Lia made the decision sitting on Isla's couch with cold coffee and a dress she could not afford.
Not a slow decision. Not one she talked herself into over days. She had walked out of her own house at two in the afternoon with nothing except her keys and her phone and the particular emptiness of a woman who had just watched her husband shrug at her pain like it was a minor inconvenience. By the time she reached Isla's she already knew what she was going to do.
She just needed someone to help her do it.
"You're really doing this," Isla said. Not a question.
"I'm really doing this."
Isla looked at her for a moment. Then she picked up her phone. "I know someone. She runs a service. Discreet, high-end, the kind of thing nobody admits to using and everyone knows exists." She was already texting. "The question is whether you're absolutely sure. Because once I make this call it becomes real."
Lia thought about the look on Julian's face when she walked in on him. Not guilt. Not even embarrassment. Mild irritation, like she had walked into a meeting she wasn't invited to. She thought about the open marriage proposal delivered three days later at the kitchen table like a business restructure.
"I'm sure," she said.
Isla made the call.
Twenty minutes later there was a name on a napkin and a number and the particular silence of two women who understood that something had been set in motion.
"Her name is Elena. Mention my name and she'll take care of you." Isla folded the napkin toward her. "It's going to cost a few thousand."
"I have a card Julian doesn't know about." She had carried it for three years in the back of her wallet, untouched. Her parents had given it to her before the wedding. An emergency, her mother had said. She had never known what would qualify.
This qualified.
She dialed before she could talk herself out of it.
The woman who answered sounded like she booked hotel rooms for a living and found nothing remarkable about any of it. Professional voice. Smooth. Like none of this was unusual in the slightest.
It probably wasn't.
They talked for ten minutes. Questions that should have been more shocking than they were. Age range. Physical type. Any specific requests. Lia answered like she was ordering something she needed rather than something she had never in her life imagined doing.
"I have someone in mind," Elena said. "His name is Marcus. Six-foot-two, dark hair, early thirties. Experienced. Excellent feedback."
"That's fine."
"Friday evening. Suite A at the Azure Hotel, penthouse level. He'll arrive at eight sharp. The rate is three thousand for the evening. Will that work?"
Three thousand dollars. She did not let herself think about it. "Friday works."
The call ended.
She sat with the phone in her lap and looked at Isla and said nothing for a long moment.
"Holy shit," she said.
Isla put an arm around her shoulders. "Yeah."
She had five days.
On Wednesday Isla dragged her shopping because Isla was the kind of person who believed that how you felt about yourself started with what you were wearing and she was not wrong. They spent two hours in a boutique that Lia would not have walked into a year ago. Too many of the clothes she owned had been chosen for what Margaret would think of them.
Not this one.
Deep emerald green. Silk. The kind of dress that did not apologize for itself. When she stood in the fitting room looking at her own reflection she felt something she had almost forgotten. Like herself, only louder.
"That's the one," Isla said.
She bought it. And lingerie that made her blush to look at. Both of them.
Thursday night Julian came home for dinner. They sat across from each other eating takeout with the television on in the other room and nothing to say.
"I have plans Friday night," she said.
Julian looked up. "Plans."
"Yes. I'm going out."
"With who?"
She looked at him. "You said we could both see other people. I'm taking you up on it."
Something moved across his face. She had expected smugness. It was not smugness. It was something tighter than that. Something that looked, if she was reading it right, like the beginning of panic.
Good.
"Fine," he said. "Do whatever you want."
His knuckles were white around his fork.
She went to bed not thinking about Friday. Thinking about his knuckles.
Friday she could not eat. Could not concentrate on anything. She kept checking the clock and then looking away from it and then checking it again.
At six she started getting ready.
Long shower. Expensive lotion she had been saving for reasons she could not remember now. Hair and makeup done carefully, properly, the way she had done them when she still believed effort meant something. The dress slipped on like it had been made for who she was becoming rather than who she had been.
She looked at herself in the mirror for a long time.
The woman looking back was not the woman Julian had talked into disappearing. She was someone else. The earlier version maybe. Or a version that had not existed yet and was starting now.
She went downstairs.
Julian was in his study. He looked up when she appeared in the doorway and something happened to his face in the half second before he controlled it.
"Where are you going dressed like that?"
"Out. Like I said."
"Lia." Sharper now. "What are you doing?"
"Exactly what you gave me permission to do." She picked up her bag. "Don't wait up."
She walked out before he could say anything else.
The drive downtown took thirty minutes through Friday traffic. She gripped the wheel the whole way and breathed deliberately and did not let herself think too hard about what she was about to do.
She could still turn around. Go home. Forget this.
She thought about his face when she walked in on him. The shrug. The open marriage proposal at the kitchen table.
She was not turning around.
The Azure Hotel was glass and money and the kind of lobby that made you feel like you were supposed to be somewhere more important than you actually were. She walked through it with her shoulders back and her heels loud on the marble floor.
Reservation under Chen. Penthouse Suite A. Key card handed over without ceremony.
The elevator opened on a hallway with thick carpet and two doors at opposite ends.
She stood outside Suite A for sixty seconds exactly. Heart going too fast. Hands damp. Everything in her telling her to leave and something else, something newer and louder, telling her to stay.
She swiped the card.
Beautiful room. City laid out below the floor-to-ceiling windows. Champagne on ice that she went to immediately and poured with shaking hands and drank too fast.
She poured a second.
Eight PM came.
Knock at the door.
She crossed the room. Took a breath. Opened it.
The man standing in the hallway was not Marcus.
She knew immediately. Not because she had any idea what Marcus looked like. Because this man looked like nobody she had ever ordered. He was taller than she expected and broader, dark-haired and gray-eyed, and he was wearing expensive clothes that looked like he had been in them for a long time. He was leaning against the doorframe slightly like he needed the support.
He looked at her.
She looked at him.
"You're not Marcus," she said.
The man's gray eyes focused. Something moved through his expression that she could not read.
"Who the fuck is Marcus?" he said.
