Chương 1
"""The Day My Fiancé Locked the Door and Asked for Everything I Owned
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“Maya! You can’t do this to me!”
Julian’s voice followed me across the sun-whitened stone courtyard, raw enough to turn the heads of the officers standing near the gate. I kept walking.
My black bag knocked against my hip. The hem of my pink silk dress brushed my knees with every step, and the sunglasses Eleanor had once called “cheaply theatrical” hid whatever my face was doing. Behind me, two police officers held Julian by the arms while he twisted between them in his dark blue suit, one side of his shirt pulled loose, his collar open and crooked.
An overturned suitcase lay near the front steps. My father was on one knee beside it, trying to gather prescription bottles before they rolled between the cracks in the stone. My mother knelt next to him with both hands clasped under her chin. A small knitted yellow blanket—the one she had made for my baby—hung halfway out of the suitcase, gathering dust.
Beyond them, the sea was an impossible blue. Eleanor’s white yacht floated in the cove as though the afternoon had been arranged for a magazine shoot instead of an arrest.
“Tell them!” Julian shouted. “Tell them this is a misunderstanding.”
I did not turn around.
Six hours earlier, that man had still been my fiancé.
Then he locked the door, kept me inside his mother’s house, and asked for the PIN to my bank card.
The afternoon had begun with orchids.
Eleanor had spread photographs of them across the glass coffee table in her living room: white phalaenopsis from Thailand, pale pink dendrobiums from Singapore, and some green variety whose name she pronounced slowly, as though the flowers had a title and an ancestral estate.
“They’ll soften the limestone,” she said.
I sat at the far end of the cream sofa with one hand near my stomach. Four months pregnant did not look like much on me yet, especially under the loose linen dress I had worn to lunch, but my body had developed its own private schedule. Hunger arrived like an alarm. Fatigue could drop over me in the middle of a sentence. Certain smells—coffee, grilled fish, Eleanor’s rose perfume—turned the back of my throat sour.
There were no orchids in the room. Only a tall arrangement of white lilies by the window, which seemed ironic because Eleanor hated lilies and had once described them as funeral flowers for people without imagination.
“The supplier needs the remaining deposit by five,” she continued. “It’s ten thousand.”
I looked at the invoice she slid toward me.
“Ten thousand more?”
“The shipping conditions changed.”
“The original flower budget was twelve.”
“And the original design was provincial.”
She said it without looking at me. Her thumbnail, painted the dark red of old wine, moved down the page to the total.
Julian sat in the armchair to my right, his phone balanced on one knee. He wore the blue suit he used whenever he wanted people to believe his company was doing better than it was. No tie. White pocket square. Brown leather shoes I had bought him for his thirty-seventh birthday after he had spent twenty minutes in a department store pretending not to care about them.
His thumb moved across his screen.
I waited for him to say something.
He did not.
A ceiling fan turned overhead, too slow to move the air. Through the open doors to the terrace came the clatter of dishes from the kitchen and a burst of laughter from one of Eleanor’s housekeepers. Someone outside was dragging a chair across stone.
I looked down at the number again.
Ten thousand dollars for additional flowers.
Three months earlier, when Julian and I had first discussed the wedding, we had agreed on a small ceremony near the water. Forty guests. Dinner at long tables. No orchestra, no ice sculpture, no champagne tower, none of the things Eleanor called “visual anchors.”
Then she offered the villa.
She had said it would save us money.
By the end of the first week, the guest list had doubled. By the second, a string quartet became an eleven-piece band. A dinner of grilled local fish became lobster, Wagyu beef, and a vegetarian tasting menu designed by a chef from Barcelona. The linen napkins had been replaced because they looked “textured in the wrong way.” The chairs had been shipped from Florence. Eleanor had ordered hand-painted ceramic place cards for people I had never met.
I had paid the deposits because Julian promised he would reimburse half when his next funding round closed.
The round had not closed.
Nothing at Julian’s company ever seemed to close except the doors of offices he could no longer afford.
“I’ve already paid eighty thousand dollars,” I said.
Eleanor’s head lifted.
The movement was slight, but the room changed with it.
“That includes the venue deposit,” she said.
“There is no venue deposit. This is your house.”
“There are operating costs.”
“You charged us to use your own house?”
“I did not charge you. The event requires staffing, maintenance, insurance, landscaping—”
“Your gardener was here before we got engaged.”
“Maya.” Julian finally looked up. “Can we not do this like an audit?”
“I am an auditor.”
“You own a payroll compliance company.”
“It still involves numbers.”
A tiny smile touched the side of his mouth. It was the smile he used when he wanted to make my anger seem charming and slightly embarrassing.
Eleanor gathered the invoices into a neat stack.
“No one is questioning your professional competence,” she said. “We are discussing a family event.”
“That I’m funding.”
“That celebrates your marriage.”
“To Julian.”
“Yes,” she said. “That is generally how weddings work.”
I had heard that tone from her before. Soft. Patient. Designed to make the other person sound unreasonable merely by answering.
May you like
My fingers tightened around the strap of my handbag.
I had been sleeping badly for two weeks. Julian blamed the pregnancy. My doctor blamed stress and suggested more rest. Rest had become one of those words people used when they did not intend to remove any of the things exhausting you.
