THE TERMS OF THE MARRIAGE

Chapter 6 — Old Ground

The dreams started that night, though dreams wasn't quite the right word — more like fragments surfacing from somewhere she'd sealed off years ago. A boy on a bicycle. A summer that smelled like cut grass and the community pool two blocks from her childhood house. A name she couldn't quite catch before it dissolved into morning light.

She woke before her alarm, unsettled in a way she couldn't explain, and lay in the enormous bed in the enormous room in the enormous apartment that still didn't feel like hers, trying to chase the fragments back down. They wouldn't come. All that remained was a feeling — warm, familiar, aching — attached to nothing she could name.

Marta found her still in the kitchen an hour later, staring at her coffee like it might have answers.

"Rough night, Mrs. Cole?"

"Strange one." Elena wrapped both hands around the mug. "Marta, can I ask you something? How long have you worked for Mr. Cole?"

"Eight years, come spring."

"Did you know him before he was — this?" She gestured vaguely at the apartment, the view, the life. "Before all of it?"

Something careful crossed Marta's face — the look of a woman who'd been paid well and long enough to know exactly where the lines were. "I knew him when he was already building the company. Not before that. You'd have to ask him about before."

"I have. He doesn't answer."

Marta's expression softened, just slightly. "Give him time, dear. He's not a man who trusts easily. If he's letting you ask at all, that's not nothing."

It wasn't the answer Elena wanted, but it was, she suspected, the only honest one she was going to get from anyone in this apartment. She thought about the photograph again — the boy outside the small brick house, laughing at something out of frame — and wondered, not for the first time, if the fragmented dream and the photograph were somehow the same unfinished thought trying to surface from two different directions.

She didn't see Damian again until that evening, and when she did, he was different — guarded in a new way, like their conversation on the terrace had cost him something he was now trying to recoup. He was polite over dinner. Distant. The wall she'd watched crack the night before had been rebuilt, brick by careful brick, and she hated how much it stung to watch him do it.

"You're quiet," he observed, halfway through the meal.

"So are you."

"I have a call with Singapore in an hour."

"Of course you do." She pushed a piece of food around her plate without eating it. "Damian. Last night—"

"Was a mistake," he said, too quickly, cutting her off before she could finish. "I said more than I meant to. It won't happen again."

The words landed like a slap, sharper for how gently he said them.

"Fine," she said, standing before he could see her face fall. "Enjoy your call."

She didn't look back to see whether he watched her leave the room, though some traitorous part of her hoped he did.