My Husband Asked Me to Give His Mistress My Skin

The smoke alarm went off at 6:47 in the morning.

I know the exact time because I was staring at the clock on my nightstand, the way I had been staring at it for an hour, trying to talk myself into going downstairs. Trying to decide if I could stand to see her pour his coffee.

The alarm shrieked through the walls.

I ran.

The kitchen was full of smoke when I got there. Not a real fire — more like a heavy, oily haze hanging at the ceiling. A pan on the stove was blackened. The marble countertop next to the burner was scorched in a long, ugly streak.

Paislee was on the floor.

She was curled against the lower cabinets, cradling her left forearm. Her sleeve was pushed back. The skin from her wrist to her elbow was red and shiny, already blistering at the edges. She was crying, soft and broken, the kind of crying that doesn't smear mascara.

The housekeeper, Marta, was already kneeling beside her with a wet towel. The driver was waving a dishrag at the smoke detector. Two other staff stood frozen in the doorway.

And then Lian was there. In his robe. Hair still damp from the shower.

He took in the scene in a single look. The pan. The counter. Paislee on the floor. Me, standing in the doorway in my nightgown with bare feet.

He went to her first.

He dropped to one knee on the kitchen tile and lifted her arm so gently it made my chest ache. "Paislee. Paislee, look at me."

"I'm sorry," she sobbed. "I came down for water and the burner was — I didn't see it, I reached across — "

"Whose burner?"

She shook her head. She wouldn't say.

Marta said it for her. Quiet. Reluctant. "Mrs. Ward came down last night for tea, sir. After everyone went to bed."

That wasn't true. I hadn't been in the kitchen since dinner. But Marta wasn't looking at me when she said it. She was looking at the floor.

"I didn't," I said.

No one heard me. Or no one wanted to.

Lian stood up slowly. He turned. And the look on his face was the look I had been waiting three months for him to give me — focused, present, finally seeing me — except it was the wrong kind of seeing.

"You could have killed her," he said.

"Lian — "

"You could have killed everyone in this building."

"I wasn't down here. Check the cameras. Please, just — "

"Don't." One word. Flat. "Don't speak."

I looked at Paislee on the floor.

She was watching me over Lian's shoulder. Her eyes were wet, but they were steady. And there, in the corner of her mouth — so small no one else would have caught it — was that same little smile.

The one from the hospital corridor.

My hands went cold all the way to the bone.

---

I sat in my room the rest of the day. No one came to get me. Not even for meals. I heard the front door open and close — the doctor, I assumed. I heard a quiet, expensive bustle through the walls. The kind of fuss that money makes around a wound.

No one fussed about mine.

I didn't cry. That surprised me. I sat on the floor by the window and watched the city go from gold to gray to dark, and somewhere inside my chest something was being put away. Folded. Stored. Made smaller.

---

He summoned me at nine the next morning.

His study. The big desk. The skyline behind him like a stage set. He didn't ask me to sit, so I stood.

"The burn is third-degree in two places," he said. He was reading something on his tablet. He didn't look up. "She'll need a graft."

I didn't answer.

"The doctor says a living donor with compatible tissue would dramatically improve the cosmetic outcome." He set the tablet down. Finally looked at me. "You're going to be that donor."

I heard the words. I waited for them to make sense.

"You want me," I said slowly, "to give her my skin."

"It's the least you can do."

The room tilted, just a little, then righted itself.

I thought about the three months. The hand I'd held while machines breathed for him. The nights I slept upright in a plastic chair so I'd be awake when he opened his eyes. The sweater. The wedding album. The pill bottle she'd planted in my drawer.

I looked at him — really looked — the way Reese had looked at me the first night, with that terrible recognition.

"No," I said. Soft. Even.

Something in his face shut.

"No?"

"No, Lian. I won't."

He stood up. He wasn't a man who stood up in conversations. He did it now.

"After everything she has suffered because of you," he said, and his voice had gone to that cold place I had never heard it go, "this is what you're capable of?"

I didn't argue. There was nothing to argue with.

"Get out of my sight."

I got out.

I walked down the long hallway past the guest wing, where I could hear her television playing softly. I walked into my bedroom. I shut the door. I sat down on the edge of the bed.

And I stayed there a long, long time, while the part of me that had loved him began, quietly, to die.