A Debt in the Dark

TRUTH IS WORSE THAN BETRAYAL

Sera Pov

I sat on my own couch in my own living room and listened to my husband tell me, in the measured voice he used for quarterly reports, that he had never been attracted to me.

"Not to you," he said. "Not to any woman. I married you because it was expected. Your background was appropriate. You were intelligent and presentable and my family approved." He paused. "I'm not trying to be cruel."

"You're managing it anyway," I said.

He held my gaze without flinching. That was the thing I'd read as steadiness for three years. Now I could see it for what it was. He simply did not feel things in ways that reached his face.

Mark was on the far end of the couch. He had put on his shirt but left it untucked and he was sitting with his hands between his knees and not looking at either of us.

"Mark," I said.

He looked up.

"Tell me your version," I said.

"Sera, I don't—"

"Tell me."

He exhaled slowly. "I tried to tell you. A hundred times I tried to figure out how—"

"You didn't," I said. "Not once."

"I didn't know how."

"You didn't know how." I repeated it back to him the way I repeated testimony back to witnesses when I wanted them to hear how it sounded out loud. "You watched me spend three years thinking I was broken. You let me blame myself. You sat across from me in coffee shops and in restaurants and listened to me cry about feeling unwanted and you went home to him. And you didn't know how."

He was quiet.

"He had things on my father," Mark said. "Financial evidence. He threatened to use it."

I turned to Ethan.

Ethan did not look away. He never did. "I made an arrangement that worked for everyone involved."

"It didn't work for me," I said.

"You weren't a party to it."

The room was very quiet.

"Two years," I said. Not to either of them particularly. Just putting it somewhere outside my own head.

"Sera." Ethan's voice was patient. "We can handle this civilly. Neither of us needs to—"

"Stop talking," I said.

He stopped.

I stood up. I picked up my bag. I walked to the door and then I turned around.

"You blackmailed my best friend into sleeping with you," I said to Ethan. "And you," I said to Mark, "let him. And then you sat with me while I cried about it." I looked at both of them. "Get out of my apartment."

"This is technically—"

"My name is on the lease," I said. "Get out."

I stood by the door and waited until they had gathered what they needed, which took eleven minutes. I counted. When the door closed I went to the kitchen table and sat down and pressed my hands against my face and breathed.

Then I called Camilla.

She picked up on the second ring. "Hey, what's.."

"I need you," I said.

A pause. One beat. "Where are you?"

"Home."

"Don't move."

She arrived in fourteen minutes, still in scrubs with a jacket pulled over them. She sat across from me and looked at my face and said, "Tell me."

I told her everything.

The courtroom. Ryan Smith's face. Coming home. The hallway lights being off. The sound from the bedroom. Mark's eyes going wide. Ethan's voice, measured and informational, telling me that I had been the brief rather than the choice.

When I finished she was quiet for a moment.

"He blackmailed Mark," she said.

"Yes."

"And you found out today."

"Tonight."

"The same night you lost the case."

"Yes," I said. "It's been a good Tuesday."

She almost smiled. Then she pressed her lips together and looked at the table.

"What do you want to do?" she said.

"I want to go back in time and make different choices," I said. "Failing that, I want to divorce him."

"Okay."

"I want Mark to have to look at himself in the mirror for the rest of his life."

"Also okay."

"And I want…" I stopped. I pressed my fingers against my temple. "I don't know what else I want. I can't think past the first two."

"That's enough for tonight," she said. "We'll worry about what comes after the first two when we get there."

She stood up. She held out my coat.

"I need you to stand up."

"Camilla, I really just want to sit here and…"

"I know what you want," she said. "You want to go over it in your head seventeen times looking for the thing you missed. You want to find the evidence that explains how you didn't see it." She stood up and held out my coat from the hook by the door. "You can do all of that tomorrow. Tonight we're going out."

"I cannot go out. My husband just…"

"I know what he just did," she said steadily. "That's exactly why we're going."

I looked at her hand.

"Where?" I said.

"Somewhere that is not here."

We took a cab across the city to a building with a black awning and no sign on the door.

"What is this place?" I said.

"A club."

"I don't want to be around people."

"I know."

"Camilla, seriously…"

"Sera." She turned to look at me in the back of the cab. "You have two options. You can go home to an apartment that currently feels like a crime scene and lie in the dark and think about this until four in the morning. Or you can come with me and have a drink in a room where nobody knows your name or your husband's name or anything about your Tuesday." She held my gaze. "Which sounds better?"

I looked out the window.

"The second one," I said.

"Good."

A man in a very good suit stepped aside when Camilla said something I didn't catch. The music reached us before we were fully through the door. Not loud, more like pressure. The kind of thing you felt in your sternum rather than your ears.

The crowd was dressed like money and moved like it knew that about itself.

I stopped at the entrance.

Camilla came to stand beside me.

"I look like someone whose life just collapsed," I said.

"You look like someone who just survived something," she said. "Which is different."

She pressed her hand to the small of my back.

"Tonight," she said quietly, close to my ear, "you either break. Or you change."