CHAPTER TWO LANA
The invitation arrives on a Wednesday, slipped under my apartment door like a secret someone wants me to keep. Heavy card stock, cream-colored, my name written in expensive calligraphy: Ms. Lana Pope.
Not Mrs. Not anymore.
I pick it up with fingers that have learned not to shake in public.
The envelope is sealed with wax—an actual wax seal, burgundy with an embossed "D" that I recognize as The Dominion's logo.
Lucien Armitage doesn't do anything by accident.
The formality is a message: you're being invited into something that matters.
I break the seal. Inside, the card is simple:
Private Exhibition
The Dominion
This Friday, 8 PM
Contemporary works exploring themes of confinement and liberation
Your presence would honor us
— Lucien Armitage
Confinement and liberation. Of course. The universe has a sense of humor.
I set the invitation on my kitchen counter and stare at it for longer than is reasonable.
My apartment is small—a one-bedroom in The Margin that I rented three months ago when I couldn't stay in the estate anymore.
My house, the one Gabriel transformed so completely after we married that I stopped recognizing it as mine.
He'd colonized every room until even the walls felt like they belonged to him.
This one-bedroom apartment is sparse. I left most of my things behind, took only what I could justify: clothes, books, and my mother's jewelry box. Everything else belonged to the performance of being Gabriel's wife, and that performance is over.
I'm still figuring out what comes after.
The invitation sits there, accusing me. Tempting me.
I went to The Dominion once, a week ago, and it was uncomfortable in ways I'm still processing.
The booth Lucien chose was too visible. The other patrons looked at me like I was a curiosity—the young widow, Gabriel Pope's leftover.
I drank wine I didn't want and left after forty-seven minutes because staying longer felt like admitting I had nowhere else to be.
Which I didn't. But admitting it felt worse than pretending.
The cameras bothered me most. I've developed a sixth sense for surveillance.
Five years of marriage to Gabriel taught me to recognize when I'm being monitored.
He had cameras installed throughout our house—"for security," he'd said, but security was just another word for control.
He'd check the feeds from his office downtown, call me if I moved through rooms in patterns he didn't approve of.
"Why were you in the east wing? You never go to the east wing.
" As if my own house had restricted zones I needed permission to access.
The Dominion's cameras are more sophisticated, better hidden. But I found them anyway. Years of spotting Gabriel's lenses taught me where to look: corners where walls meet ceilings, spaces behind decorative molding, angles that offer the best view of entry and exit points.
And I looked at one. Deliberately. Tested it.
Because if someone was watching—and someone was definitely watching—I wanted them to know I knew.
The question is whether that was smart or incredibly stupid.
I pour myself coffee from the French press on the counter.
It's 10 AM on a Wednesday. I have nowhere to be.
The foundation I started with Gabriel's money—the one thing I did with his death that feels like redemption instead of theft—doesn't require my presence today.
Solange, my co-founder and the only person who knows pieces of the truth, is handling donor meetings.
I have the day to myself, which means I have the day to spiral.
I pick up the invitation again. Read it three more times.
Themes of confinement and liberation.
Gabriel's death was five months ago, but it feels like it happened to someone else.
I remember fragments: the storm, the terrace, his hands on my shoulders shaking me, the way his foot slipped.
Then falling. Then gone. But the sequence is jumbled, the details blurred like I'm watching it through frosted glass.
The police asked questions. I answered them, they ruled it accidental. Case closed.
Except nothing is closed. I still don't know if my hands pushed him or tried to save him. I still wake up at 3 AM with my palms pressed against the mattress, feeling the phantom memory of his chest under my fingers. Pushing? Steadying? The nightmare never clarifies.
My therapist—Dr. Cross, who I see twice a week and who never judges the gaps in my memory—says trauma does this. Fragments the narrative. Protects you from what you can't process yet. "Your brain is being kind," she told me last session. "It's giving you time."
Time for what, though? To remember? To forgive myself? To accept that I might have killed my husband and the uncertainty is the punishment?
I set down the invitation and walk to my bedroom.
The space is minimal: a bed, nightstand, and lamp.
