Chapter 1

In the seventieth year of my marriage to Adrian, the whole world still believed we were the most devoted vampire couple alive.

In the documentary, he looked at me across old footage that spanned half a century and told everyone,

"After I met my wife, I finally understood that even immortality can make you feel there isn't enough time."

He confessed his love for me. He said he wanted every tomorrow I had.

But that same night, I received a video.

In a dim hotel corridor, my husband had a young human woman pinned against the wall, his head bent to bite the side of her neck.

She asked him whether he was going home to me that night.

Adrian kissed the blood from the corner of her lips and answered gently,

"I'm yours until sunrise."

Later he knelt in front of me and explained that the woman was only a brief diversion in his long life.

She would age. She would die.

And I was his only wife, the one he wanted to keep beside him forever.

He thought that as long as eternity belonged to me, handing a few nights to someone else did not count as betrayal.

But he had forgotten. On the day I agreed to marry him, I told him plainly,

I could stand beside him through poverty, war, silver, and death.

The one thing I could not accept was a third person entering our marriage.

One betrayal, and there would never be a second chance.

Adrian did not believe I would really go.

He thought seventy years of knowing each other was enough to earn my forgiveness, and he thought we had endless time, enough to start over as many times as he liked.

Until I left the divorce papers behind, took everything that was mine, and never looked back.

Then a year passed.

Ten years passed.

A hundred years passed.

I built a whole life that had nothing to do with him.

And that vampire duke, who would not age and would not easily die, stayed alone in the long night.

He could have everything. He would never have my love again.

Chapter 1

Fourteen days before our seventieth wedding anniversary, I received the video of my husband's affair.

At the time, Adrian and I were sitting in the screening room at Blackwood Manor, watching a documentary about the two of us.

The footage on the screen had been shot in 1956.

Adrian stood outside St. Mary's Church in a black dress coat, waiting for me. The colors of the old film had faded, but when he looked at the camera his gray-blue eyes were as bright as ever.

Seventy years had passed and his face had not changed at all.

The man sitting beside me still had the same pale skin, the same straight nose, the same eyes that would never age.

Bridget, the director, was clearly pleased with this part.

She had cut photographs from seventy years ago together with our present-day interviews and laid a slow piano piece underneath, and it was enough to make anyone who believed in love cry.

"Duke Blackwood, what did you feel the first time you saw your wife?"

The reporter on the screen asked the question.

Adrian was sitting in the manor's rose garden, and he smiled a little when he heard it.

"I've lived more than three hundred years, and it was the first time I understood that even immortality can make you feel there isn't enough time."

"I wanted to know her past, and I wanted every tomorrow she had."

Live comments flooded across the image.

A three-hundred-year-old vampire duke saying things like that should be illegal.

My grandmother read about their wedding when she was young, I'm married myself now, and they still look exactly like the photographs.

Seventy years! That's an entire human lifetime, and the way they look at each other hasn't changed one bit.

Who was it that told me vampires are cold by nature? The duke has only ever loved Evelyn.

This is what eternal love actually looks like.

Bridget sat in the back row, her cheeks flushed with excitement.

"Your Grace, this is going to be a sensation when it goes live. People online are saying the two of you have given the word eternity a real face."

I looked at the two people leaning against each other on the screen and did not answer.

Adrian thought I was tired, and he reached over to tuck my hair behind my ear.

His fingertips were cool, the temperature every vampire knows best.

"Ten minutes left," he said quietly. "If you aren't feeling well, we can finish it tomorrow night."

"No need."

I shook my head.

He had turned down a great deal of work for this documentary.

Filming had taken half a year, from London to Paris, from the church where we were married to Hartwell Manor. The crew had dug up every public image of us from the last seventy years, and even I hadn't known we had left so many traces behind together.

A photograph from 1989 came up on the screen.

That was the year Adrian took over the family foundation. Reporters had him surrounded at a reception, and he looked past all of them at me, standing in the corner.

Bridget had enlarged the frame and given his expression a close-up.

I had seen that tenderness countless times.

At that moment it was resting on me again.

When the screening ended, the crew left one by one.

Adrian took a call from Brussels. He kissed my forehead and carried his phone out into the hall.

"Give me a few minutes, darling."

The door closed.

The huge screening room went abruptly quiet.

I picked up my phone to answer a message from my estate manager, and an unfamiliar address sent me an email.

No subject line, no text.

The attachment was a video, forty-seven seconds long.

I stared at the strange file for a few seconds, then pressed play.

