ONE YEAR, ONE HUSBAND
Book Five: The Blackout Night
The storm rolled in without warning around nine that evening, the kind of violent summer thunderstorm that turns the sky the color of a bruise and sends rain sideways against the windows hard enough to sound like static. I was curled up in the library with a book I wasn't really reading, more interested in the way lightning kept freezing the garden into brief, silver photographs, when the entire house went black.
Not dim. Not flickering. Black, all at once, the kind of total darkness that makes a familiar room suddenly feel enormous and hostile.
"Ethan?" My voice came out smaller than I intended.
"Here." His voice, from somewhere near the hallway, closer than I expected. "The generator should kick in within a minute. Don't move, there's a side table directly to your left."
I did not, in fact, remember there being a side table directly to my left, which I discovered the hard way when my shin found it first.
"Found it," I hissed.
"I heard." I could hear the almost-smile in his voice even through the dark, and despite the throbbing in my shin, something in me relaxed slightly at the sound of it.
The generator did not kick in within a minute. It did not, in fact, kick in at all, something to do with a tree branch and the main line, according to the panicked call Ethan made to the building's maintenance service, his phone screen the only light in the entire downstairs. We spent the first ten minutes moving through the house together by that single small glow, Ethan going ahead to check windows the storm was rattling in their frames, me trailing behind with both hands out in front of me like a woman navigating a haunted house, until we finally found candles in the pantry, half a dozen thick pillar candles that Mrs. Whitfield apparently kept for exactly this kind of emergency, and lit them along the hallway console like a strange, flickering runway.
"You're better at this than I expected," I said, watching him strike match after match with the brisk efficiency of someone who had clearly done it before.
"I grew up in a house that lost power constantly," he said. "Old wiring, older money. You learn to manage."
We ended up in the elevator by pure bad luck, on our way down to check the fuse box in the basement, when the backup power finally sputtered and died completely between the second floor and the first, leaving us suspended in a small metal box in total darkness with no way to know how long it would take anyone to notice.
"This is fine," I said, in the overly bright voice of someone who is not fine. "This is completely fine. Elevators get stuck all the time. It's practically a rite of passage."
"You're afraid of the dark," Ethan said. It wasn't a question.
"I am not afraid of the dark. I am cautiously respectful of the dark."
"Mia."
"Fine. Yes. A little. Since I was seven, if you must know, and I would very much like to talk about literally anything else."
I heard him shift, felt more than saw him settle down against the elevator wall, and after a moment, felt his hand find mine in the dark, not holding it exactly, just resting there, warm and steady, an anchor I hadn't asked for and didn't want to let go of.
"Talk to me, then," he said. "About anything else."
"You go first," I said. "You're the one who's suspiciously calm about being trapped in a box."
"I've been trapped in worse places," he said, with something that might have been dry humor if the dark hadn't made it impossible to read his face. "Boardrooms, mostly."
"That's not the same thing."
"Isn't it? At least the elevator is honest about wanting to trap you."
I laughed despite myself, a small, surprised sound that echoed strangely in the metal box. "Is that a joke, Ethan Blake? In the dark? Should I be concerned?"
"Deeply concerned," he said. "I understand it's out of character."
There was a long silence, long enough that I thought he might refuse to say anything real, and then, quietly, in a voice stripped of all its usual polish, he said, "My mother used to lock herself in her room for days when my father traveled. I used to sit outside her door in the dark, because the hallway lights ran on a timer and no one remembered to reset it, and I got very good at not being afraid of the dark because I decided fear was a luxury I didn't have time for."
"Ethan."
"She left when I was eleven," he continued, like he'd already decided to say it all now that he'd started. "After she found out about the affair. She didn't take me with her. I used to think that meant something about me specifically, before I got old enough to understand it meant something about her."
I found his hand more firmly in the dark and held on. "I'm sorry."
"Don't be. It's ancient history." But his fingers tightened around mine, just slightly, betraying the words even as he said them, and I understood, with a small ache in my chest, that this was the most honest thing Ethan Blake had told anyone in a very long time, and he had told it to me, in the dark, where he didn't have to watch my face while he did it.
