Chapter 5
Chapter Five
Reed
Ifind my wife by the orangery.
It takes me half the night to reach her.
Every time I spot the edge of her dress slipping through the crowd, someone blocks my path with a drink and a complaint: the lower drive, the donor seating, a cousin searching for his lost wife.
The staff keeps funneling everyone to me, as if I have the answers.
Through all of it, I keep seeing Annie. Wine-dark skirt disappearing beyond the ballroom doors.
Black feathers turning near the fountain room.
Her hair pinned up, baring the nape of her neck.
Once, across three layers of guests and candlelight, she looks back over her shoulder, and the sight of her hits low in my body. Wicked and dangerous. Mine.
By the time I escape a trustee ranting about parking, the music has gone slow and syrupy. The house feels different now. Noise packed tight in the center, shadows stretching out along the halls. I head for the orangery because I saw her slip this way, and because I could find Annie anywhere.
She stands near the open doorway, turned half away from me, dark-red fabric falling clean from her waist, raven mask catching the sconce light.
“There you are,” I say, low enough for only her. “I told you not to let anyone steal you.”
Her head tilts. No answer, not really. Just a small sound, soft enough to vanish under the music bleeding through the walls.
I step in. “You hiding from me?”
She turns into me just enough that I take it as an invitation, and I put my hand at her waist. The fabric under my palm is right. The curve of the mask is right. The loose dark twist of hair is right. I kiss her with the easy certainty of a man kissing his wife.
For one second, my mind accepts it. Then my body rejects the lie.
The angle is off. She stands too stiff against me. Her perfume is all flowers and money, thick where I expect the bite of darkroom chemicals that always lingers on Annie. Her mouth moves wrong. The waist under my hand isn’t the one I know half-asleep, laughing into my shoulder in the dark.
I jerk back so hard my shoulder clips the doorframe. The woman lifts her hand to the mask and lets it shift.
Lexi smiles at me.
“Relax, Reed,” she says. “It’s only me.”
The words hit like cold water down my spine.
“What the hell are you doing?”
Her eyebrows rise beneath the feathers. Annie’s feathers. Not the same exactly, but close enough that my stomach turns.
“Reed.”
“Why are you dressed like my wife?”
The smile stays. That’s the first thing that makes the anger come through the shock. She doesn’t look embarrassed. She doesn’t look horrified. She looks entertained.
“It’s a masquerade,” she says lightly. “Half the women here are in red.”
“Not like that.”
“You kissed me.”
“I thought you were Annie.”
“So you say,” she says, and something small and bright moves in her eyes.
My hand curls tight at my side. The spot where I touched her feels wrong, like I need to scrub it clean.
“I definitely say.”
She lets out a soft laugh. “Don’t make a scene. It was a mistake. Crowded party, poor lighting, masks. These things happen.”
“No.” My voice drops. “They don't just happen.”
A movement at the far end of the corridor pulls my attention. A man in a bronze fox mask stands half-turned from the archway, staring at us with his mouth slightly open. His gaze flicks from Lexi to me.
“I think,” he says, awkwardly, “Mrs. Dillon may have seen.”
My whole body goes still.
“Where?”
He blinks. “I don’t know. She was just there.”
I walk away, leaving Lexi in the doorway.
I rip my mask off as I move. The corridor opens into the brighter hall, and the party turns into a wall of bodies: silk shoulders, black gloves, painted mouths. People are laughing and turning, saying my name as if I have time to stop.
“Have you seen Annie?” I ask the first person close enough.
A woman in pearls points toward the west sitting room. “She went that way, I think.”
I push through the next cluster. “Annie?”
Someone says, “Reed?”
Then I spot the dark-red skirt, spread out on the marble at the end of the hall, fabric puddled around her legs. Her raven mask is a few feet away, one wing bent and broken. For a moment, the house goes silent.
My wife, in a puddle on the ground, collapsed. The world shrinks around the sight.
I get to her on my knees.
“Annie.” My hand goes to her face, then hesitates because her skin is too pale. “Annie, sweetheart, open your eyes.”
Someone gasps behind me. Another voice calls my mother’s name. The chandelier light is too harsh on Annie’s face.
“Call an ambulance,” I snap.
A server moves. Someone else says, “Perhaps she only fainted.”
“Call one.”
Annie’s lashes flutter.
I bend closer. “Look at me.”
Her eyes open, unfocused at first. Then they find my face.
She recoils. It’s not much, barely an inch, but it feels like a door slamming shut.
“Don’t touch me.”
