Not packed away, not relocated to a spare room, not covered over and made manageable. Left exactly as she arranged it.Preserved behind a locked door with the key left in the lock because he couldn't decide what fully closed would mean and couldn't do fully open either, and so it has been sitting here like this, in the middle, for however long it's been.
I don't remember exactly when she died or how or what she was called. It can’t have been that long ago, since I was already in Europe. I know almost nothing about the man I married except the shape of his jaw and the temperature of his hands and the fact that when he says careful men move.
I step back into the doorway.
The amber perfume is in my hair now, faint, clinging. I can smell it on myself and it sits wrong, intimate in a way I didn't agree to, and I am suddenly very aware that I am standing in the middle of a life that was carefully and completely someone else's and that no part of this room, this house, this marriage was arranged with me in mind.
I was the replacement casting for a role that already had someone perfect in it.
I reach back and turn the key in the lock.
I stand in the dark of the bedroom with the key cold in my palm and the amber perfume still on my skin, and I think about the ring on the velvet tray and the hand at the small of her back and Rafael's face in that photograph, open and laughing and entirely unguarded, and I feel the specific weight of a place that already has a person in it.
I need a bath.
I set the key down exactly where I found it and I go to run one.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
GIA
The bath is too hot and I don't care.
I slide down until the water reaches my chin and I stare at the ceiling, making a deliberate, conscious and fully committed decision not to think about anything in that dressing room.
Not the photographs. Not the ring on the velvet tray. Not the perfume that is probably still in my hair.
What I think about instead is my sister.
It's been three days since the wedding and I have not spoken to her once. She could be back in that room with the plain walls, scared, asking for me and being told I'm busy, I'm settling in, I'll call soon, all the soft untrue things adults say to children when the real answer is too complicated.
But fuck it, I’ll find a way to contact her. I'm not going to be a fucking prisoner here.
Laura hates sleeping without a nightlight. She's had one since she was four and she will not admit it because she's nine now and nine is apparently too old for nightlights, which is nonsense, but she will lie in the dark and not say anything about it rather than ask.
My chest pulls tight.
I close my eyes.
I have a burner phone in my jewelry box and a father waiting for information, a sister somewhere I can't reach and a strange husband who kneeled to put a slipper on my foot tonight.
I cannot fix a single one of those things right now, so I am simply going to lie here and?—
Only, my mind won't cooperate.
It keeps going back to the dress. His hands at my back, working the laces with that infuriating patience. The warmth of him behind me. The specific moment when the last lace gave and I exhaled and his fingers stilled, just for a second, like he was deciding something. I told myself I imagined it. I've been telling myself that for two hours.
I shift in the water. The heat of the bath has nothing to do with what's moving through me right now and I know it and I hate it. I hate that it's him. Of every possible person in every possible version of my life, it is this man, in this house, in this marriage I didn't ask for, who makes my body do this. Who makes me lie in a bath at ten o'clock at night with my thighs pressed together and my breathing wrong.
My hand drifts down through the water without me deciding to let it.
I stop it. I press it flat against my own thigh and stare at the ceiling and feel the specific shame of a woman who just caught herself about to do something she absolutely cannot do, because doing it means it's real, means he did this, means I am lying in his bath wanting his hands instead of my own and that is not something I am prepared to be true about tonight.
I squeeze my eyes shut.
Slowly my hands reach down again and this time I brush the aching bud of my clit and shiver, I start to slowly circle, my lower lip caught between my teeth and?—
The bathroom door opens.
