The call came on a Thursday morning.
I heard Collin's voice through the door—clipped, efficient, the tone he used when he was managing optics. Something about appearances. Something about the gala. Something about how it would look if I wasn't there.
The door opened twenty minutes later. One of the men who had brought me down here stood in the frame, not quite meeting my eyes.
"Mr. Henderson says you're going back upstairs."
I stood up from the cot. Smoothed my clothes. Walked out without looking back at the concrete walls or the bare bulb or the metal door.
I had already left that room a hundred times in my mind. My body was just catching up.
---
Collin told me himself, in the hallway outside the penthouse kitchen. He didn't look at me when he spoke. His eyes were somewhere past my shoulder, already moving on to the next item on his list.
"The Plaza. Tonight. Black tie." A pause. "Stay visible. Stay quiet. Don't make it complicated."
I looked at a point just past his jaw. "Okay."
He waited, I think, for something else. Some flicker of resistance or gratitude or feeling. Something he could respond to.
I gave him nothing.
He walked away.
---
I chose the dress myself.
Not the one Collin had bought me for occasions like this—the safe navy column that photographed well and asked nothing of anyone who looked at it. I went to the back of the closet, past Anastasia's silk blouses hanging in the center space where my things used to be, and I found the dress I had bought two years ago and never worn. Dark green. Simple. Mine.
I put it on. I sat at the mirror and did my own hair.
In the adjacent room, I could hear Anastasia.
She had positioned herself in front of the full-length mirror in the dressing area, close enough to the open doorway that every word carried. She didn't need to raise her voice. She never did.
"Collin, does this neckline work with the ring?" A soft laugh. "I want the table to see it properly."
His voice, low and indulgent: "It's perfect."
"And our placement—you said front left? I want to make sure we're not near the—" Another laugh, lighter. "You know. I just want tonight to be ours."
I drew the mascara wand from the base of my lashes to the tip. Steady hand. Even strokes.
"It will be," he said.
I set the mascara down. Looked at myself in the mirror.
Thirty-two years old. Quiet. Still. Wearing a dress I chose for myself.
I scanned the room once. The closet with her things hanging in my space. The coffee she'd replaced on the kitchen shelf. The flowers she'd had moved because they clashed with her vision.
I didn't take anything. Not the earrings on the dresser, not the scarf on the chair, not the small framed photograph I'd kept on the nightstand for six years. I had left all of it the night I stood behind a half-open door and heard a man put a ring on another woman's finger and casually assign my child to her like furniture being redistributed.
There was nothing here that belonged to me anymore. There hadn't been for a long time. I just hadn't known it until now.
I stood up. Picked up my evening bag. Walked out of the room.
---
In the elevator, Anastasia stood close to Collin with her hand through his arm. The Cartier ring caught the light every time she moved, which was often.
I stood on the other side of the elevator and watched the floor numbers descend.
The car was waiting downstairs. A black town car, long, the kind Collin used when he needed to be seen arriving. The driver held the door. Collin guided Anastasia in first, his hand at the small of her back, and she slid across the seat and settled against him like she'd been doing it for years.
I got in on the other side.
The partition between us and the driver went up. The car pulled into traffic.
Manhattan moved past the tinted window in long amber streaks—headlights, storefronts, the particular restless brightness of a city that never quite goes dark. I watched it without naming any of it. I had spent ten years learning the streets of this city from the back seat of cars like this one, going to places that were his and coming home to a penthouse that was his and sleeping in a bed that had always, in every way that mattered, been his.
I was three cars behind myself before I saw it.
A dark sedan. Keeping pace. Not close enough to be obvious. Close enough for me to know.
I recognized the make. I had memorized it from the message Jace's network had sent me, weeks ago, in a different locked room.
I looked at it for a long moment through the tinted glass.
Then I pressed my thumbnail into my palm.
The small sharp sting. The crescent mark I had pressed into that same spot a thousand times over ten years, in a thousand rooms, swallowing a thousand things I never said.
I held the pressure for one breath.
Then I let go.
I flattened my hand against my knee, fingers loose, palm open.
Outside the window, the Plaza was already visible at the end of the block, blazing with light.
