Chapter 2: The Drive Home
On the drive home, Harold gripped the steering wheel so tightly that his knuckles turned white.
“What did you do to make a man offer two million dollars for you?”
“Nothing.”
He didn’t believe me.
The city lights slid across the windshield in hard white streaks. Harold’s whiskey still sat on his breath. In the passenger seat I kept my hands folded the same way they had been on the stage—quiet, visible, no longer available for him to steer like a prop. He asked again, sharper: what history, what favor, what secret. I repeated that I had never met Owen Rodgers. Truth, in our marriage, had often been treated as optional decoration. Tonight it was simply all I had left that still belonged to me.
At the house he poured another drink and paced the length of the living room while I removed the blue dress and hung it carefully, as if fabric could be protected from what had been done beneath the lights. He called his assistant from the study. I heard the words background check, priority, everything. I washed my face, drank water, and lay down without waiting for an apology that was not going to arrive.
By dawn the report had come back.
I know because Harold’s face, when he appeared in the bedroom doorway, had lost the auction’s swagger. He held a tablet the way men hold news they cannot immediately weaponize.
May you like
For years, Owen Rodgers had been searching for a woman named Anastasia Robbins.
Robbins had been my name before the marriage certificates and the foundation letterhead and the twenty-seven years of becoming least interesting in rooms I had arranged.
