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"Please, Laszlo. Please. I'm begging you. Just let me come, please."

"There it is." He straightens up behind me, takes out his pocket square. Not my underwear, the actual pocket square—the man came equipped. With it, he wipes his mouth. "That's five. One for every hour I spent today not knowing where my wife was."

"You cannot leave me like this."

"I can. Watch me." He eases my dress down and smooths it flat, then leans over my shoulder, mouth at my ear, both of us looking at me in the mirror. Flushed. Shaking. Ruined. "Here's my promise to you, Manon. The next time you come, you'll be on our plot in Williamstown. On the grass, over your own name in black granite, stuffed full of my cock, screaming loud enough to wake the residents. That's where. That's how. Not with your fingers, or the shower head. If you cheat, I'll know." He kisses the corner of my jaw, gently, like we've just finished a slow dance. "You don't get to disappear on me. Not in a hospital, not in this bathroom, not in the ground. That's what today costs."

Then he unlocks the door, checks his cuffs in the mirror over my head, and leaves me on my mother's bathroom counter, soaked and empty and shaking, with dessert waiting downstairs.

I stare at myself for a long moment. My hair is destroyed. My legs won't hold me yet. My underwear is in his pocket.

He's insane. He bought me a grave. He put his mouth on me five times in my mother's bathroom and walked out, and I sat at that table an hour ago and played my game. But I kissed him anyway.

I fix my hair, splash my face with cold water and pat it dry. Then I go back downstairs, back to the party, to the conservatory and the empty chair waiting beside him.

Somewhere in these last months I’ve wanted to stop coming back to him. To walk away the moment I could.

I'm halfway down the stairs before I let myself admit that I can't.

CHAPTER 19

Laszlo

It's been four days since the dinner at her parents' house, and I'm still fucking yearning for my wife who won't even touch me.

Manon sleeps in my bed every night now—every night the hospital doesn't keep her, anyway. I am not sure if she shares my bed out of will or fear, and I don’t think I want the answer to that. When the shifts run long she stays at work, on a cot in some on-call room with a mattress thinner than the ones I put in my cheapest caskets, which offends me professionally. The rest of the time she's here. In my house. In my bed. An arm's length away and colder than a corpse.

At least, I won the battle to have her in my bed, after the stunt she pulled. She owed me.

It isn't that I don't want to touch her. God knows I do. I want to pull her back against me in the dark and put my mouth on the back of her neck, feel her fall asleep, her breaths even. But she lies there stiff on her own side of the mattress and lets me know without a single word that I'm not welcome to get close. She treats this marriage like a contract—that’s what I proposed, after all. She's counting down the year she thinks she owes me, ticking off the days one by one, certain that when they're up I'll shake her hand and let her walk out of my life.

But I'm Laszlo Novak, and no one has ever said ‘no’ to me. Besides, I already know that this woman is the love of my life. The fact she’s not aware of this fact is irrelevant.

I'm never letting her go.

I glance at my watch. It's eleven o'clock, and I'm stalling at the door, knowing that my wife will be home soon. I haven't seen her for almost two days, so I'm at the bottom of the stairs, ready to leave, when I finally hear the gate. I don't need to look. Daniel opens the gate at a different speed for everyone, faster for her because of how she drives like she's got a grudge against the driveway itself.

It's her old blue Honda, the one she still insists on driving even after I told Rafe to take her to the Maserati dealership to pick out a new car at last. She bluntly refused.

She comes through the door in her coat, her hair a mess. There's a coffee stain on her cuff and a smudge of pen on the heel of her hand. She looks like something the night shift dragged backward through the whole of medicine.

She's the best thing I've seen in days.

"Good morning, wife."

"It's still morning?" She drops her keys in the bowl by the door—the bowl I put there in week two, which she uses while pretending she doesn't know why it exists. "Tragic."

"Long one?"

"What do you think?"

"How was it?"

She stops with one shoe half off and looks at me properly for the first time, her nose wrinkling like I've walked in trailing the smell of my own mortuary behind me.

"Why do you care?"

"Because you were gone many hours and I'd like to know what they were like."