No mirrors. I refused to bring any from the estate—especially not the full-length mirror Gabriel had installed in our bedroom so he could watch me dress.
I couldn't stand seeing myself in it anymore, couldn't stand the way my reflection looked like a stranger I'd agreed to become.
My closet is half-empty. Most of my wardrobe is still in boxes, clothes I haven't had the energy to unpack. But I know what I'd wear if I went back to The Dominion. Black. Always black. Widow's weeds without the veil.
I shouldn't go. Last time was an exposure I wasn't ready for. People looking at me, assessing me, wondering. Is that Gabriel Pope's widow? The one who called 911 and said she killed him, but they ruled it an accident anyway? What really happened on those cliffs?
I felt their questions like hands on my skin.
But…
There was one moment last week that felt different.
When I looked at the camera—when I let whoever was watching know that I saw them too—there was a shift.
Like the surveillance stopped being violation and became.
.. acknowledgment. Someone seeing me. Really seeing me, not the performance of the widow or the ghost of Mrs. Pope, but me. Whoever that is now.
It was the first time in five years I felt seen instead of monitored.
And I want that again. Even though wanting it feels dangerous.
Even though the rational part of my brain—the part that sounds like Dr. Cross—is screaming that seeking out surveillance is a trauma response, that I'm recreating the conditions of my marriage because familiar pain is easier than unfamiliar freedom.
But maybe I need to be seen before I can figure out who I am without Gabriel's reflection showing me.
I walk back to the kitchen and pick up the invitation one more time.
Your presence would honor us.
Lucien Armitage is a stranger who sends formal invitations and builds exclusive clubs and probably has reasons for inviting me that have nothing to do with being honored by my presence.
But he's offering me a space. A booth. A gallery.
Somewhere to exist that isn't this apartment where I'm slowly disappearing.
I take out my phone. Type: Mr. Armitage, thank you for the invitation. I'll attend. — Lana Pope
I send it before I can reconsider.
His response arrives thirty seconds later: Wonderful. I look forward to seeing you. A car will collect you at 7:45 PM.
Of course he's arranged a car. Of course he knows where I live. Lucien Armitage is the kind of man who knows things.
I set down my phone and look at the invitation one more time.
Friday. Two days away.
Two days to decide if I'm brave or just addicted to being watched.
The rest of the day dissolves into the kind of numbness I've become familiar with.
I eat yogurt from the container because cooking for one person feels performative.
I read half a chapter of a book I won't remember.
I sit on my couch—second-hand, purchased from a furniture store in The Hollows where no one knew my face or my last name—and watch the afternoon light change angles across my walls.
At 4 PM, my phone rings. Solange.
I answer. "Hey."
"You sound dead." Her voice is warm, still carrying traces of The Hollows despite two decades working in The Crest. "Tell me you left the apartment today."
"I left the apartment yesterday."
"Lana."
"I'm fine. Just tired." The lie comes easily. I've been lying about being fine for so long it's become my most fluent language.
"You're not fine. You're isolating again.
" I hear papers shuffling on her end. Solange is probably at the foundation office, surrounded by funding proposals and donor files and all the work I should be helping with but can't quite manage.
"Come in tomorrow. We have the donor lunch. You need to be here."
I'd forgotten about the lunch. Some tech CEO who's interested in funding our expansion into legal aid for domestic violence survivors. Important. The kind of meeting that requires Mrs. Pope's widow face—gracious, grateful, appropriately bereaved but inspiringly resilient.
"What time?" I ask.
"Noon. And Lana? Wear something that isn't black."
"I'm in mourning."
"You're in hiding." Her tone softens. "I'm not saying you have to wear pink. Just... maybe charcoal? Navy? Something that says, 'I'm healing' instead of 'I'm haunting my own life.'"
I almost laugh. Almost. "I'll think about it."
"That's not a yes."
"It's the best you're getting."
She sighs, but there's affection in it. "Fine. See you tomorrow. And Lana? I'm proud of you. The foundation—what we're building—it matters. You matter."
The call ends before I can figure out how to respond to that.