Chapter Two

Our house stood halfway up Bellhaven Ridge, surrounded by pines and expensive silence.

When Adrian bought it after our wedding, he said the clean air would help my heart. I believed him. I believed the wide windows, the quiet road, and the private garden were gifts.

I understood the truth only after my friends stopped visiting, my phone disappeared, and every call from my family began arriving through Adrian's assistant.

The house wasn't a retreat.

It was a beautiful cage.

Adrian entered through the mudroom and paused at the shoe rack.

His indoor shoes were lined up exactly where I always left them.

He stared at them for a moment, then gave a sharp laugh.

"Good riddance, Evelyn."

I stepped on his shadow as he walked away.

It was childish, but death had removed most of my options.

"You are such a bastard," I told him.

He didn't hear me.

The house was empty. Adrian had dismissed the staff months earlier, claiming he didn't want strangers around while my health was so fragile. After that, I cooked, cleaned, washed his clothes, and maintained a home I was rarely allowed to leave.

He opened the refrigerator and reached for a bottle of sparkling water.

A yellow note was stuck to the door.

Adrian,

I made the cream puffs you like. Eat them while they're fresh!

—Evelyn

December 28

The day before I died.

His fingers stopped on the bottle.

I had shaped the pastries like hearts. Adrian used to eat them warm from the tray, sometimes before I could fill them. Once he stopped pretending, he wouldn't touch anything I made unless he wanted to prove I didn't have the nerve to poison him.

He pulled the note free, crushed it in his fist, and dropped it into the trash.

He left the pastries where they were.

That should have been the end of it.

Instead, he carried his water to the living room and lay on the sofa for almost an hour, staring at the chandelier.

It was made of thin brass and blue glass. From below, the glass pieces looked like butterfly wings.

I had chosen it before our wedding. Adrian had agreed so quickly that I thought we'd discovered our first shared taste.

I didn't know then that butterflies had belonged to Lila first.

Once, early in our marriage, I asked him about his first love. He lay with his head against my chest, listening to my heartbeat.

"She turned into a butterfly and flew away," he said.

I kissed his forehead.

"Then I'll be your butterfly," I promised. "Everyone in my family says I can't stay sad for more than five minutes. I'll be happy enough for both of us."

His arms tightened around me until it hurt.

I mistook hatred for passion. I mistook restraint for tenderness. I had been so eager to be loved that I translated every warning into a language I wanted to hear.

Adrian sat up abruptly.

He crossed the hall and opened the bathroom door.

The smell reached him first.

The police had removed my body, but no one had cleaned the room. Bloody water still filled the tub. Dark streaks marked the porcelain where the waterline had dropped. A towel lay near the sink, and a bottle of shampoo had rolled beneath the vanity.

Adrian froze.

His face lost all color.

"Evelyn!"

The shout shook the glass shower door.

I flinched. "I'm standing right here."

He couldn't see me.

His hand closed around the doorframe. For the first time since the funeral home, his expression broke. Not into grief. Not yet. It looked more like rage with nowhere to go.

He took out his phone and called Marcus Brooks.

"Find me another house," Adrian said. "I want to be out tomorrow."

Marcus must have answered too slowly.

"Tomorrow," Adrian repeated, then threw the phone against the wall.

The screen shattered.

I watched him leave the bathroom without turning off the light. My hands looked thinner than they had at the funeral home, like the edges were being erased.

Only then did I look at the tub.

The sight should have frightened me. Instead, it reminded me of the baby.

On our first wedding anniversary, I had waited beside a small cake with a positive pregnancy test in my pocket. A storm rolled over Bellhaven. Adrian didn't answer his phone. He came home after midnight, drunk, and said Lila's name while staring at the butterfly chandelier.

A photograph fell from his coat.

Lila was twenty in the picture, smiling beside Adrian when they were both poor and young. On the back, they had promised each other forever.

The next morning, I hired an investigator.

The report told me Lila had died on the same date Adrian chose for our wedding. It told me her heart was beating in my chest. It told me Adrian had known exactly who I was long before he asked me out.

I fell in this bathroom with blood running down my legs.

By the time I called for help, our child was gone.

Adrian had been waiting when I returned from the hospital.

He held the report in one hand and asked how it felt to be alive because Lila wasn't.

That was the beginning of the year that killed me.

At first, Adrian's revenge was quiet.

He removed my phone because he said stress was bad for my heart. He canceled lunches with my friends because he said I needed rest. When Daniel drove up without warning, Adrian met him at the gate and told him I was sleeping. I stood at the upstairs window while my brother waited beside his car for twenty minutes, hoping I might appear.

I did not know Adrian had locked the bedroom door from the outside.

Later, he stopped bothering with excuses.

He sat beside me whenever my father called. The first time I tried to tell Dad I wanted to come home, Adrian placed two fingers over the phone's mute button and showed me a live feed from the Hart distribution center. Inspectors were walking through the warehouse.

One call to the right people at the county, he said, and they would shut it down.

"Tell him you're happy," Adrian ordered.

I told my father I was happy.

Adrian smiled and unmuted the call.

The inspections multiplied. Loans were called early. Partners who had known my father for thirty years stopped returning messages. Adrian never explained how much of it was legal, how much was pressure, and how much was simple fear. He only brought each new loss to me like an invoice.

"One company for every year Lila should have lived," he said.

I learned not to react. If I cried, he called it performance. If I argued, he said a murderer had no right to anger. If I remained silent, he accused me of arrogance.

There was no correct answer.

Once, fever left me too weak to walk. Adrian found me on the kitchen floor and carried me upstairs. He changed the sheets, brought my medicine, and sat outside the bedroom until morning.

For three days afterward, I believed the man I married still existed.

On the fourth day, he placed Lila's photograph on my bedside table.

"Don't mistake me taking care of you for forgiveness," he said.

The lesson was effective. I stopped trusting kindness as much as I feared cruelty.

He did not hit me often. He preferred injuries no one could photograph: isolation, interrupted sleep, food left outside a locked room, the constant threat that my family's next loss would be my fault. When he did grab me, he chose my upper arms, where sleeves covered the bruises.

The worst nights were the gentle ones.

He would come home tired, forget to hate me for an hour, and eat whatever I had cooked. Sometimes he asked about a book on the table. Sometimes he stood behind me while I watered the plants. Once, he repaired the clasp on my necklace and brushed my hair aside with such familiar care that I nearly leaned back against him.

Then his hand touched the pulse in my throat.

His face hardened.

Lila's heart had reminded him.

He left without a word.

Those moments kept me alive longer than open hatred would have. They offered just enough hope to make the next punishment hurt. I told myself confusion meant conflict, and conflict meant he cared. I treated every hesitation as proof that love was winning somewhere inside him.

I understand now that a person's uncertainty is not a promise.

Whatever Adrian felt, he chose what he did.

The final week began when he told me the Hart family would be finished before New Year's Day. He had acquired enough debt and enough voting shares to take control of the last company my father still held.

"After that," he said, "you'll understand what it means to lose everyone."

I asked whether destroying my family would bring Lila back.

He looked at me for a long time.

"No," he said. "But it will make the world fairer."

That night, I made cream puffs because they were the only thing I still knew how to offer him.

The next evening, I filled the bathtub.

I crouched beside the tub now, though my knees no longer touched the floor.

"What happens when you learn I didn't kill her?" I asked Adrian's retreating back. "Will you regret any of it?"

He kept walking.