But I'm not going to think about the priest. I'm not going to think about the way he looked at me in the diner — the half-second where his eyes stayed on me before his training kicked in. I'm not going to think about his hand when we shook, which was warm and callused and larger than it had any right to be. I'm not going to think about the fact that he almost laughed and then stopped himself, like laughter was something he'd given up along with whatever else that collar takes.
I'm not going to think about him because I know what I do with men who interest me, and it's never anything good.
I start the car.
The thing about Julian is that I don't miss him, and the guilt of that is supposed to be the hard part. Everyone says so — the grief counselor I saw exactly once in New York, the well-meaning acquaintances who sent flowers, the internet forums I scrolled through at 3 AM looking for someone who felt the way I felt. You're in shock, they said. The grief will come.
It's been six months. The grief hasn't come. What came instead was space — glorious, terrifying, empty space, like stepping out of a closet into an open field and realizing you've forgotten how to walk without walls to guide you.
Julian Reznik was not a good man. I say that plainly, without drama, the way you'd say the sky is blue. Stating a fact. He was charming and handsome and meticulous and he dismantled my life with the patience of a man taking apart a watch — so carefully, so precisely, that I didn't notice until all the pieces were laid out on his workbench and I couldn't remember how they'd fit together.
It started with preferences. He preferred I wear my hair down. He preferred I didn't visit my grandmother so often — it depressed me, he said, and he was worried about my mood. He preferred I not take the freelance job, because he made enough for both of us, and wouldn't it be nice to have free time?Each preference was reasonable on its own. Together they were architecture. By year two he'd redesigned my entire life, and I was living in a building he'd constructed, and the doors only opened from his side.
I didn't leave because leaving Julian Reznik was not a thing you did. Not because he'd hurt me — he never hit me, he was too sophisticated for anything that crude. But the people Julian worked for, the Markovics, they didn't lose assets gracefully. And that's what I'd become. An asset. The wife who smiled at the right dinners and didn't ask about the men who came and went from the study and didn't flinch when the conversations happened in Russian.
I drive through Homestead with the windows down. October in South Florida means the air has finally stopped trying to kill you — still warm, but the murderous humidity of summer has backed off enough that you can breathe without chewing. The town is quiet. Shuttered shops, a gas station, the flat dark stretch of agricultural land in every direction. The opposite of everything I've known.
The opposite of Julian's world, where the restaurants had six-month waiting lists and the apartments had views of Central Park and the parties at Il Lusso glittered like something from a film. Where I drank champagne I couldn't pronounce and stood in rooms full of men whose eyes were cold and whose suits were immaculate and felt — God help me — alive. So alive. The hum of danger like a current running under the marble floors, the awareness that any conversation could be the one that mattered, that life and death and enormous amounts of money were being negotiated over canapés and someone had placed me in the middle of it and I was electric with it.
I liked it. I hate that I liked it. But I'm done lying about it, at least to myself. I told the priest the truth: I chose the intensity over the safety. I saw the cage being built and I walked inbecause the cage was exciting and the alternative was ordinary and I have never been able to stomach ordinary.
What I didn't tell him — what I haven't told anyone, what I barely let myself think — is the rest of it.
The sex.
Julian in public was a performance. Julian in bed was the realest version of himself, and the cruelest joke of my marriage is that I responded to it. Completely. Physically. Without reservation. He was certain in a way that left no room for doubt, and my body answered that certainty like it had been waiting its whole life for someone to stop asking and start telling. I came harder with Julian than with anyone before him, and I craved it, and the craving was real, and it happened inside a relationship that was systematically erasing me.
So what does that make me? A woman whose body betrayed her. A woman who got wet for her jailer. A woman who can separate her nervous system from her judgment so completely that she can be simultaneously oppressed and aroused by the same man.
I'm not confused about Julian. I'm glad he's dead. What I'm confused about is me. Because if I wanted him — and I did, physically, undeniably — then what does that say about what I'll want next? What does it say about the fact that a priest with intense eyes and a voice like gravel looked at me in a diner today and my first thought wasn't oh, he's handsome, it was oh, he's contained, and the second thought, which came so fast it might as well have been the first, was: I wonder what he's like when the container breaks.
I am a problem. I have always been a problem. Julian didn't make me this way. He just gave me an environment where this particular problem thrived.
The ring swings against my chest as I drive. Julian's code. Julian's money. Julian's ghost. Even dead, he's the architectureof my life. I need to dismantle that architecture, and the ring is the crowbar.
Six months of running. A used car bought under a friend's name. A series of motels and short-term rentals, moving south because south felt like away. I've been working the code on Julian's laptop — wiped, but I recovered fragments. Account numbers that don't match any bank I can find. Encrypted files. A name traced through corporate filings: Arturo Reyes, wealth management, Miami.
Reyes is the key. Or at least the next door. He moves in the world where clean money and dirty money shake hands. If I can find him, I can start pulling the thread that leads to whatever the ring unlocks.
I don't know what's in the vault. Money, probably. Records, maybe. Leverage, possibly. I know it was important enough for Julian to die over, which means it's important enough to keep me alive — or get me killed.
Homestead wasn't the plan. Miami was the plan — get close to Reyes, work the angles. But Miami is exposed. Too many eyes, too many people connected to the Markovics. Homestead is forty-five minutes south. Far enough to be invisible. Close enough to reach Miami when I need to.
And apparently it has a church with a priest who listens without flinching.
I want to go back.
The thought is stupid and I know it's stupid and I'm going to do it anyway. Not for God. Not for absolution. For the dark box and the screen and the voice that listened without flinching, and that's worth more to me right now than strategy.
I pull over to the side of the road and google short-term rental Homestead Florida.
The cottage is on a flower nursery property outside town proper — set back from a rural road, screened by palms and bougainvillea. I call the number on the listing. An older woman answers, Cuban accent, not thrilled about a tenant materializing at 10 PM on a Wednesday.
I'm good at this. Five years of reading people and adjusting my approach. I'm warm but not pushy. I mention I'm looking for somewhere quiet. I'm a writer, I tell her — the lie comes easily. I need peace and space to work.
She softens. Two hundred a week, cash, first and last up front. No paperwork. No questions.
I drive out. The nursery is dark, the main house set farther back with a porch light glowing. The cottage is separate — small, private, hidden. I park and the landlady meets me at the door. She's short, with steel-gray hair and sharp eyes. She shows me the space with the brisk efficiency of someone who doesn't need my approval.