It had been filmed in a dim hotel corridor.

Adrian had a young woman pinned against the wall, his palm cupping the back of her neck.

She tipped her face up, baring a slender white throat.

A second later he lowered his head and drove his fangs into the skin beside her neck.

She shuddered and held him around the waist, and the sound she made was intimate and satisfied.

Adrian did not let go of her right away.

He drank from her, then lifted his head and kissed away the little smear of red at the corner of her mouth.

That was not feeding.

No vampire treats a blood donor who means nothing to him that way.

At the end of the video the woman leaned against him, laughing.

"Are you still going back to your duchess tonight?"

Adrian bent his head and kissed her.

"I'm yours until sunrise."

The video cut off.

I sat exactly where I was, holding the phone, not moving.

A few minutes later the door of the screening room opened again.

Adrian came toward me, and his gray-blue eyes still held the tenderness I knew so well.

"Did I keep you waiting?"

I switched off the screen, and for the first time I understood that a man can tell you he loves you and wear a completely different face somewhere else.

Chapter 2

Adrian did not notice anything wrong with me.

He held my hand the whole way back to the bedroom.

Blackwood Manor is more than four hundred years old, the corridors are long, and after dark only the wall lamps are lit. Adrian knew I disliked too much dark, so every lamp was a little brighter than it used to be.

He had kept that habit for seventy years.

"The doctor came this afternoon?" he asked.

"Yes."

"What did the results say?"

"The same as last month."

My answers were short.

He stopped walking and turned to look at me.

"Evelyn, you're upset."

Four hundred years of life had made him very good at reading people, and seventy years of marriage had made him especially fluent in my moods.

I used to think that was proof we loved each other.

"Just tired," I said.

Adrian frowned slightly but did not press.

Back in our room, he took out the medicine I had to take and poured a glass of warmed blood.

I don't like blood that has gone cold, and I don't like it served in a clear glass.

He remembered every one of those small, almost fussy preferences.

"Finish it before you sleep."

He handed me the glass, his voice gentle, leaving no room for argument.

I took it, and I caught a trace of scent still clinging to his cuff.

White roses, amber, and some kind of vanilla that was far too sweet.

It was exactly what had hung in the air when the woman in the video leaned toward the camera.

I lowered my eyes and drank a mouthful.

"Did everything go smoothly in Brussels?"

"Smoothly enough."

Adrian undid his cufflinks, and his expression did not change in the slightest.

"The council won't raise the rates for human blood donors. We argued about it for two nights. Victor thinks we can negotiate slowly, but I don't want to drag it out any longer."

He gave me specifics.

What the meeting covered, who attended, where the disagreement came from. Every detail would have held up under questioning.

If I hadn't seen that video, I wouldn't have doubted a single word.

"Which hotel was the meeting at?" I asked.

He glanced at me.

"The usual place, the hotel near Sablon Square."

The corridor in the video had dark green carpet and brass room numbers.

I had stayed at that hotel before.

It isn't in Brussels. It's in Paris.

When Adrian took off his shirt, I saw three scratches on the back of his shoulder, already faded.

A vampire's body heals fast.

An ordinary scratch disappears in a few hours. If these were still there, the woman had used real force, and they had been made more recently than he was claiming.

He followed my eyes and glanced down.

"What is it?"

"Your shoulder is hurt."

"I probably caught it on a broken nail in the doorframe of the old archive room last night."

He answered easily, and even reached back to touch the marks.

"They're almost gone."

I didn't tell him that a nail in a doorframe doesn't leave red marks shaped like fingernails.

Before we slept, he put his arms around me from behind, the way he always did.

The curtains were drawn, the heavy fabric holding back the daylight that was coming. Adrian buried his face against my neck, and his breathing slowly evened out.

I didn't close my eyes all night.

He still remembered to warm my blood, remembered the lamps in the corridor, remembered the date of my monthly examination.

I could not find a single piece of evidence that I had been neglected.

But his tenderness didn't reassure me.

It only made me see more clearly that he hadn't gone to another woman because he'd stopped loving me.

He had chosen to lie to me while he still did.

After sunrise, Adrian fell into a deep sleep.

I picked up his phone, then stopped before I touched the screen.

I didn't need to read his private messages.

I only needed to check what he had told me.

I left the bedroom, went into the study, and searched for the Brussels meeting on the computer.

The official page came up quickly.

The meeting scheduled for that week had been canceled a week early, because the host had been injured.

The cancellation notice had been posted ten days ago.

There was no way Adrian didn't know.

