Reborn to Ruin Him

CHAPTER TWO

She did not scream. She had already used up all her screaming in a life that hadn’t happened yet.

Instead, Camille Ross — twenty-five years old on the outside, thirty-one and freshly murdered on the inside — got up off the bed she remembered, walked to the window she remembered, and looked down at the street where, in about ninety minutes, a car would come to take her to a wedding she had, the first time, believed in.

She let herself have exactly one minute to shake.

She counted it. That was the only way she trusted herself to stop. She stood at the glass with her arms wrapped around her own ribs and let the shaking come — the memory of the garage, the sodium light, the weightlessness of the folder leaving her hands — and she watched the second hand on the little bedside clock go all the way around once, and when it reached twelve again she took a breath and put the fear away in a drawer and closed it.

There would be a cost to this. She already knew that too. A person is not built to carry two lives at once, to sit at a breakfast table remembering the funeral of everyone at it.

She would have moments — she could feel their edges already — when the future pressed so hard against the present that she’d have to grip the underside of a table to stay in the room. She promised herself she would let those moments come in private, and only in private, and never once where a Whitmore could see her flinch at what hadn’t happened yet.

Grief was an expense and she could not afford it this morning. She had been given the impossible gift, the one she had begged the dark for, and if she wasted it weeping she would deserve the diagnosis she’d already learned to fear in herself: that the ledger would try to become all of her, that she would price every hour and spend none of them living.

That was the danger. She could feel it already, the cold accounting mind reaching to catalogue even her own terror. Not yet, she told it. Not this minute. This minute is mine.

Then the minute was over, and she went to work.

She had, she realized, standing there with her heart going like a struck bell, the single most valuable asset any person in that entire vicious family had ever held. She had the future. All of it. Every crash, every scandal, every seduction and sabotage and quiet coup. She knew that the freight index would dip before the quarter closed. She knew which minister’s son would be arrested at which party.

She knew the exact Tuesday, two years out, when a courier would bring her a folder full of her own ruin and call it a formality. She had five years of Whitmore crimes memorized because she had lived downstream of every single one of them, soaked to the skin, and never once been allowed to understand the weather.

And she had the one thing not written in any of those crimes — the fact even Adrian had never troubled to learn: that the orphan he’d married was the last living Everhart, and that a trust the family had spent a decade quietly bleeding would come home to the surviving heir on her twenty-seventh birthday, one year and one day away, if only that heir stood up in the right room and claimed it.

Last time, she hadn’t known to stand. This time she would be early.

And they had no idea.

That was the whole of it, the coin she turned over and over. In the first life she had walked into that house blind, and they had read her like a balance sheet, and the asymmetry had killed her. This time the asymmetry ran the other way. This time she knew the ending of every scene before the cast walked on. She was not a bride. She was a woman who had already read the last page and had come back to write in the margins.

The trick — the whole trick, the thing every one of the next five years would turn on — would be to never, ever let them see her read.

She showered. The water was exactly as she remembered it, a hair too hot, the pressure in the old apartment that she’d complained about and then, later, missed. She let the stylists come.

She sat very still while a woman she remembered — a woman who, in three years, would sell an unflattering candid of her to a gossip column for four hundred dollars — pinned her hair, and Camille thanked her by name and tipped her, this time, enough to matter, because you never knew which entries you’d want to have paid. The woman blinked at the bills, surprised, and something in her softened, and Camille thought: there.

One person in this city who will remember me kindly. Start there.

The prenup arrived at nine, with a lawyer, as it had the first time.

The first time, she had signed it without reading it, drunk on being chosen. It had made her liable for a company she didn’t understand and entitled to nothing she’d need. This time she read every clause while the lawyer checked his watch, and then she smiled, and asked, in the sweet dazzled voice of a girl too in love to be shrewd, whether she might add just one romantic little thing.

“A gesture,” she said. “For Adrian. So he knows I’m not marrying the company.”

The lawyer, indulgent, thinking her exactly as harmless as she needed him to, let her.

The clause she added was four lines long and read, to anyone glancing, like sentiment: a mutual affirmation that each party entered the marriage in good faith and full disclosure of all material facts bearing on the other’s interests. It was the kind of thing a naive bride might weep over.

It was also, worded exactly so, a landmine — because the Whitmores had not disclosed that they had murdered her family, and one day, in a courtroom she could already see, that single undisclosed material fact was going to support a fraud-in-the-inducement claim and expose every downstream transaction built upon the marriage to challenge.

She signed with a flourish. The R had no tail. She made sure of it.

“He’ll be so touched,” the lawyer said.

“I certainly hope so,” said Camille.

By the time the car came, she was ready. She rode to the cathedral through streets she’d once watched blur past from a very different vehicle, on a very different night, and she walked up the aisle on no one’s arm — an orphan, radiant, alone, exactly as they’d wanted her, a woman with no family to ask difficult questions — toward a man who had signed her family’s death warrant in a font from a dropdown menu. And she did the hardest thing she had ever done in either life.

She catalogued the house the way she had once catalogued nothing — because in the first life she had moved through these rooms as a guest in her own marriage, grateful, incurious, careful not to look too hard at the machinery that fed and clothed and eventually disposed of her. Now she looked.

She noted which servants watched her and which merely served, which doors were locked and which only appeared to be, where the family kept its secrets and where it kept the appearance of having none. It was astonishing, she thought, how much a person could refuse to see when seeing was inconvenient — how much she herself had refused, the first time, in exchange for the warm illusion of belonging. She would not refuse again.

The illusion had cost her everything. Clarity, however cold, was cheaper.

She said the vows and meant a different set entirely.

To have and to hold, she said, and thought: I will hold every one of you accountable.

For richer or poorer, she said, and thought: poorer. I promise you poorer.

Till death do us part, she said, and did not flinch, because she had already done that part, and it had not parted them nearly enough.

And at the end, when the priest said the words and Adrian lifted the veil and looked at her with the fond, proprietary warmth of a man admiring a well-chosen acquisition, Camille Everhart — for that was who stood inside the dress, whatever the register said — smiled at her husband with her whole heart.

It was a real smile. That was what made it terrible.

She had wondered, in the car on the way, whether she could do it — whether her body would betray her at the altar, whether she’d weep or laugh or simply run. But standing there in the borrowed light of the cathedral, she found the smile came easily, because it was not for him.

It was for the version of herself who had stood in this exact spot the first time, trembling and grateful, and had no idea. Camille smiled for that girl. I’m here, she told her, across five years. I came back. We’re not going to lose this time.

In the front row, in ivory and pearls, Regina Whitmore had been smiling too, the small satisfied smile of a woman watching a deal close on schedule. She had ordered a fire eleven years ago and never once lost a night’s sleep. She had chosen this girl the way you choose a document — for what it would sign and how quietly it would file.

At the sight of that smile on the bride, the matriarch’s own faltered.

For one half-second, across a cathedral full of people applauding a wedding that was actually a burial, the two women looked at each other. And Regina — who read rooms like ledgers, who missed nothing, who had built a life on being the fastest mind in any room she entered — felt something she could not name and did not like, a small cold draft from a door she was certain she had locked.

The girl was smiling wrong.