Morning, Beautiful

You fall asleep at some point after three, with the phone still in your hand and the conversation still glowing on the screen.

When you wake, you read it all again. Every line. Nothing you wrote looks sane in daylight. Nothing he wrote back gives anything away. Dominic Arkwright texts like he talks: short, precise, every word placed like a chess piece. But he answered. At midnight, at one, at nearly two. A man who reportedly sleeps four hours a night and spends none of them on strangers stayed up with you.

That has to mean something.

You shower, dress in a soft gray sweater and jeans, and put on the face you wore for a whole engagement without knowing it was a mask. Then you go down to breakfast.

They're all there.

Lucinda at the head of the long table with the Journal folded beside her plate. Romy, who lives in the city and almost never comes up on a Tuesday, in a white silk shirt with her platinum bob tucked behind one ear, stirring her coffee with a tiny silver spoon. And Tristan, by the window, laughing at something on his phone, the morning sun turning his hair to gold.

He looks up when you come in and his whole face lights.

"There she is." He crosses the room in three strides, pulls you into his arms, and kisses your forehead. He smells like expensive soap and sea salt. Your skin crawls under his hands and you hold perfectly still and let it. "How's the head?"

"Better," you say into his collar.

"You scared me. You never ignore my texts." He pulls back, cups your face, searches it. His brown eyes are warm, concerned, completely sincere. If you hadn't died looking up at them, you'd believe every flicker. "You sure you're okay?"

"I'm sure."

"Good." He kisses you. Lightly, on the lips. You make yourself kiss him back and think, very clearly, about the champagne glass on the mantel that he never once touched.

"You missed your fitting," Romy says from the table. "Madame Vigneau was devastated. I had to sit there and drink her terrible tea for twenty minutes."

"Sorry." You sit across from her. "I wasn't up to it."

Romy smiles at you over her cup. Red lipstick at nine in the morning. "We'll go Thursday. I'll make sure you're up to it."

Last time, you'd have found that sweet.

Moira comes in with a fresh pot of coffee and catches your eye, and for a second you see a small, kind worry in her face. You smile at her, and she smiles back, and you notice the thin bandage on her own finger. She cut herself on the vase instead of you.

Lucinda lowers the Journal.

"Tristan's mother called," she says. "She'd like to add twelve people to Saturday."

"Saturday?"

"The engagement party, darling." Lucinda's voice is patient, like you're a small and distracted child. "Two hundred guests. The marquee goes up Thursday."

The engagement party. You'd forgotten. In your old life you'd floated through it in pale blue chiffon with your finger bandaged and Tristan's ring catching the light, and someone took a photograph of you dancing and called it the happiest night of your life.

"Of course," you say. "Whatever she wants."

You butter a piece of toast you have no intention of eating. Tristan sits down next to you, his arm draped along the back of your chair, and starts telling Lucinda about a sailboat he wants to buy. Romy says something dry about the color. Tristan laughs.

And under the table, something moves.

You only see it because you drop your napkin. You bend to get it, and there, in the shadows beneath the white tablecloth, Romy's bare foot is resting against Tristan's ankle. Not by accident. Her toes are slowly tracing the line of his sock.

You sit up. Tristan's hand is still on the back of your chair. He's still smiling at Lucinda. Romy is stirring her coffee.

Nobody knows you saw.

"You've gone pale, Ava," Lucinda says. "Are you sure you're well?"

"Just tired," you say, and you take a bite of the toast, and it tastes like ash.

You don't make it back to your room before your phone buzzes.

Unknown: Your story is interesting. I don't invest in stories.

Unknown: Proof, Miss Wrenfield. Something that hasn't happened yet. Something you couldn't know.

You stand in the upstairs hallway with your back against the wall, under a portrait of some Wrenfield ancestor with a disapproving nose, and close your eyes.

Something that hasn't happened yet.

You were a sheltered twenty-five-year-old heiress planning a wedding. You didn't follow the news. You didn't follow markets. You barely followed your own calendar. What do you remember about the last week of March that a man like Dominic Arkwright would care about?

You think back. March 24. You and Romy, shopping for shoes. March 25—

Tristan. Shouting.

You'd never heard him raise his voice before. You'd come into the library at Wyndmere in the late afternoon and found him on the phone, pacing, his face a color you'd never seen on him. Two hundred thousand, he'd been saying. In one afternoon. How was I supposed to know he'd quit? He'd seen you and hung up so fast he fumbled the phone. Then he'd laughed, kissed you, said it was nothing, just a bad trade. A pharma company. The CEO had resigned with no warning. Something about a failed drug trial.

What was the name?

You'd seen it on the television in the library behind him. The red banner across the bottom of the screen. Norrland Pharma CEO Resigns; Shares Plunge. And the little clock in the corner of the screen, which you'd noticed because you were supposed to be at the florist at two thirty and you were already late.

2:17.

The banner had already been running a minute or two.

You open the text thread and type before you can talk yourself out of it.

You: Norrland Pharma. Their CEO resigns tomorrow afternoon. Around 2:15. Unannounced. Something to do with a failed trial.

The dots appear almost immediately.

Unknown: That's very specific.

You: You asked for specific.

Unknown: If you've been fed insider information, sending it to me is a crime. For both of us.

You: I haven't been fed anything. Don't trade on it. Just watch.

A long pause. You start to think he's gone.

Unknown: And if it doesn't happen?

You look down the hallway, toward the room where you died. It's just a guest room now, the door half open, the bed made with plain linen. No peonies. No candles.

You: Then I'm insane, and you never have to hear from me again.

Unknown: Understood. Until tomorrow, Miss Wrenfield.

The next day lasts a hundred years.

You go shoe shopping with Romy, because she insists, and because you don't want her to notice anything has changed. She talks about the honeymoon in Positano and touches every expensive thing in the store and calls you sweetie, and you smile and nod and watch her hands and wonder how many times they've been on him.

At two o'clock you're sitting on a velvet bench in a boutique on Madison, a pair of silver heels on your feet that you'll never wear, and your phone is face up on your knee.

2:05.

2:10.

Romy is at the counter, arguing pleasantly with a saleswoman about a discount she doesn't need.

2:13.

What if you're wrong? What if you changed something, some tiny thing, by not going to the fitting, by not cutting your finger, and the world shifted half an inch and Norrland's CEO decides to stay? What if it was the twenty-sixth, not the twenty-fifth? What if you were already late for the florist that day for a different reason?

2:14.

You can hear your own heartbeat.

2:15.

Nothing.

The screen stays dark. Romy laughs at the counter. Outside, a taxi honks.

Your stomach drops through the floor. You were wrong. You're insane. You'll go home and marry Tristan and die in a white dress and—

The phone buzzes.

A news alert slides down across the top of the screen, red and urgent.

BREAKING: Norrland Pharma CEO resigns effective immediately after failed late-stage trial; shares halted.

You stare at it until the words blur.

Then a second notification slides in beneath it.

Unknown: 2:15.

Unknown: Explain that to me in person, Ava.

It's the first time he's used your name.