Reborn to Ruin Him

CHAPTER SEVEN

The trick to booking your own execution was to sound delighted about it.

“An anniversary dinner,” Camille said brightly, over Sunday breakfast, to the whole assembled family. “Our first. I know it’s the better part of a year off, but the good rooms book out, and I want it to be perfect. The Astor Room, at the Corvane. The same date as the wedding.” She buttered her toast as though she were talking about flowers. “I’ve always thought it romantic — to promise a place a year in advance.”

Adrian looked charmed. Regina looked at her over the rim of a cup of coffee she was not drinking, and said, “How organized of you, dear.”

“I learned it from you,” Camille said, and meant every layer of it.

Adrian reached over and covered her hand with his, a gesture so unexpected she had to work not to flinch. “She thinks of everything,” he told the table, proud of her the way a man is proud of a good acquisition that has begun to appreciate. “You should hear her on the markets lately.” Down the table, Bianca’s fork paused a quarter-inch above her plate and resumed. Regina said nothing, but Camille felt the matriarch log the pride, and the appreciation, and the fork, and file all three.

She had chosen the Astor Room because it was the room.

In the first life she had sat at the long table under its chandeliers on a night she could still replay frame by frame, and she had listened to her husband stand and thank everyone for coming and announce, to a ripple of stunned and then delighted applause, that he and Camille had decided to part as friends — while Bianca, three seats down, had smiled into her wine and worn, on her left hand, a ring Camille was still wearing on hers.

That was the room. That was the date. That was the applause she was going to make them give her again, for an entirely different reason.

The Corvane’s Astor Room was the kind of place that only rented a year out to people it had already decided about, and Camille had spent a careful afternoon becoming one of those people — a deposit, a note in the right hand, a word to the events director about how much the family valued discretion and history.

She had walked the empty room alone before she booked it, standing under the dark chandeliers where they would blaze on the night that mattered, and she had chosen, precisely, the seat she would rise from. First life, she had sat facing the door and watched the applause come at her like weather.

This time she would sit with her back to the windows and the whole room in front of her, every face turned her way, nowhere for any of them to look but at the orphan standing up to say her own name.

P3, planted. She let herself feel the click of it, quiet as a lock, and moved on.

The danger came at dinner, and it came from Regina, and it came dressed as a favor.

“I heard the strangest thing at the club,” the matriarch said, midway through the fish, to the table at large but with her attention arranged, Camille understood a beat too late, entirely on the bride. “That someone’s going to make a run at Halloran Freight. Hostile. Before the quarter turns.” She let it sit. “Adrian, you’ve a view on Halloran, haven’t you?”

And Camille — who had spent three weeks training herself into a locked door, who knew better, who knew better — felt her whole mind lunge at the name like a dog at a gate.

She knew Halloran the way you know a childhood street. In the life she had lived, Halloran Freight had been a byword at this table for two more years, a limping concern everyone agreed was doomed and no one bothered to finish off, until it was sold in a back room for parts to a buyer whose name Camille could recite. There had been no hostile run. There had been no run at all.

The rumor Regina had just laid on the tablecloth was not merely wrong; it was impossible, a thing that had never happened in all of the future Camille carried, and the part of her that had been built by dying wanted, with an almost physical hunger, to reach out and correct the record. Because she remembered Halloran. She remembered it precisely.

There had been no run at Halloran Freight, not that quarter, not ever; Halloran had limped along untouched for two more years before it was quietly sold. The rumor was wrong. The rumor was impossible. And the reflex, the deep new reflex that was becoming the engine of her whole life, wanted to say so — to smile and murmur, oh, I doubt that, and be right, and be safe, and be seen.

It was a test built for her, and she had built herself, over a year, into the one person who could pass it.

She had the word half-formed on her tongue.

She had actually drawn the breath.

Later she would understand that the breath had been the most dangerous thing she had done since waking. Not the forged clause, not the letter to Ezra, not the wrong smile at the altar — the breath, drawn to correct a rumor, in front of the one person on earth who was watching for exactly that reflex.

If she had spoken, she would not have been caught, not that night, not conclusively; Regina would only have had one more entry for her list. But it was the kind of entry that did not come off a list, and lists like Regina’s did not need a confession.

They needed a pattern, and a pattern was only ever a handful of breaths like the one Camille had very nearly wasted on a freight company that no longer mattered in any world.

And in the space of that breath she saw it, the whole shape of it, clean and cold: Regina had not heard anything at any club. Regina had invented Halloran, here, tonight, and floated it across the table like bait on flat water, and she was watching — not Adrian, never Adrian — to see whether the pliant little bride would correct a rumor she had no earthly way of knowing was false. It was a test built specifically for a person who knew the future.

It was a test built for her.

There was a particular exhaustion to living inside foreknowledge that no one had ever warned her about, because no one had ever had it to warn her of. Everyone else in the room moved through time the ordinary way, forward, blind, discovering each moment as it arrived. Camille moved through it twice — living each day while remembering its shadow, the version that had already happened, the outcome she was trying to bend.

It made every ordinary exchange a kind of double exposure. A pleasantry from Regina was also the memory of a hundred pleasantries that had preceded a betrayal. A kindness from Adrian was also the cold conference room it would curdle into.

She smiled and nodded and played the wife, and underneath the performance ran the ceaseless private labor of comparison, this life against the last, every divergence noted, every place the river had begun to run in a new channel because she had put her hand in the water.

And the labor was lonely in a way that had no bottom. She could tell no one why she knew what she knew. She could point to no source, cite no evidence, share none of the weight. She was the only person alive carrying a map of a country everyone else believed was uncharted, and the map was made of her own death, and she could never once set it down.

It was, she thought, the true price of the second chance — not danger, which she had expected, but solitude, which she had not: the specific unshareable solitude of being the only one who remembered a future that had already killed her.

Camille let the breath out as a small vague sound, and reached for her water.

“I wouldn’t know a Halloran from a hole in the ground,” she said, laughing at herself, the frivolous bride, and turned to ask Bianca where she’d found her earrings.

The moment passed. The fish was cleared. Adrian said something confident and wrong about Halloran and no one contradicted him, least of all his wife.

But Camille did not taste the rest of the meal, because she had felt the floor move. Three weeks. Three weeks of perfect discipline, and the matriarch had already built a trap shaped exactly like her secret and set it in the open, casually, as a test — which meant Regina did not yet know anything, but Regina had begun, on nothing but instinct, to hunt the one thing that could not be allowed to be found.

That night, brushing out her hair, Camille looked at herself in the glass for a long moment.

She thought about the Halloran name for a long time before she slept. Not the trap itself — she’d survived the trap — but what it meant that the trap existed at all. Regina had not accused her of anything. Regina had, so far as the table knew, simply made pleasant conversation over the fish.

And yet the matriarch had, out of pure instinct, out of nothing but a bride who smiled wrong at an altar, constructed a lie of a particular and diagnostic shape: a false future, offered to see whether the girl would correct it. You did not build a test like that for a wife you thought was ordinary.

You built it for a wife you had begun, without any evidence you could name, to suspect of knowing things she could not know.

Never be surprised twice, she’d promised herself. She hadn’t been. But she had been surprised once, tonight, and once was a beginning, and the woman who had built the trap was not going to stop at one.