism but removal — as if warmth had once been here and been deliberately extracted.

A woman named Helene, fifties, with the manner of someone who had long ago stopped being surprised by anything, showed her to a room at the east end of the apartment.

"Mr. Voss is in meetings until ten," Helene said. "There's food in the kitchen. He asks that you keep to the private wing tonight."

"Does he." Nora set her suitcase down. The room was large and gray and had a window overlooking the water. The bed was made with the kind of precision that felt aggressive. "And if I don't?"

Helene looked at her for a moment with something that might, in another context, have been amusement. "Then I suppose you won't," she said, and left.

Nora didn't unpack. She sat on the edge of the bed and looked at her hands for a while. Then she looked at the window. Then she opened her tote bag and took out the small framed photograph she'd brought — Elena at nineteen, at the beach, laughing at something off-frame, her hair in the wind, her eyes crinkled shut.

She put it on the nightstand.

There. Now it was a room she was in, not just a room.

She lasted until eight-thirty before she left the private wing.

Not because she was defying anyone. Because the silence of four gray walls was starting to press against her in a way that felt too much like the three days immediately after the phone call — that terrible, thick silence of a world that had kept moving without permission.

The kitchen was immense and smelled faintly of coffee. She found bread, eggs, butter. She cooked because it was something to do with her hands, because her mother had always said grief needed an activity or it would eat you from the inside.

She was eating toast at the kitchen island, reading the news on her phone, when she heard him come in.

She didn't look up.

The footsteps paused. She felt the shift in the air that preceded him — she was already learning this about him, that he changed the pressure of a room simply by entering it.

"You're outside the private wing," Damien said.

"I was hungry." She turned a page she wasn't reading. "I left some bread if you want it."

Silence.

He set his jacket over a chair. She heard him move to the coffee machine, the quiet efficiency of it, the sound of someone operating a familiar space without thought.

He didn't tell her to go back to her room.

She ate her toast. He stood at the counter with his coffee. The city glittered through the windows between them like a third thing in the room.

"You should know," he said eventually, "the staff will talk. Anything you do in this apartment has the potential to become information."

"I'll keep that in mind."

"I'm not warning you against the staff. I'm telling you so you understand the performance starts here. Not just in public."

She looked up then. He was watching her over the coffee cup with those unreadable dark eyes, and she had the strange feeling that the warning wasn't entirely impersonal.

"Meaning what, exactly?"

"Meaning if you're going to live here, you should know how to live here." He set the cup down. "There are three people in this building on Crane's payroll. I know who they are. They report on my habits. Going forward, you'll need to be convincing."

"Convincing," she repeated.

"As someone who chose to be here."

She turned that over. A woman who chose this. A woman in love with Damien Voss, who had moved in not out of desperation but desire. She would need to wear that like a second skin.

"I can do that," she said.

He nodded once. Picked up his jacket. Was already leaving when she said:

"Does it bother you? Having people watching you in your own home?"

He stopped.

She genuinely didn't know why she'd asked. Something about the way he'd said it — the performance starts here — like even this, the private, should have an audience.

"I stopped thinking about it," he said, his back still to her.

"That's not the same as it not bothering you."

He turned then. Looked at her with an expression she couldn't name — not quite surprise, not quite something else. Whatever it was, he locked it away before she could read it.

"Get some sleep, Ms. Kane."

"Nora," she said.

He paused.

"If we're going to be convincing," she said, "you should probably use my name."

Something shifted in him. Imperceptible to anyone who wasn't watching for it. She was.

"Nora," he said.

Just that. Just her name, in his voice, which was lower than she expected and steady in a way that felt like something she'd need to be careful about.

He left.

She stayed at the kitchen island for a long time after, her toast gone cold, the city outside doing its indifferent, glittering thing.

Elena had known this man. Had trusted him enough to go to him. Had — Nora was beginning to think — perhaps felt something for him, though that was a door she wasn't ready to open yet.

She picked up the tote bag from the floor. Looked at the embroidered sunflower.

What did you get yourself into? she thought at her sister's memory. And what exactly did you leave me in the middle of?

No answer. There never was, from Elena. Just the laugh from the photograph, frozen mid-sound, directed at something Nora would never see.

She went back to the gray room.

She did not sleep for a long time.

And down the hall — not that she could know this, not that she would have believed it — neither did he.