The Husband Clause

The Signature

I signed the contract at eleven fifty-three in the morning, with seven minutes to spare and a pen that was heavier than any pen had any right to be.

The conference room was on the forty-second floor of a building that did not have Damon's name on it but might as well have. Glass on three sides. The Hudson River below us, glittering like something that had been beaten flat with a hammer. A long black table. Three lawyers on his side. None on mine.

I had refused the lawyer he offered to provide. It had felt important, at three in the morning, to keep one thing of my own. By eleven fifty-three it felt stupid.

"Initial here," said the lawyer on the left, a woman in her fifties with a mouth like a closed envelope. "And here. And here. And the signature on the last page, please."

I initialed. I initialed. I initialed.

My handwriting did not look like my handwriting.

Damon stood by the window with his back to me, his hands in his pockets, a long line of black wool and held breath. He had not spoken since I walked in. He had not looked at me since I sat down. I had the distinct sense that he was waiting for me to change my mind, and that he would not stop me if I did.

I did not change my mind.

I signed the last page. Selene Eve Marchetti, in cursive my Catholic school had drilled into me before I was old enough to know what I was practicing for. The ink dried slowly. The lawyer with the closed-envelope mouth slid a second document across the table.

"The non-disclosure," she said. "Standard."

Nothing about this was standard. I signed it anyway.

Damon turned around.

"Out," he said.

The lawyers stood up. They gathered their pages. They left without looking at me, the way you leave a room where someone is grieving, and the door closed behind them with the soft heavy click of a vault sealing.

And then I was alone with my husband.

* * *

"You are pale," he said.

"I haven't slept."

"Then you should sleep. There are rooms upstairs."

"I want to go home."

"You no longer have a home, Selene." He said it without cruelty, which made it worse. "You have an address. Two of them. The penthouse and the estate in Connecticut. You will be moved into the penthouse this afternoon. Your belongings have already been packed."

"My belongings."

"Three suitcases. A box of books. A photograph of your grandmother in a silver frame. The framed embroidery your mother made you when you were nine. A small jewelry box containing six pieces of costume jewelry and one gold cross." He paused. "Did I miss anything."

My throat closed.

I had not told him any of that. Not the embroidery. Not the cross. I had told him almost nothing, because that had been the only piece of myself I thought I had left to keep, and now I understood that I had not been keeping it at all. He had simply allowed me to think I was.

"How," I said.

"Adrian."

"You had him in my apartment."

"I had him in your life. There is a difference." His voice did not change. "You will get used to it. He has a job. The job is to know you better than you know yourself. He has been doing the job for nine days."

Nine days.

Nine days ago I had been a nobody. Nine days ago I had been a girl crying in a coffee shop bathroom over a final notice from a hospital. Nine days ago a stranger in an expensive coat had handed me a card with a phone number on it and said, when you are ready, you will call this number, and I had laughed in his face.

I had called the number six hours later.

"You watched me," I said.

"He watched you."

"For nine days."

"It was an investment."

My hands were shaking. I put them flat on the table to stop them and the table felt cold under my palms, the kind of cold that lives in stone. I made myself breathe. I made myself look at him.

"And what did he find."

Damon walked toward me. He moved the way certain animals moved when they were not in a hurry, when they had already decided that the thing they wanted was not going to be able to leave. He stopped beside my chair. He did not touch me. He bent down, slowly, until his mouth was next to my ear, and I could smell him, expensive cologne and something underneath it that was just heat, just skin.

"He found," Damon said, very softly, "that you do not lock your bedroom door at night."

My breath stopped.

"He found that you sing in the shower. Off-key. He found that you cry in your sleep, but not loudly. He found that you keep the photograph of a boy in the back of your jewelry box, and that you have not opened the box in eleven months, and that the boy is not someone I need to worry about because the boy is dead."

"Stop."

"He found that you taste your coffee before you put the milk in. He found that you read poetry. He found that there is a freckle on your left shoulder blade in the exact shape of a teardrop."

"Stop it."

"He found," Damon said, "that you are mine."

He straightened. He walked to the door. He opened it without looking back.

"Adrian will drive you to the penthouse," he said. "I will see you tonight."

And then the door closed, and I was alone with the marriage I had just signed myself into, and the slow, terrible understanding that the man who had been watching me for nine days was the man waiting for me by the elevator. The man who had counted my freckles. The man whose hands were about to be the only hands I would feel for six months.

And I did not yet know which of my two husbands was going to break me first.