CHAPTER SEVEN- THIN WALLS
1511 Words
She couldn't sleep.
Not unusual. She rarely slept well in unfamiliar places — too many variables, too many sounds she hadn't catalogued yet. The estate settled around her in the dark, creaking and sighing the way old houses did, like it was talking to itself about things that happened before any of them were born.
She lay on her back staring at the ceiling at one in the morning and listened.
The connecting door was still open.
She could hear him on the other side. Not much — just the occasional movement, the low sound of his voice on the phone, the specific quality of wakefulness that carried through walls when everything else was quiet.
He wasn't sleeping either.
She thought about going to the door. Knocking. Asking if he wanted company the way two people who were actually together might ask each other that at one in the morning.
She thought about it for exactly thirty seconds.
Then she got up, pulled on her robe and knocked on the connecting door anyway.
He answered immediately. Like he'd been standing on the other side.
He was still dressed — shirt untucked, sleeves rolled, the closest to undone she'd seen him. He looked at her in the doorway with an expression that wasn't surprise.
"You're awake," she said.
"I'm always awake," he said.
"I know." She leaned against the doorframe. "I heard you."
A pause. "The walls are thin."
"Thin enough," she said.
He stepped back slightly — not an invitation exactly, more an opening. She took it, coming just far enough through the door that they were in the same room for the first time without a meeting or a performance or a reason.
Just — the same room. Late at night. Both of them not sleeping.
"Who were you on the phone with?" she asked.
"James."
"At one in the morning?"
"James doesn't sleep either."
"You're terrible employers of yourselves," she said.
Something pulled at his mouth. He sat on the edge of the bed — the enormous, completely untouched bed of a man who had been sitting at the desk since dinner. She sat in the chair across from him. Pulled her robe tighter.
"I've been thinking about Richard," she said.
"Of course you have."
"He's not done. What he did at dinner was an opening move. He's trying to find the edges of our story." She looked at Ethan. "He's going to try to separate us at some point. Get one of us alone and push harder."
"He'll try me first," Ethan said.
"No," she said. "He'll try me. You're too prepared. He knows that." She held his gaze. "I'm the unknown variable. He'll wait until I'm alone and then he'll be charming and helpful and ask something that sounds like nothing."
Ethan was quiet.
"When it happens," she said, "I need you to trust that I can handle it."
"I already told you I trust you."
"I know. I'm reminding you for when your instinct is to intervene."
He looked at her. "What makes you think I'd intervene?"
She tilted her head slightly. "Because you put your hand on my back in the entrance hall when Diana wasn't even watching."
The room went very quiet.
He didn't look away. Didn't qualify it. Didn't reach for an explanation.
"I noticed," she said quietly.
"I know you noticed," he said.
The space between them felt different at one in the morning in a dark room in a house that didn't belong to either of them. The performance was asleep. The contract was in her bag. It was just them and the thin walls and the question neither of them was asking out loud yet.
"Fina —"
A knock at the main door.
They both went still.
Not a timid knock. Three sharp precise raps. The knock of someone who knew the room was occupied and didn't care.
Ethan was on his feet in one movement. He looked at the connecting door — at Fina sitting in his chair at one in the morning in her robe — and made a decision in approximately half a second.
"Bathroom," he said.
She was already moving.
She stood in his bathroom with the door pulled and listened.
The main door opened.
"Serena." Ethan's voice. Flat. Controlled.
"I saw your light." Serena's voice was soft. Concerned. The voice of a woman who had rehearsed this moment or one very like it. "I couldn't sleep either. I thought —"
"It's late," Ethan said.
"I know." A pause. The particular silence of someone choosing their next words very carefully. "I just wanted to make sure you were alright. This week — bringing someone here for the first time, the family watching everything —" another pause — "it's a lot."
"I'm fine."
"Ethan." Her voice changed. Dropped. Became the voice of fifteen years of history compressed into two syllables. "You don't have to perform for me. I've known you too long."
Fina stood very still in the bathroom.
"I'm not performing," he said. "I'm tired. Goodnight Serena."
A long silence.
"She's not what she's showing you," Serena said quietly. Not cruel. Gentle. Carefully gentle in the way that landed harder than cruelty. "I just — I know people, Ethan. I've watched them all my life. There's something she's not telling you."
Fina's jaw tightened.
"Goodnight," Ethan said. Final. Immovable.
Another silence. Then footsteps. Then the door.
Then nothing.
Fina waited thirty seconds before coming out of the bathroom.
Ethan was standing in the middle of the room. He looked at her when she emerged — at whatever her face was doing — and said nothing for a moment.
"She's good," Fina said. Her voice was completely steady.
"Yes," he said.
"The concern. The gentleness. The perfectly timed —" she stopped. Breathed once. "She didn't say anything untrue. That's the clever part. There IS something I'm not telling you." She looked at him. "There's something neither of us is telling anyone."
He held her gaze.
"She's planting doubt," Fina said. "Not tonight — tonight was just the seed. She'll water it slowly. By day ten she won't need to say anything directly because the doubt will already be there every time you look at me."
"It won't work," he said.
"How do you know?"
He looked at her — steadily, completely, with those blue eyes that she had learned gave nothing away to everyone else and had somehow started giving everything away to her.
"Because I know exactly what you're not telling me," he said quietly. "And it's the same thing I'm not telling you."
The room was very very quiet.
Her heart was doing that loud unhelpful thing again.
"Ethan —"
"Go to sleep Fina," he said. Low. Almost gentle.
"We need to talk about —"
"Tomorrow," he said. "We'll talk tomorrow. Tonight go to sleep."
She looked at him for a long moment.
Then she walked to the connecting door. Stopped with her hand on the frame.
"The thing you're not telling me," she said without turning around.
"Yes," he said.
"When are you going to say it?"
A silence so complete she could hear the house breathing.
"When I'm sure you won't leave after I do," he said.
She closed her eyes briefly.
Walked through the connecting door.
Lay in her bed in the dark with her heart hammering and forty-four days feeling like both too long and nowhere near enough and Ethan Robinson on the other side of a wall saying things like I know exactly what you're not telling me at one thirty in the morning.
She stared at the ceiling.
Then — footsteps in the corridor outside her room. Slow. Deliberate. Pausing outside her door for exactly three seconds.
Then moving on.
She sat up.
That wasn't Ethan. His room was connected. He had no reason to be in the corridor.
She got up. Moved to the door. Opened it quietly.
The corridor was empty.
But at the far end — just disappearing around the corner — the hem of a silk robe.
Honey blonde hair.
Serena.
She hadn't been coming from Ethan's room.
She had been coming from the other direction entirely.
From Richard's end of the corridor.
Fina stood in the doorway of her room in the dark and felt something cold settle in her stomach that had nothing to do with the temperature.
She's been working with Richard.
Not just planting doubt. Something bigger. Something that had been planned before Fina even arrived.
She stood there for a long moment.
Then she went back inside and sat on the edge of the bed and thought very carefully about everything she'd seen and heard since they arrived and what it meant and what it was going to take to stay ahead of it.
At two thirty she picked up her phone.
Typed one message to Ethan.
We need to talk before breakfast. Not tomorrow. Now.
Three seconds later her phone lit up.
Connecting door.
She stood up.
Walked to it.
Pushed it open.
- Writer
