Chapter6

Celia's POV

Arthur came down the corridor fast. I understood the shape of the whole thing before he dropped to one knee beside her.

He put one hand behind Diana's head, palm flat against her skull, thumb braced at her hairline. The ease of it turned my stomach cold. I had seen him hold a person that way exactly once, six years ago, outside an emergency room at two in the morning, with Leonie in his arms and her fever climbing. He learned that move that night. He never once used it on me.

I held my hand out, palm up, empty. I said nothing. Across all the distance from our wedding night to this moment, I had slowly learned that explanations meant nothing to Arthur. He cared only for his own version of things.

"Celia." He didn't raise his voice, which was worse. "What did you just do??"

He brought Diana up onto her feet with one arm across her back. She leaned into him with both hands closed around his forearm, small and careful, taking exactly as much weight as a woman who wants to be seen carrying none. Half the lights back here were dead.

The ones that worked were the cold kind that show every line in your face, and behind me the corridor ran on toward the service door, smelling of lemon polish and the old carpet underneath it.

Arthur looked at me over her shoulder. "Even if you're angry about what I said inside, you come to me with it. You don't take it out on her."

I laughed. It came out short and flat and completely honest, because there was nothing else left in me worth making.

I knew explanations would serve no purpose. I glanced around, searching for a camera that might have captured what had just happened. Up above the corner, I spotted the camera housing coated in a thin, dull layer of dust. A broken light sat in the corner — either it had never worked at all, or it had been out for so long that no one had noticed. There was no lens, no witness. Nothing in that corridor would speak for me.

I could only offer a helpless explanation. "I didn't push her," I said anyway. "I never touched her."

Arthur's jaw tightened. "I'm not an idiot. I saw you push her."

He had said I saw. Not I believe. In his mouth the word worked like a signature on a contract. Once it was down, the facts could be arranged around it later. He had done that to other people in other rooms while I stood on the safe side of the table and said nothing.

Diana bent and picked the watch up off the baseboard. Her thumb moved twice across the back of the case, along the two letters and the date I had cut there with a needle file, one stroke a night for a week, because back then I couldn't spare the machine work.

She looked at Arthur when she spoke. Her voice came out at exactly the volume that carries.

"Don't blame her… it's my fault. I shouldn't have asked her to give it back to Leonie." A pause the length of a breath she didn't need. "She must be so angry with me."

And there it was. She had sewn a motive into my silence and handed it over finished. The temper was mine now. The injury was his to forgive. I didn't have one sentence left that wouldn't sound like an excuse. So I kept my face still and took the rest of it apart. The floor beneath her was dry. The stretch of wainscoting behind her had nothing in front of it, no plinth, no chair, no rug edge. And half a second before she went down, her eyes had moved past my shoulder, checking where he was standing.

"Apologize." Arthur said it like a line item. "This is a small thing. Say you're sorry and we'll go home."

“No.” My voice was calm, and I was surprised how simple the word sounded. “I didn’t force her, and I won’t say I did just to make the two of you feel better. Think whatever you like.” I shifted my coat higher on my shoulders. “As for this watch, since Leonie handed it to Diana, it should go back from Diana to her. There is no need to come after me.”

With that, I took a step to leave. The next second, I felt my hand seized hard, and a sharp stab of pain followed.

I looked at Arthur. His hand closed around my wrist and the bones under it ground together. The pain went up my arm in a bright thin line that narrowed everything at the edges of my sight. My first thought wasn't about him. My first thought was the drawings, the ink on the tracing paper, the fine line I still had to hold steady. Everything I had left depended on those hands working.

"Let go of me."

"Apologize first." His grip didn't move. "Then I'll let go."

Diana had stopped crying. She was watching us from a foot away with the watch shut inside her fist, and for one second she forgot to arrange her face. What came through was plain and bright and cheap. She thought she had already won.

I paused. I weighed what I held, tallying it quickly in the dim light. An apology could end all of this in four seconds. I could not bear to let my hand be hurt, yet the thought of apologising for something I had not done — that sting of being wrongfully accused — sat heavy inside me. I gritted my teeth against the pain and was just about to speak the words when the ache around my wrist vanished.

I looked down at my wrist. A man had seized Arthur’s wrist, and Arthur let go of me with his teeth clenched. His expression turned cold. He stepped back, shook his hand out, and fixed the man with a frown.

The man stepped to my side. Beneath his canvas jacket he wore a hoodie, his hands hanging loosely at his sides. On his wrist sat a watch that clashed sharply with everything else he had on. The way he looked at Arthur was the way you might regard a foul smell drifting up from a stairwell.

"A man doesn't put his hands on a woman like that. Any man. Ever."

Then he turned to me, his voice softening at once. “Are you hurt?” he asked. “Do you need someone to check your wrist?”