"Either you clean my mother's apartment tonight…

I changed every password at Grace's desk while she watched.

Email.

Banking.

Company accounts.

The cloud backup I used for work files.

The payroll system.

Every login I could think of, replaced with something new, something he had never seen, something that existed only in my head.

When I was done, Grace walked me to the elevator.

"Don't tell him anything tonight," she said.

"Don't give him a reason to accelerate.

My colleague's name is Frank Delaney.

He'll be here at nine tomorrow morning.

Can you be here by eight forty-five?"

"Yes."

"If anything happens tonight — anything that feels threatening, anything that makes you feel unsafe — you call me.

Not tomorrow.

Tonight."

The elevator opened.

I stepped in.

"Grace," I said.

"Thank you."

She looked at me with the expression of someone who has seen this kind of thing before and wishes she hadn't.

"Don't thank me yet," she said.

---

The apartment was quiet when I got home.

Too quiet.

Daniel's car was in the lot.

His jacket was on the hook by the door.

But the living room was empty, and his mother's teacup was gone from the side table.

"Daniel?" I called.

"In here," he said from the kitchen.

He was cooking.

That was the first strange thing.

In six months of unemployment, he had cooked dinner perhaps twice.

"Sit down," he said, without turning around.

"It's almost ready."

I sat at the table.

I watched the back of his head.

He moved around the kitchen with a kind of careful ease that I recognized now as performance.

He set a plate in front of me.

Pasta.

A glass of wine beside it.

"Where's your mother?" I asked.

"She went home." He sat across from me and picked up his fork.

"I thought it would be nice.

Just the two of us."

I picked up my fork.

"I've been thinking," he said, "about what I said last night.

The ultimatum." He paused, turning his fork slowly.

"That wasn't fair.

I was stressed.

I took it out on you."

"All right," I said.

"I mean it." He looked up.

"You've been carrying everything.

I know that.

I haven't been doing my part." He set the fork down.

"I want to fix that."

I ate a small bite of pasta.

"I've been looking at some opportunities," he said.

"There's a position at a firm downtown.

I have a contact there.

I think it could work out."

"That's good," I said.

"I thought maybe this weekend we could talk.

Really talk.

About where things are going." He reached across the table and put his hand over mine.

"I don't want to lose you, Olivia."

His hand was warm.

His eyes were steady.

His voice was exactly right.

Every word was a lie.

I knew it the way you know something you can't yet prove — a certainty that lives in the chest before it reaches the mind.

He had seen me in that apartment.

He had watched through the camera.

He had spent the day deciding what to do next, and this — the dinner, the apology, the hand over mine — was what he had decided.

"I'd like that," I said.

"Talking this weekend."

He smiled.

He squeezed my hand once and picked up his fork.

We ate dinner together, and I asked him about the job opportunity, and he told me about it in enough detail to sound real, and I listened and nodded and refilled my own glass of wine, and the whole time I was thinking about Frank Delaney and nine o'clock and what Grace had said about the backup plan.

After dinner he washed the dishes.

I dried them.

We stood side by side at the sink the way we had in the early years, and he hummed something under his breath, and I set each plate carefully in the cabinet.

When I went to bed, he came too, for the first time in weeks.

He fell asleep quickly.

I lay in the dark and listened to him breathe.

At two in the morning, his phone lit up on the nightstand.

I didn't move.

I watched the screen from the corner of my eye.

The message preview was visible for four seconds before the screen went dark.