Because underneath the notice, his reply was there in plain sight.

Sorry to miss it, looking forward to the next one.

It was dated the day before he left London.

Chapter 3

In seventy years of marriage, Adrian had told me only two lies that I caught him in.

The first was in 1962.

He bought a painting I loved and claimed he hadn't bid on it at all, then hung it in my study on the night of my birthday.

The second was in 2003.

My vineyard ran into cash trouble, and he quietly bought up all the unsold wine and had it disguised as an order from Canada.

When the truth came out, I wasn't angry.

Both lies existed to make me happy.

Over time I somehow forgot that deception doesn't change shape just because the motive behind it does.

And this time, what he was protecting wasn't a surprise.

It was another woman.

After dark I didn't stay at the manor.

I drove into London alone and met Helen Grant at a coffeehouse that stays open all night.

She is my personal lawyer, and one of the few people the Blackwood family has no hold over.

"Divorce?"

Helen set down her coffee, and for the first time her professional calm slipped.

"Evelyn, you and Adrian?"

"Yes."

"What happened?"

I pushed the video across the table.

Helen watched barely a dozen seconds before she hit pause.

She didn't ask whether I might have misunderstood, and she didn't invoke seventy years of marriage to talk me into calming down.

"What do you want me to do?"

"Start with the prenuptial agreement, and put together an inventory of everything in my name."

"Don't contact him yet."

Helen looked at me. "You haven't decided?"

"I've decided."

My voice was steadier than I expected.

"But I need to know whether this was an accident or a relationship everyone around us has been protecting."

I wasn't looking for a reason to forgive Adrian.

I only needed to know which doors to close on my way out.

Whether to end only the marriage.

Or to leave behind every relationship that had been built around it.

Helen didn't ask again.

She opened her laptop and began pulling up the prenuptial agreement we had signed seventy years earlier.

I looked out at the night and thought of Vienna, thirty years ago.

That was the closest I ever came to dying.

It was also the closest Adrian ever came.

A group of hunters had attacked a vampire charity dinner. A silver bullet went in through Adrian's back and stopped less than an inch from his heart.

Ordinary blood can't heal a silver wound.

After the doctors took out the fragments he kept losing blood, and his body went as cold as actual stone.

People told me to give up.

They said Adrian had lived nearly four hundred years, and perhaps this was simply where he ended.

I didn't listen.

I opened my wrist and fed my blood into his mouth.

The first night, nothing.

By the second night I was too weak to stand.

On the third night the doctor caught my hand and refused to let me continue.

"If you give him any more, you'll die with him."

I pushed the doctor away.

"Then let him wake up and stop me himself."

That was the moment Adrian opened his eyes.

He caught my wrist, so weak he had almost no strength left, and still he stubbornly pressed down on the cut.

"Enough, Evelyn."

I knelt by the bed and cried without any dignity for the first time in my life.

He wiped my tears away and promised me over and over.

"I'm not leaving you."

"This life you brought back belongs to you now."

For thirty years I never once doubted those words.

The lights of the coffeehouse lay across the table.

Helen turned the prenuptial agreement toward me and said quietly, "The fidelity clause is still binding. If the evidence holds, you can end the marriage and keep everything you brought into it."

I looked at the two names side by side on the page.

Adrian Blackwood.

Evelyn Hartwell.

Seventy years ago we both thought they would be written together forever.

"How long will it take?" I asked.

"If he doesn't contest it, four weeks at the fastest."

"And if he refuses?"

"Then longer. But he has no power to keep you trapped forever."

I nodded.

Before I left, Helen called after me one more time.

"You said there was one last thing you wanted to see for yourself."

"What is it?"

I put my hand on the door and stood there for a few seconds.

"I want to know whether everyone was helping him while he lied to me."

Chapter 4

Claire Moreau was twenty-seven.

She was born in Lyon, came to London at nineteen, and started out singing in bars and small theaters.

Two years ago she signed with a record label backed by the Blackwood Foundation.

A year and a half ago she stood on the stage of the Royal Theatre.

Eight months ago she released her first solo album and gained several million followers on social media.

Her career read like a road that had been carefully paved for her.

And every stone in that road connected back to my husband.

I didn't hire a private investigator.

Claire is a public figure, and almost everything she had been given could be found in published articles.

Adrian had attended three of her performances.

Once from the middle of the audience, twice through the theater's side entrance.

Every time, the press explained it as the chairman of a foundation supporting a young artist.

I had thought so too.

Last winter I even met her at a dinner.

