After he’s gone, Ronan walks me through the penthouse.
He shows me the kitchen, points to a silver box on the wall and tells me it is a refrigerator, then opens it so cold air hits my face. He shows me the light switches, and lets me press one, and I watch the ceiling light go on and off and on and off until I understand, and then I keep pressing for three more clicks while the small miracle of it continues to astonish me. He shows me a round dial beside a doorway and tells me it is a thermostat and that I can make the room warmer or cooler by turning it.
I can make a room warmer or cooler.
Ronan then leads me down a hallway and opens a door. Inside is a beautiful bedroom. There’s a bed with a pale blue cover, a small table beside it, and a window with the same impossible view beyond it.
“This is your room,” he says. “You can shower. There’s a bathroom through that door—I’ll show you how the shower works. Towels are on the rack. Take your time.”
My room.Myroom, notourroom?
A realization creeps in and wraps itself around me.
He is talking, but I am not listening.
“Myroom?” I hear myself say aloud. “Notyourroom?”
He pauses. “My bedroom is just down the hall.”
Down the hall.A husband and wife share a bed on their wedding night. That is the rule. That is scripture. A man who refuses to share a bed with his wife finds her unworthy. Repulsive, unclean.
I look at the bed again. My throat tightens and tears fill my eyes. Ihavedispleased my husband. I have displeased him already, and I do not know how.
“Prudence?” He is watching me. “Are you alright?”
I lift my head slightly and stare at his chest, blurred through my tears.
“What have I done to displease you that you will not share a marital bed with me?”
Chapter 6
Ronan
I fight to keep my expression even. I am a man who has negotiated with cartels and charmed senators, and I do not, as a rule, let my face give me away. But my mind is scrambling, rearranging itself around the shape of what she just said.
“What have I done to displease you that you will not share a marital bed with me?”
A fresh tear trails down her cheek that tears through me like a bullet through flesh.
“I—uh—you haven’t done anything wrong.” I take half a step toward her and stop when her shoulders hitch.
She shakes her head. The motion is small and tight.
“A husband will not share a bed with his wife if he finds her repulsive.” She recites it by rote, from a script that has been burned into her. “And unclean. A woman who is shunned from the marital bed has committed a grievance so deep that her own husband cannot bear her presence and?—”
“Stop.” The word comes out sharper than I intend and she flinches. I curse inwardly and soften my voice. “Prudence, that’s not what this is. I’m not shunning you.”
“Then why?”
I rake a hand through my hair. I am thirty-two years old. I run a portfolio that spans three legitimate companies and a dozen illegitimate ones. I have a lawyer on retainer who once argued before the state supreme court. I do not, as a rule, feel outmatched by a hundred-pound barefoot girl in a torn burlap sack.
I search for the right phrasing to explain to my wife why separate bedrooms aren’t a punishment.
“In the modern world,” I begin, and the phrase sounds condescending even as I hear myself say it, “married couples often have their own spaces. It’s not rejection. It’s respect. I wanted to give you time to adjust before?—”
“Before what?”
Before I have to survive sharing a mattress with a nineteen-year-old woman whose skin still burns against my fingertips and has burrowed under my skin from the moment I first saw her in the dirt yard.
