Twice His, Once Deceieved

Morning After

The first thing Sandra noticed was the light.

It came through the balcony curtains in soft gold ribbons, pooling across the marble floor in a way that made the room look like something from one of her art history textbooks. She lay still for a moment, letting the warmth settle over her and then she remembered the note.She sat up.

The master bedroom was empty, the other side of the bed untouched. Alexander had gone. Of course he had.She pressed her fingers to her sternum and breathed through the hollow ache there. Then she swung her legs over the side of the bed, stood, and decided not to feel sorry for herself before she'd even had coffee.

The breakfast tray on the console table held a silver carafe, a small dish of berries, and a single croissant. It was precise and perfectly arranged the work of Catherine, she suspected and completely impersonal. She poured the coffee anyway. It was very good.She was halfway through her second cup when she heard the soft knock. Mrs. Ashford?, Catherine's voice carried through the door. "Are you decent? I thought I might show you the house, if you're ready."

Sandra set down the cup. "Give me ten minutes."

Catherine Mills turned out to be exactly what Sandra had hoped for and hadn't dared expect: practical, warm, and completely without ceremony. She had silver-streaked hair pinned at her nape and walked the long corridors of the mansion as if she had built every wall herself.

"The east wing is Mr. Ashford's private office and his gym," Catherine said, gesturing down a hallway Sandra had not yet explored. "He prefers that space undisturbed when he's working from home. The west wing is yours to do with as you like."Sandra glanced down the corridor that was apparently hers. It was broader than her family's entire townhouse. "All of it?"He had the solarium repainted last week." Catherine said it mildly, as if she were commenting on the weather, but Sandra caught the flicker of something amusement, maybe in the older woman's eyes. "In case you wanted a project."The library stopped Sandra cold.It occupied two full floors, connected by a forged iron spiral staircase that wound up to a railed gallery lined with more shelves than she could count. The windows here were floor to ceiling, and the morning light fell across the spines of thousands of books in shades of amber and pale gold.She pressed her hand flat against the nearest shelf, feeling the texture of aged cloth and leather bindings beneath her palm. First editions. Art catalogues. Poetry. Philosophy. Histories thick as bricks.

"He doesn't use it much," Catherine said from the doorway. "Mr. Ashford prefers his office. But the room's been waiting for someone who would."

Sandra turned slowly, taking in the whole of it. The fireplace with its deep mantle. The reading chairs positioned near the windows. The writing desk in the corner, clean and clear as an invitation.I could spend the rest of my life in here," she said, before she could think better of it.

Catherine smiled the first full smile Sandra had seen from her. "I rather thought so."She spent the rest of the morning drifting through rooms she was not sure she was meant to occupy. The house was stunning and vaguely oppressive in the way that very large beautiful things often were beautiful enough that you were afraid to touch anything, so large you couldn't quite believe you were meant to belong to it.

She didn't belong to it. She belonged to it as much as a vase purchased to match a room's palette belonged to its shelf.Sandra pushed the thought away and kept moving.By early afternoon she had memorized the route from the master bedroom to the kitchen, catalogued the art in the main hall, and discovered a small side room that had probably once been a sitting room and now held nothing but good light and a view of the garden.She sat down on the floor in that room, leaned against the wall, and let herself be still.The garden, she thought. She could do something with the garden. She'd once spent an entire semester studying the landscape design principles of Japanese gardens for a paper she'd written that her professor had called "quietly exceptional." She'd been twentyone and so proud of those two words.She wondered what Alexander's garden had been designed to be, and whether he'd care if she changed it.She thought he probably wouldn't notice.She thought, suddenly, about the voice from last night. Zane. She turned the name over in her mind and felt the unfamiliar warmth of it.He'd listened. That was the thing she kept circling back to. He'd sat on her balcony in the dark and actually listened not to perform interest, not to be polite but because he'd genuinely wanted to hear what she had to say. She hadn't known, until that moment, how hungry she was for that.She was being foolish. She knew she was being foolish. He was a stranger who climbed buildings at night and introduced himself with a name that was probably not his name, and the rational response would have been to call security.And yet.She almost didn't find the note.She'd gone back to the library after dinner alone again, Catherine having left a meal in the dining room that Sandra ate in approximately eight minutes before retreating to the one room that felt livable and she was running her fingers along the lower shelves when she saw the small square of cream paper on the writing desk.It hadn't been there before. She was certain of it.Her heart did something strange as she crossed to it and lifted it by the corner.The handwriting was clean and unhurried:'For the woman who loves beautiful things use this room as much as you like.....The Night Visitor..'She read it three times.Then she sat down slowly in the chair behind the desk, the note held carefully in both hands, and looked around at all those books and all that light and felt something in her chest that she hadn't felt in weeks.She felt, against all reason, like she had been seen.