She wore a silver-gray gown and came over with a glass in her hand to thank the Blackwood Foundation politely for the opportunity.

She looked nervous and full of admiration.

I said to her, "What put you on that stage is your own voice."

She blushed and laughed.

"Your Grace, the way you and the duke love each other is something to envy."

Looking back now, her eyes went past my shoulder while she said it.

Adrian was standing behind me.

That night when we got home, he praised Claire's talent.

"Her voice will bring more attention to the foundation's music program this year."

He didn't say one word beyond that.

And I didn't ask.

Because it had never occurred to me that I needed to guard against every woman my husband complimented.

Helen quickly traced the apartment Claire lived in.

The property belonged to an investment company, and that company was indirectly controlled by the Blackwood Group. It had been purchased two years ago, three months after Claire signed her contract.

Her car, her driver, and her private security were all paid for out of Adrian's office.

"On their own, these could still be explained as protecting a client," Helen said.

"I know."

So I told her to keep digging.

A two-year relationship doesn't leave behind only forty-seven seconds of video.

That evening Adrian came home to the manor on time to have dinner with me.

He brought a bouquet of white tulips and said he had passed a florist and thought of a painting I made when I was young.

That painting burned during the war.

The only people left who remember it are the two of us.

I took the flowers and thanked him quietly.

Adrian watched my face.

"You've been very quiet these last few days."

"The documentary is nearly out. It makes me a little nervous."

"If you don't like it, we can cancel it."

He said it without a moment's hesitation.

The foundation had poured a fortune into that documentary, and the publicity campaign had been running for three months.

And yet if I said I didn't like it, he really would cancel it.

Moments like this were exactly why I used to believe I would never become my mother.

My father always had a great many things that mattered more than she did.

With Adrian, I seemed to be the one who always mattered most.

"Don't cancel it," I said. "I want to see what our story looks like to other people."

Adrian smiled and reached over to take my hand.

"The same as it looks to me."

"And how is that?"

"Irreplaceable."

He answered without looking away.

The love in his eyes was so clear that I almost doubted the man in the video was him.

My phone buzzed then.

Helen had sent the newest results.

The apartment has a registered electronic lock. Adrian has his own access. He doesn't need Claire to let him in remotely.

That key was activated two years ago.

I looked at the words two years ago and suddenly remembered when Claire first received foundation support.

So that lucky road of hers hadn't started on a stage.

It started the night Adrian walked into her apartment.

Chapter 5

Three days later, Adrian and Claire were in the headlines together.

The photograph had been taken at two in the morning.

Outside Claire's apartment building, Adrian was getting out of a car in a black hat. Even as a blurred profile, anyone who knew him would recognize him.

The entertainment reporter who published it wrote:

Duke Blackwood pays a late-night visit to a rising singer. Perhaps their relationship is more than patron and artist.

The story wasn't up half an hour before it had more than a hundred thousand comments.

Almost nobody believed it.

You can build a story out of one profile shot? The duke and duchess have been married seventy years.

Claire's label is backed by the Blackwood Foundation in the first place. What's wrong with him going to discuss work?

Vampires don't work during the day. Should he hold meetings at noon under the sun?

The documentary is about to drop. Somebody is obviously riding the wave.

People who make up stories about other people's marriages are disgusting.

Users dug up Adrian's interviews from across the years.

He had said on camera that he would never drink from any woman's throat except mine.

He had also refused a young actress's kiss at a charity dinner, on the grounds that I didn't like the smell of strangers on him.

Those clips were shared over and over.

Within an hour the reporter who had published the photograph turned off comments.

Then came the statement from the Blackwood Group.

The duke did not meet privately with Ms. Moreau that evening. Mr. Victor Blackwood and foundation staff were present, and the meeting concerned a music project only. We reserve the right to pursue action against malicious speculation about the duke's private life.

Victor testified on his own account as well.

Adrian was with me the entire night. Please stop damaging a marriage that deserves respect.

Public opinion turned in minutes.

The reporter became a clown trying to make a name off the duke and duchess.

Claire posted a photograph from her studio with a caption.

Focused on the music. Please don't disturb my work or my life.

Her makeup in the picture was clean, her expression innocent.

As if every guess about her were a stain.

If I were not Evelyn Hartwell, I might have believed them too.

But on the night that photograph was taken, Victor was not in London at all.

He was at Hartwell Manor.

My vineyard was releasing a new vintage, and he had come as an invited guest to the private tasting. At eleven that night he was still standing on the terrace with me, discussing next year's harvest.