✲ ✲ ✲
The elevator doors finally opened forty minutes later, to a maintenance crew and a great deal of apologizing, and it was only in the light of the lobby that I noticed Ethan favoring his right hand, a shallow gash across his knuckles where he must have braced himself against the metal wall when the elevator first dropped and jolted before catching.
"You're bleeding."
"It's nothing."
"It is very clearly not nothing, sit down." I steered him, with more authority than I actually possessed, onto the bottom step of the staircase, and went to find the first aid kit Mrs. Whitfield kept in the downstairs powder room, working by candlelight since the power still hadn't returned.
He watched me clean the cut with the wary suspicion of a man who was not accustomed to being taken care of, and I worked in silence, aware of how close I was sitting, of the candlelight doing something unfair to the planes of his face, softening all the sharp, guarded lines I had spent weeks learning to read.
"You don't have to do this," he said quietly.
"I know," I said, wrapping the gauze with more care than the small wound strictly required. "I'm doing it anyway."
"You didn't grow up with anyone doing this for you either," he said, watching me work. "I noticed. At the dinner where you mentioned your father. You flinch a little whenever anyone brings up being taken care of."
"That's a very specific observation for a man who alphabetizes his shirts by fabric weight."
"I notice things," he said simply, and something about the plainness of it, the total absence of his usual careful distance, made my chest ache in a way I didn't have a name for yet.
Something shifted in the air between us, the particular charged stillness of two people sitting closer than the moment technically called for, candlelight throwing long shadows up the stairwell, the storm still hammering distantly against the windows. His uninjured hand came up, tucking a piece of hair behind my ear that had fallen loose during the elevator ordeal, his fingers grazing my cheek in a way that lingered far longer than the task required.
"Mia," he said, very low.
"Yes?"
He didn't answer with words. He leaned in, slow enough that I had every opportunity to stop him, slow enough that I understood he was giving me the choice he hadn't given me at the gala, and I found I did not want to use it. I was perhaps three inches from finding out exactly what an unscripted, unwitnessed kiss from Ethan Blake felt like when my phone, forgotten on the step beside me, lit up with a message.
We both looked down at it at the same moment.
✲ ✲ ✲
I should have waited until morning to open it. I did not wait until morning.
It was from Olivia, a photograph attached beneath a short message, and even in the dim candlelight I recognized the setting instantly, the same lake house from the photograph she'd sent weeks earlier, though this one was different, closer, more intimate, Ethan's arm around her waist instead of her shoulders, both of them laughing at something outside the frame.
And on his hand, resting against her hip, was a ring.
Not a wedding band. Something simpler, a plain silver band that I would not have looked at twice except that I had spent three weeks now staring at an almost identical ring every single day, because it sat on my own hand, the one Ethan had slid onto my finger in that cold lawyer's office the day we signed our contract.
Recognize it? Olivia's message read. He had it made years before you. I wonder if he ever told you that, or if he let you believe it was something new, made just for you. Ask him where the original went. Ask him why he still had it to give you at all.
I sat very still on the stairs, the gauze still in my hand, the candle guttering in a draft from somewhere, and felt the warm, unguarded moment we had just been standing inside collapse quietly into something much colder.
"Mia?" Ethan's voice, careful, noticing the change in me before I'd said a single word. "What is it?"
I looked up at him, at the man who had just told me, in the dark, about a mother who left and a childhood spent learning not to be afraid, and I held up the phone so he could see the photograph, watched his face change the instant he recognized it, watched something that looked uncomfortably like guilt move across his features before he could stop it.
"Tell me about the ring, Ethan," I said quietly. "Tell me why it wasn't new."
He opened his mouth, and for one long moment I thought he might actually answer me, right there on the stairs with the candle burning low and the storm finally softening outside. Instead, the hallway lights flickered once, twice, and flooded back on all at once, the returning power throwing us both into a sudden, unforgiving brightness that made the whole moment feel exposed in a way the darkness never had.
"Not tonight," he said quietly, his eyes still on the photograph. "Please, Mia. Not like this."
"When, then?"
"Soon," he said, the same word he'd given me before, and I was starting to understand that with Ethan Blake, soon was a country with no map and no borders, a place he kept promising to take me without ever naming the road.
I left him sitting there on the stairs in the returning light, the ring still warm on my finger, the ache in my chest not the least bit resolved by having asked the question, only sharpened by not having an answer.