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One message. Her name.

I’ll send for the rest of my things later. I want a divorce.

CHAPTER 32

It's been a month since I left Laszlo and ended my marriage, and I still can't sleep in my bed without making sure that all my doors are locked.

The door to my house is like the door to my mind—I can’t get them to myself again, they’re wide open and exposed to the elements. There’s nothing around me that I can control.

In any straightforward divorce, there would be a part where the injured party cries and the part fraught with paperwork. I have done the crying part and I hate myself for the simple fact that I fell in love with that bastard. I can't stop thinking about him. But there’s something else, too. The knowledge of being watched for years has left its mark. No one follows me anymore, yet I still catch myself checking for them.

I somehow managed to move back to my old house. Laszlo owned that property but gave it to me right away, ahead of the divorce, along with his vow he’d never set foot within a couple hundred yards of me.

All my furniture is still in this house, kept in pristine condition, with a new, state-of-the-art security system installed and a maintenance company—unconnected to Laszlo—available for repairs on demand, their monthly fee prepaid for a decade.

Perhaps I am crazy to have accepted these terms, but I need a familiar environment to deal with all this upheaval. This has come with challenges. I spend the evenings noticing things that never used to bother me before. The quirky café across the road has a perfect view of my front door. The streetlight outside my bedroom went out two days ago and nobody's fixed it. I now can tell exactly how a person would sit in a parked car to see into my kitchen without being seen themselves, because I've read the reports. The knowledge of being watched for years used to feel like being loved. I told myself that, and I believed it. Now I know what the watching was for, and it feels like what it always was—a man studying prey he'd decided to take. He taught me that, in the end. He taught me to be afraid of the stillness.

Laszlo has taken over every waking moment, then my dreams when I sleep. Everything he did to me, every touch, is imprinted on my skin. It is scientifically impossible but it feels as though not even my DNA was spared. Whatever makes me Manon Valmont is no more. He’s scrambled my hormones, my very spirit, and turned me into something different. Something signed by him, in his blood.

The biggest shock came three days ago, when the lawyer called to say Laszlo had signed the divorce papers. I made her repeat it. I'd spent the last two weeks bracing myself for a fight, because I couldn't imagine him letting me walk out so easily. But he did. There wasn't a meeting or any conditions I had to meet. The paperwork is with the lawyers now, and it’s all done. This should feel like winning but what I am is miserable because I miss him so damn much.

In the past, he went through great lengths to keep up with my life. He stalked me, covered me in his shadow each and every day. I was never alone. He was a constant, even though I wasn’t aware.

Now he’s gone. Might as well be dead…

"You've cleaned that tray five times," Daphne says.

We're in the morgue, which is the only place where I feel like myself, the only place where Laszlo's blue eyes aren't giving me nightmares but haunting me with bittersweet memories I can’t let go of. Mrs. Kaminski lies on the table between us, a seventy-two-year-old woman who came down from the cardiac ward this morning.

"I'm being thorough, doing this so you don’t have to. I have some time to kill."

"You've gone quiet and that's not you. So either you're dying or something's happened, and you'd have told me if you were dying, because you'd be running your mouth about running your own tests." She snaps her gloves off and comes to stand next to me. "Talk to me."

I laugh, except it doesn’t come out as a laugh. Somehow, I’ve resisted spilling the beans until now. I should have told her weeks ago, but I needed time to process.

“I’m divorcing my hot husband.”

“Oh, love,” she says, and her whole face changes. “What did he do? Apart from being dangerous and controlling, I mean…”

"You know he owns a several funeral homes," I say. "Well, and more properties, too. I won’t go into detail but around two weeks ago I had a hunch to go to one and I was right. There was a room in it dedicated to me, Daphne. Full of files from the past seven years, all about my life before I married him. Photographs of me sleeping, creepy stuff. Notes on where I go and who I talk to, photos of me with other people." I have to stop and breathe because it obviously still upsets me to talk about it. "Here's the thing: he’s been watching me since before we ever met. The marriage wasn't the start of it. It was just the first time I found out."

Daphne stares at me, her mouth agape. “And why didn’t you tell me that before?”

As tears prick my eyes, she pulls me into a hug. "Shhh, baby, it’s okay. I knew there was something suspicious about this man the minute I saw him. Motherfucker.” The savage version of Daphne is rearing its head. “Him and his gorilla-built lap dog,” she huffs. "Whatever he called it, that’s not love. Men who love you don't do shit like that. Not the normal ones."

"I know." Except Laszlo is not normal, and neither am I. She doesn’t know the half of it.

"Does he know you found it? I suppose he does since you asked for a divorce."

I nod. "I spoke my mind, told him everything I thought about it, and then I left. I haven't seen him since." I pick up some pencils on her desk and line them up because I can't stand my hands being idle. "It's truly over between us. He signed the papers real fast."

She doesn't look shocked now, but I know I can't tell her any more than I have. Daphne is too innocent to know about my brother being recorded killing someone and what really happened to Charles. Not to protect Laszlo—that I won’t do ever again. It's that Daphne still thinks my father operates a shipping company for a living, and that Rafe is some sort of security guy for Laszlo. She's the one person left in my life who was never part of my family’s world, and if I tell her, she’ll become a part of it. Can’t do that to her.

So I let her believe only that Laszlo has stalked me religiously in the past seven years and he kept all the info about me in one room. I don’t want to be the one deciding what she gets to know, but I just don’t see another way. Some things I will simply take to the grave if I must.

"You've gone somewhere again," she says.

"I'm here."