The manor's security footage, the guest list, and the signed register all prove it.

And Victor publicly claimed he had been with Adrian all night.

He wasn't even worried that I would see the statement.

There is only one explanation.

He was certain I would never expose him.

By the time Adrian came home, the storm had already passed.

He pulled me into his arms the moment he was through the door.

"Did you see the news?"

"I saw it."

"Don't believe those photographs."

He looked down at me, his voice carrying exactly the right amount of concern.

"I didn't want something so stupid to upset you. There was a problem with Claire's album, so I went to handle it. Victor and the staff were all there."

Every detail of the lie had already been filled in for him by someone else.

All I had to do was nod, and I could go on being the happiest duchess in the world.

"I didn't believe it," I said.

Adrian was visibly relieved.

He kissed my forehead.

"I knew it. Nobody understands me the way you do."

That was true.

I understood him far too well.

I knew that he silences his phone when he works, and that the moment he gets home he drops it on the table in the entryway.

Just as he turned to take off his coat, the screen lit up.

A new message from Victor.

The lock screen didn't hide the content.

Don't worry, I've explained everything for you. Evelyn won't find out.

Chapter 6

My mother, Rosalind, once told me that when she discovered the first betrayal, she also thought it was only an accident.

Theodore had already been alive for more than two hundred years.

The woman was a nineteen-year-old human maid on the estate.

Rosalind fought with him and smashed everything in the bedroom that could be smashed, and she meant to leave the next morning.

But one sentence from my father was enough to keep her there.

"She'll be dead in a few decades, and I'll be with you forever."

Back then, my mother believed him.

She decided eternity mattered more than a few decades, and that she was the one who had ultimately been chosen.

Later the maid grew old and went away, and my father did come back to her.

But a second woman appeared soon after, and then a third.

Every one of them was young and vivid, full of a warmth my mother had lost long ago.

Every time, my father said they weren't important.

The relatives took turns comforting her too.

"He only wants something new."

"He's never once thought of letting anyone replace you."

"You two are the ones who'll be living together for centuries."

"Is it worth wrecking a family over a human who'll be gone in no time?"

My mother stayed, again and again.

A hundred years on, she no longer smashed anything, and she no longer asked where he had been.

She became calm and gentle, as if nothing touched her.

Only I knew she hadn't forgiven him.

She had simply turned herself into a house with nobody living in it.

When I was small I asked her why she didn't leave.

Rosalind sat by the window, looking out at the roses my father had planted for his newest mistress.

"Because I kept thinking he would turn back into the man he used to be."

"And by the time I'd waited too long, I no longer knew where I could go."

Before my mother died, my father sat with her for three straight months.

He looked wretched and hollowed out, and he held her hand and told her that she had always been the one he loved most.

I believe that was true.

And her whole life was destroyed by his true love anyway.

On the day of her funeral, I made myself a promise.

I would not walk her road.

Even after I met Adrian, even after he spent twenty years wearing down my guard, I never forgot it.

Before he proposed, I told him my parents' story from beginning to end.

I didn't hide my fear, and I certainly didn't pretend I could live with the unspoken rules that noble vampires keep among themselves.

Adrian knew everything.

Which is why it never occurred to me that the same thing could happen with him.

I stayed at Hartwell Manor for three nights.

Nora assumed I was going over the wine list for the anniversary dinner, and she didn't ask questions. She helped me take stock of the cellar and the guest rooms, then brought me the past year's financial reports.

This estate belongs to me.

I was born here, and my mother is buried here.

After I married I spent most of my time at Blackwood Manor, but I never folded the Hartwell title into my husband's name.

It had been the last piece of security my mother left me.

Now it was also the reason I could leave whenever I chose.

On the third night, Helen brought the prenuptial agreement to the manor.

The original from seventy years ago had been kept in a bank, and the paper had yellowed while the writing stayed clear.

Property, inheritance, management of the estates, and on the final page, set apart on its own, the fidelity clause.

For the duration of the marriage, neither party shall establish a sexual relationship, a mate-style feeding relationship, or a long-term emotional relationship with a third person.

If either party violates this agreement, the other has the right to file for divorce immediately.

That clause hadn't been added by a lawyer.

Adrian had written it himself.

Beside his signature, in the handwriting he had then, he had left one more line.

Evelyn will never have to become her mother.

I looked at that line for a long time without turning the page.

Helen asked quietly, "Do you want to keep confirming?"

I closed the file.

"Yes."

