After My Husband Locked Me Away for His Mistress

Amos took my phone first. Then my wallet, sliding my cards out one by one like he was dealing cards at a table where I'd already lost. My passport came last, plucked from the drawer in my nightstand where I kept it beside Lylah's old birthday cards.

"You'll thank me for this," he said. "Once you're calm."

I didn't ask what calm meant to him. I already knew. He walked me down the back stairs, past the kitchen where Marguerite wouldn't meet my eyes, to the wine cellar door. The hinges groaned. He didn't.

"A few days," he said. "To think."

The door locked with a sound so small it shouldn't have mattered. It mattered.

There was a chair down there, and a single bottle of water on the floor beside it, and racks of bottles worth more than most people's rent, and none of it was mine to drink. I sat in the dark and counted my own breathing because it was the only thing left that still belonged to me.

The intercom clicked on sometime that first night. I hadn't noticed the speaker in the corner before — small, gray, easy to miss. Cheyenne's laugh came through it first, bright and unhurried. Then music. Then the clink of silverware, a dinner being plated, Amos's voice saying something I couldn't make out that made her laugh again.

It clicked off. Then, hours later, it clicked back on. Like someone upstairs kept checking whether I was still listening.

By the second day my mouth had gone dry in a way water didn't fix anymore. By the third, I stopped standing up too fast because the room tilted when I did. I thought about Lylah's hand going cold in mine. I thought that at least she hadn't had time to be this hungry, this small, this erased.

On the fourth day, the door opened. Amos came down the stairs with a folder and a pen, and the light behind him made him look like something arriving from another world.

"Victim impact statement," he said, setting it on my knee like I was a client. "Next of kin requesting leniency for the driver."

I looked at the paper. I looked at him.

"You want me to ask for mercy for the man who killed her."

"I want you to come upstairs," he said. "I want you to eat something. I want this to be over."

My hand shook so badly the pen skittered twice before I could make it write my name. I don't remember deciding to sign it. I remember the shape of my own signature looking like it belonged to someone else, someone who had already given up.

Rafael got a suspended sentence. I watched the news footage of the courthouse steps from a hospital bed where they were putting fluids back into me one bag at a time. Cheyenne wore white. She smiled for the cameras like a bride.

Lylah's funeral was three days after that.

I stood at the grave in a black coat that felt too heavy for my body, and I don't remember most of the service. I remember dirt. I remember my father's face, older than I'd ever seen it. I remember thinking Lylah would have hated how quiet everyone was being, how careful, how nobody was laughing the way she would have wanted.

Then I saw him. A face from another life, standing at the edge of the crowd like he wasn't sure he had the right to be there. Santiago Jordan. I hadn't seen him since juniors, since before Amos, since before I traded snow for silk sheets and called it love. He'd gotten taller. Or maybe I'd just gotten smaller.

He waited until the crowd thinned before he came to me. He didn't offer condolences I could tell he'd rehearsed and discarded.

"The Zurich facility keeps a lane open for you," he said instead. "No conditions. No deadline." He pressed a card into my hand, his fingers steady where mine weren't. "Whenever you're ready. If you're ever ready."

I looked at the card like it was written in a language I used to speak fluently and had since forgotten.

"I'm not that person anymore," I said, and gave it back.

He didn't argue. He just nodded, like he'd expected exactly that answer, and walked away before I could see whatever was in his face.

Amos was watching from the car. I felt it before I turned, the particular weight of his attention, the way it always arrived like a verdict.

He didn't say anything on the drive home. He didn't have to. That week my cards stopped working at the pharmacy. At a gallery opening, when a woman asked how I was holding up, he answered for me — smoothly, warmly, a performance of concern that left no room for my own voice. At dinner, he mentioned, almost gently, that Cheyenne had said something kind about grief, as if I needed her permission to have any.

I sat through all of it with my face perfectly still. I had gotten so good at that. I hated how good I'd gotten.