After My Husband Faked My Death for His Mistress

Three years.

I don't know what I lost. I only know what I have.

Every morning I wake up before Koen. I pull on a sweater and make coffee and stand at the kitchen window while the Seattle mist lifts off the water. The light comes in slow here — gray first, then gold, then something warmer than gold that doesn't have a name. I watch it happen every day and it never gets boring.

I have a sketchbook on the counter. I don't remember starting it. But every few days my hand picks up a pen and starts moving — looping patterns, layered geometries, something that looks almost like fabric, almost like something I once knew. I never plan it. It just comes out. Koen says I do it when I'm happy. I believe him.

Tuesdays and Thursdays I go to yoga. The studio is six blocks away and I walk, coffee in hand, watching the city wake up around me. I know the woman at the front desk by name. I know which mat to take. I know that afterward I'll stop at Pike Place and buy peonies because there's something about peonies — the weight of them, the way they smell like rain and sweetness at the same time — that makes the whole day feel right.

I always pick them by scent first. Then color.

I don't know where that habit came from. I don't ask.

There are a lot of things I don't ask about.

My head hurts sometimes. A deep, pressing ache behind my eyes that comes without warning and stays until Koen sits me down on the couch and puts his hands on my temples and works slow circles until it eases. We do this every evening. It has become the rhythm of our nights — dinner, dishes, the couch, his hands.

"Why can't I remember things?" I asked him once. Early on. The headache had been bad that night and I was tired and the question just slipped out.

He didn't hesitate.

"Your brain decided to only keep the good stuff," he said. "That's how smart you are."

I laughed. I couldn't help it.

I've asked him the same question maybe a dozen times since then, in different moods, on different nights. He always says the same thing. And I always laugh. I don't know if that's strange. It doesn't feel strange. It feels like something solid I can put my weight on.

I am happy. Not the kind of happy where you're trying to convince yourself. The real kind. The kind that lives in small things — the mist, the peonies, the sketchbook, his hands.

I don't know what came before this. But I know it doesn't matter.

---

In a penthouse apartment in New York, the curtains are always drawn.

Julien Carter is awake at 3 AM. He is always awake at 3 AM. The insomnia found him three years ago and never left — no medication touches it, no amount of whiskey fully closes the gap. He sits in a leather chair by the window with a glass in his hand and the city glittering thirty floors below him like something beautiful and completely irrelevant.

He is thinner than he should be. His coat hangs wrong on his shoulders. His face has the particular hollowness of a man who has been eating just enough to stay alive and not a bite more.

Against his chest, on a chain beneath his shirt, is a locket. Inside the locket is a ring. White gold. Single inlaid diamond.

He touches it sometimes without thinking. Like a bruise he can't stop pressing.

Every Sunday he goes to the cemetery. He stands at the grave for a long time. He doesn't bring flowers anymore — he did, for the first year, and then one Sunday he arrived and couldn't make himself do it and he hasn't since. He just stands there. In the cold, or the heat, or the rain. He stands there and he looks at the name carved in the stone and he does not speak because there is nothing left to say that he hasn't already said to the dark at 3 AM a thousand times.

Melina is in the house. She is always in the house. She moves through the rooms and manages the child and speaks to him sometimes and he hears the sounds she makes but they don't reach him. She could be furniture. She could be weather. He looks through her the way you look through glass — aware of the surface, seeing only what's beyond.

He hasn't touched her since the night Yara died.

He doesn't think about why. He doesn't think about much.

The Carter family's business is bleeding. His mother calls. His lawyers call. Numbers move in directions they shouldn't. He signs what's put in front of him and goes back to the chair by the window and pours another two fingers and watches the city that keeps moving without him.

He deserves this. He knows that.

It doesn't help.

In Seattle, three thousand miles away, a woman laughs at something her husband said, and tucks a peony stem into a glass vase on the kitchen counter, and does not dream of anything at all.