I wanted to see with my own eyes exactly when Adrian had decided to make me into my mother.

Chapter 7

Adrian proposed to me in the winter of 1955.

It wasn't the first time he had asked, but it was the first time I didn't refuse immediately.

He stood by the frozen lake at Hartwell Manor, holding the ring my mother had left me.

No reporters, no family witnesses, no roses spread across the ground.

I had told him once that my mother hated roses.

Because roses were what my father sent every mistress he ever had.

Adrian remembered.

He had prepared nothing at all. He only asked whether I was willing to trust him once.

"I can marry you."

I looked at him. "But I have one condition."

"Tell me."

"I won't accept a third person."

"This isn't about illegitimate children, and it isn't about whether you'd bring her in front of me."

"Kissing, sleeping with someone, drinking from her throat, or any short thing you think isn't worth mentioning. I can't accept any of it."

Adrian didn't laugh at me for being as naive as a human, and he didn't tell me that a vampire's life is too long for that.

He took my hand, as serious as a man reading out a vow that life and death depended on.

"There won't be a third person."

"Evelyn, I didn't pursue you so that you could live the life your mother lived."

"If I ever break that promise, you don't have to listen to me explain."

"You can simply leave."

That was the day I said yes.

Seventy years later, he seemed to have forgotten what he said.

I hadn't.

Preparations for the anniversary dinner entered their final stage, and I went back to Blackwood Manor.

Adrian sat through the tasting menu with me himself and had Agnes take away a dessert I didn't care for.

When the dining room was empty except for the two of us, I set down my glass and spoke as if I were making small talk.

"All that news about you lately made me think of my father."

Adrian's hand paused.

Only for an instant.

"I'm not like him."

"I know." I looked at him. "So I'm just curious. What do you think now of vampires who keep a string of human lovers?"

He frowned, and there was something close to disgust in his face.

"A pack of fools spoiled by having too much time."

"Some of them think a human only gets a few decades, so a relationship like that hardly counts."

"How long something lasts has nothing to do with loyalty."

He took my hand and ran his thumb slowly over my knuckles.

"Evelyn, you don't need one photograph dragging all of that back up."

"I told you I would never let you become your mother."

I watched him, and my heart felt like it was being drawn tight by a thin wire.

He knew the right answer perfectly well.

He knew better than I did exactly what to say to put me at ease.

"And if one day you fell in love with someone else?" I asked.

"That day won't come."

"Adrian, life is very long."

"Which is why I have more than enough time to keep choosing you."

When he finished, he bent his head and kissed the back of my hand.

His phone lit up on the table.

The screen was facing up. I wasn't trying to look, but the notification came into view whole.

The sender was Claire.

The Langham, room 1708.

I miss you.

Adrian picked up the phone and switched off the screen as if it were nothing.

"Victor is pushing me about foundation business."

He had even prepared an answer in advance for a question I hadn't asked.

Ten minutes later he took a call.

"I'm sorry, darling." Adrian stood up. "Something's come up at the company. I need to go into London."

I didn't stop him.

"Go."

He bent down to kiss me, and before he left he told Agnes to turn up the heat in the bedroom.

As the car pulled out of the grounds, I sat alone at the end of the long table.

The candlelight wavered over the wine he hadn't finished.

I took out my phone and looked up the Langham.

From the manor it is exactly an hour's drive.

And Adrian had told me he was only going to the office.

Chapter 8

I didn't follow him to the hotel.

Forty-seven seconds of video, two years of door records, Victor's lie, and the room number Claire had sent were already proof enough.

Going after him would only leave me standing outside another door, seeing an answer I already had.

That isn't confirmation.

It's self-torture.

After Adrian left, I called Helen.

"Start getting everything ready."

There were a few seconds of silence on the line.

"You're sure you don't want to wait any longer?"

"No more waiting."

I had waited long enough to hear him repeat his promise out loud, and long enough to watch him walk to another woman right after he said it.

Waiting further wouldn't produce a new truth.

It would only produce more wounds.

Over the next few days, using the anniversary preparations as my reason, I went back through everything in my name.

Hartwell Manor, the old house in the south of France, my shares in the vineyard, the art fund, and the private collection in a Swiss bank.

All of it was mine before the marriage.

I also drew out the portion of our joint accounts that was legally mine, and not a pound more.

There were too many of my paintings, books, and clothes at Blackwood Manor to move all at once.

Nora and a few employees she trusted took a small portion away every night.

Agnes assumed I was organizing pieces for the documentary.

