Chapter 3

"Just morning sickness," I say. "I'm fine."

Roman pulls me closer, one hand rubbing slow circles on my back.

"You've been so patient with me, baby. We never got proper wedding photos. I already put a deposit on the dress you liked, the one you pointed out last month. Tomorrow I'm taking you to shoot them, before the bump gets too big."

I look at him.

Such a devoted face. Such careful, practiced eyes. He has been lying to me for three years, and he has never once slipped.

If he knew I had no intention of carrying this baby to term, I'd end up like the housekeeper.

"I'm going to rest," I say. "You finish up."

I make it to the bathroom before my stomach gives out. I stay on the floor beside the toilet until there's nothing left, tears running down my face, one hand pressed flat against the cold tile.

The pain means nothing. Not compared to what he did to me.

When I finally come out, Roman's phone is sitting on the coffee table. He forgot it.

Roman has a rule about his phone. Everyone in this house knows it. I have never touched it in three years.

Now I pick it up without thinking. I try my birthday. Wrong. I try his. Wrong.

I type in Delphine's birthday.

It unlocks.

The screen that comes up is a photo of her on tiptoe, laughing as she presses a kiss to his cheek.

It's a second system hidden inside the phone, separate from the main screen. The home screen holds nothing but a few photo albums and a messaging app.

Eight thousand photos. Every single one of Delphine.

Four folders. Each one labeled with a single word.

Together, they read: Delphine. My. One. Love.

Tears fall onto the screen, and I don't wipe them away.

It's not the betrayal that breaks me. It's the waste. Three years of my life, my body, my heart, all of it spent on a man who was keeping a shrine to another woman the whole time.

I'm about to put the phone down when something in one of the photos catches my eye.

Delphine's right shoulder.

A birthmark, small and rose-shaped.

I reach up and touch my own right shoulder.

Same place. Same shape. Identical.

We've known each other for years. She never once mentioned it. Neither did I, because I never knew she had one.

But I remember the last time things shifted between us.

I'd just come back from a medical exchange program abroad when I mentioned, almost casually, that I'd once pulled a man off the street, covered in nine stab wounds and left for dead on the docks.

After that, Delphine got cold.

She stopped calling. Stopped showing up.

A few weeks later, she was introduced as Roman's adopted sister.

Roman treated her like she had given him his life back. He told everyone she had once saved his life, and in his world, that was enough to make her untouchable.

Every soldier in his organization would die before letting anyone lay a hand on her.

And Delphine has never set foot in that city.

I know because she told me herself, more than once, with that particular curl of her lip, how much she despised everything about it.

My legs give out. I catch myself on the edge of the table and hold on.

The thought forming in my head is almost too big to face.

I cover my face with both hands.

I don't know whether I'm laughing or crying.

I think it might be both.