THE TERMS OF THE MARRIAGE

Chapter 4 — The Argument

It was two weeks into the marriage before they had their first real fight, and it started, absurdly, over a photograph.

Elena found it while looking for a phone charger in Damian's office — a room she'd been told, without being told directly, that she wasn't meant to wander into. It was tucked into the back of a drawer she hadn't meant to open: a photo, old and slightly creased, of a boy who couldn't have been older than sixteen, standing outside a small brick house she didn't recognize, laughing at something outside the frame.

She almost put it back. Almost.

Instead she was still holding it when Damian walked in.

"That's not yours to look through," he said, and his voice had a rawness to it she hadn't heard before — not anger exactly, something closer to exposure.

"I wasn't looking through anything. I was finding a charger." She held up the photo. "Who is this?"

"Put it back, Elena."

"Why? It's a picture of a kid. It's not exactly a state secret—"

"Put it back." He crossed the room fast enough that she took an involuntary step back, and for a moment something dangerous moved through his expression before he visibly reined it in. He took the photo from her hand, gently, but his fingers were shaking. "This isn't a conversation we're having tonight."

"Then when? You keep saying that — ask me again in a year, this isn't the night — when exactly is the night, Damian? Because I signed a contract that says I'm your wife for twelve months, and I still don't know a single true thing about you."

"You know plenty."

"I know what you let me know." She heard her own voice rising and didn't try to stop it. "I know you eat dinner at eight and you hate being interrupted and you warn me off men at parties like you actually care what happens to me, but I don't know why, I don't know what Richard Voss meant by a great deal you don't yet know about your husband, I don't know why you looked at that photo like I'd caught you doing something illegal—"

"Because you did," he said, and the words came out before he could stop them, sharp and final, and then he closed his eyes like he wished he could take them back.

The room went very quiet.

"Did what," Elena said, low.

Damian looked at the photograph in his hand for a long moment. When he spoke again, his voice had gone flat and controlled, every trace of the crack sealed back over.

"It's nothing," he said. "A picture of my childhood house. I don't like people in my things. That's all it is."

She knew, with total certainty, that it wasn't all it was. But she also knew, watching him fold the photo carefully back into the drawer like something fragile, that pushing any harder tonight would get her nowhere but a locked door.

"Fine," she said. "Keep your secrets."

"Elena—"

"Goodnight, Damian."

She left him standing in the office, the drawer still open, his jaw tight with something that looked, for just a second before she turned away, almost like grief.