Adrian assumed I was preparing an anniversary surprise for him.

He grew gentler than ever.

Some nights he didn't come back until after midnight, and even then he came into the bedroom with flowers or something sweet.

He would shower and change before he held me, making sure Claire's scent wasn't on him.

When a bite mark turned up that he couldn't explain, he said a young vampire at the foundation had lost control, or that he had scratched himself by accident.

I never called him on it.

Not because I believed him.

Because every lie was finishing the decision for me.

Five days before the anniversary dinner, Claire posted a new photograph.

It showed only a glass of red wine and an open sheet of music.

She was sitting on the edge of a bed with white linens, one leg in a stocking showing.

The caption read: In my favorite city, with my favorite person.

The comments were all guesses about where she was.

Someone recognized Paris from the buildings outside the window.

Others asked whether the favorite person was the mysterious boyfriend she had never confirmed.

Claire didn't answer. She only liked that comment.

I was about to close the page when I noticed a silver picture frame in the upper right corner of the photograph.

The frame had been deliberately shot out of focus, but I could still make out the two people inside it.

It was Adrian and me.

The photograph was taken in 1966.

We were on the balcony of our Paris apartment, holding each other, and behind us was the Seine at night.

That apartment was Adrian's tenth anniversary gift to me.

There were only two keys.

He said it didn't belong to the Blackwood family and it didn't belong to any kind of work. It belonged to us.

For seventy years we spent countless nights there.

My paintings are in the study.

The dresses I wear most are still in the wardrobe.

Our photograph sits on the nightstand.

And now Claire was sitting on that bed, taking pictures as if it were nothing.

A few minutes later Adrian sent me a message.

I need to stay in London tonight to deal with the documentary rights. I can't get back to the manor.

Don't wait up. Get some rest.

I looked at the familiar Paris skyline outside Claire's window, and I laughed once.

So the place that belonged only to us had already had a third person in it for a long time.

I called Helen.

"Book me on the next flight to Paris."

"You're going to confront them?"

"No."

I looked at the frame on the nightstand in the picture.

"I'm going to take back what's mine."

Chapter 9

When the plane landed in Paris, sunrise was three hours away.

I hadn't told anyone.

The apartment is on the top floor of a nineteenth-century building on the right bank of the Seine. Seventy years ago the street was quiet. Now there is a restaurant and a gallery downstairs, and people are still drinking at the curb late at night.

I stood across the street and looked up at the lit windows on the top floor.

That was the bedroom.

Adrian had said he was in London handling work.

Claire was in our room.

The answer was already clear enough.

But I still needed to go inside.

My mother's jewelry was in that apartment, along with several family documents and three paintings that had never been exhibited.

I wasn't going to leave them beside the bed Adrian shared with his mistress.

The building manager had been replaced by a young man.

He didn't know me, and only after he checked my identification and the property papers did his face change.

"Mrs. Hartwell?"

"That's me."

"I'm sorry, I had no idea you were coming tonight. Mr. Blackwood didn't notify us."

"This is my home. I don't need him to notify anyone when I come back."

The young manager went pale.

"Of course. That isn't what I meant."

I didn't make it hard for him. I only asked him to pull the visitor records for the past year.

He hesitated for a moment.

"You're a joint owner. You have the right to see them."

The records printed out quickly.

Claire had entered the apartment for the first time eleven months ago.

After that she came almost every month.

Sometimes for one night, sometimes for a week.

Most of the time Adrian checked in with her.

On several of those dates, I had been at Blackwood Manor in London, waiting for him to come home.

He had told me he was in a meeting in Edinburgh, in Germany working on a foundation project, or with Victor tracing a batch of stolen artwork.

Every lie had someone assigned to confirm it.

I turned to the last page.

Claire had arrived at eleven the previous night and hadn't left.

Adrian arrived ten minutes after her.

"They're still upstairs?" I asked.

The manager lowered his head.

"Yes."

"Do you know who she is?"

"Mr. Blackwood said Ms. Moreau is an important guest of the foundation."

"Did he also tell you there was no need to report it to me?"

The young man's face got worse.

His silence was already the answer.

I took the records and went up in the elevator alone.

My face looked back at me from the mirrored wall.

I had thought I would be furious, or a wreck, or that I would at least be crying.

The woman in the mirror was strangely calm.

So this is what it actually means to give up on someone. It isn't hysteria.

It's watching one piece of evidence after another and finally stopping the hope that any of it is false.

The elevator stopped at the top floor.

I took out my own key.

The lock hadn't been changed. The key still turned.

A single floor lamp was on in the living room.

There were two glasses on the table and Adrian's coat thrown across the sofa. Claire's heels lay outside the bedroom door, next to a black dress I had never seen.

My painting of the Seine, made when I was young, hung on the wall.

Under it stood a bouquet of fresh roses.

White ones.

From the same florist as the tulips Adrian had brought me a few days earlier.

The bedroom door wasn't fully closed.

A woman's laughter came through it.

"After the documentary goes live, everyone is going to envy the two of you even more."

It was Claire.

"Adrian, sometimes I really want to know what I am to you."

The room went quiet for a few seconds.

Then I heard my husband's voice.

Lower than it was with me, and more careless.

"Don't ask depressing questions at a time like this, darling."

Darling.

For seventy years that was what he called me.

Now, through a door, I heard the word belong to another woman for the first time.

I put my hand on the handle and pushed the bedroom door slowly open.

Chapter 10

Both of them turned to look at me at once.

Claire was half sitting against the headboard with nothing but a white sheet wrapped around her. Her hair was loose over her shoulders, and two fresh puncture marks on the side of her neck were still weeping blood.

Adrian sat beside her, his shirt open, red still smeared at the corner of his mouth.

Our eyes met across the room.

The tenderness and ease went out of his face in an instant.

"Evelyn?"

Adrian shot to his feet.

He moved so fast that he knocked over the glass by the bed and it fell onto the carpet. The dark red spread through the wool like blood that hadn't finished clotting.

Claire sat up too.

She clutched the sheet, and her eyes filled first with panic and then with something she couldn't quite hide, something like anticipation.

She seemed to have been waiting for this moment all along.

"Why are you in Paris?" Adrian came toward me.

I stepped back and avoided his hand.

That one movement froze him where he stood.

"Don't touch me," I said.

His face lost a little more color.

"Let me explain."

"Put your clothes on first."

I didn't raise my voice.

This was my bedroom, and I had no intention of standing among my mother's paintings and jewelry while the two of them discussed my marriage in a bedsheet.

Adrian seemed to realize what he looked like, and he hurriedly buttoned his shirt.

Claire got off the bed, picked her dress up off the floor, and went into the bathroom.

She stopped as she passed me.

"Your Grace, I—"

"Don't speak to me right now."

She pressed her lips together and shut the door.

Adrian took half a step closer, then stopped because of my expression.

"This isn't what it looks like."

I looked at the wrecked bed, then at the blood on his mouth.

"Then what is it?"

He had no answer.

After a moment he managed, "There are no feelings between us."

"Only feeding?"

"Not exactly."

"Only sex?"

Adrian's jaw tightened.

For the first time I saw that he could be afraid of a question I asked.

"Evelyn, you're the one I love."

"Does that have anything to do with what I asked?"

"I never wanted her to replace you, and I never thought about a divorce."

He spoke quickly, as if proving my position was secure would leave room to explain everything else.

Watching him, I suddenly understood why Claire had dared to sit on my bed.

They both knew I was irreplaceable.

And they both believed that as long as I was still the duchess, I hadn't really been hurt.

"How long have the two of you been together?"

"Evelyn—"

"How long?"

He was silent for a few seconds.

"It isn't the kind of relationship you think it is."

I didn't ask again.

Adrian had already given me the answer.

I went around him into the dressing room and opened the safe at the back.

My mother's jewelry, the Hartwell family documents, and the three small paintings were all still there. I packed them one by one into the case I had brought.

Adrian followed me in.

"What are you doing?"

"Taking my things."

"This is our home."

"It stopped being our home the moment you brought another woman into it."

Real panic finally showed in his eyes.

"I can make her leave right now. She'll never come here again."

"Adrian, you still don't understand."

I closed the case.

"What I'm taking isn't her place here."

"It's myself."

I picked up the case and walked out.

Claire was dressed now, standing in the bedroom doorway. Adrian didn't look at her. He only followed me into the living room.

"Evelyn, come back to London with me first."

"We'll talk after the anniversary dinner."

"Why does it have to wait for the dinner?"

I stopped at the door and turned to look at him.

"Because several hundred employees have spent half a year on it, and the foundation has invited artists who need the funding."

"Your betrayal shouldn't cost them anything."

His lips moved.

I didn't give him another chance to speak.

Before the elevator doors closed, I saw Adrian standing in our living room.

Behind him stood Claire, fully dressed.

To the very last second, he never answered how long the two of them had been together.