My hand stops in the air between us. “All right,” I say, even though nothing in me is all right. “I won’t.”
She pushes herself up too fast. I reach again by instinct, and she flinches so violently I drop my hand to my knee.
“Easy,” I say. “You passed out. You may have hit your head.”
“I’m fine.”
“You’re not fine. You were unconscious on the floor.”
“I’m not leaving Catherine’s masquerade in an ambulance with all these people watching.”
“I don’t care about them.”
“I do.” Her voice is thin, scraped raw. “I do, Reed.”
Hearing my name from her hurts. Not darling. Not husband. Not even the sharp, private words we use when we fight over nothing.
A woman kneels nearby. Margaret Landry, maybe. Her mask makes everyone look like a stranger. “We can call Dr. Ames. Quietly.”
Annie’s eyes flick toward the gathered guests. “I’ll call my own doctor after I leave.”
“After you leave?” I say.
She looks at me then. Fully. Coldly.
I forget every person standing around us. “I thought it was you,” I say.
Her mouth tightens.
“I swear to God, Annie. I thought it was you.” Someone shifts behind me. I lower my voice, but the words come faster. “The dress was the same. The mask was the same. Your hair. I stopped the second I realized.”
Her face doesn't change.
“I didn't know it was Lexi.”
For one second, I think she might believe me. The thought hits with such ugly relief that I nearly reach for her again.
Then she says, “If the kiss were the only thing that happened tonight, maybe I could live through it.”
I stare at her. “What?”
She looks past me toward the main hall, toward all the masks, the chandeliers, and the watching spectators.
“What else happened?” I ask.
Nothing.
“Annie.”
“I need to leave.”
“Did Lexi say something to you?”
Her jaw works once.
“Did my mother?” I ask, and something moves across her face before she kills it. “What did she say?”
“Stop.”
“Was it someone else? Did somebody at the party say something to upset you?”
“Reed, stop.”
Her control is barely holding. I can almost hear it tearing. One wrong word, one touch, one old habit of trying to fix things, and she’ll shut me out for good.
“I need to get away from you,” she says. “Before I say something I can’t take back.”
The floor tilts under my knees. I want to say no. I want to scoop her up, get her to the car, to the doctor, to any room where nobody can stare at her. I want to shrink the world down to something I can hold.
Instead, I stand. “All right,” I say. “I’ll let you go if you let me make sure you get to the room okay.”
Her eyes cut to mine.
“I won’t touch you,” I say. “I won’t argue in front of them. But you passed out, Annie. Let me do that much.”
For a long second, she says nothing. Then she nods once. It’s the smallest mercy I’ve ever been given.
I stand, keeping enough distance between us that she doesn’t have to flinch away from me again.
“I’m going upstairs,” she says.
“Annie—”
“I can’t be down here.” Her eyes flick toward the people gathered around us, the masks, the champagne glasses, all those faces pretending not to watch. “I can’t do this with everyone looking at me.”
“All right.”
She pushes herself fully upright. Her knees buckle for half a second, and every instinct in me screams to catch her, but I force my hands to stay at my sides.
“Let me help you.”
“No.”
The word isn’t loud. It doesn’t need to be.
Someone else suggests calling the ambulance again.
“I’m not getting into an ambulance,” she says. “Just let me go."
"Okay," I agree, but it takes everything in me not to force her into an ambulance.
Her dark-red skirt trails behind her as she starts toward the staircase. One hand closes around the banister, and I follow several paces back before she stops.
She doesn’t turn around.
“Don’t.”
I stop.
Henry appears near the foot of the stairs, his face carefully blank despite everything he’s witnessed tonight.
“Would you like me to walk with you, Mrs. Dillon?”
Annie hesitates, then nods.
That hurts more than it should. She’ll accept Henry beside her. Just not me.
“Annie.”
She pauses.
“I need you to believe me about the kiss.” The back of her neck is bare where loose hair has fallen from the pins.
I remember touching her there this morning.
I remember thinking I knew every inch of the life we’d made.
“I didn’t know it was her,” I say. “I would never have touched her if I had known.”
For a moment, she stands perfectly still.
Then she looks back at me.
“That’s not why I can’t look at you, Reed.”
She turns away.
Henry stays close without touching her as they climb the stairs. I watch until the dark-red skirt disappears around the landing.
Finally, I turn, determined to find out what happened after Annie saw me kissing Lexi.
Inside, the party has gone sour. The music keeps playing, people still clutch their champagne. Catherine’s staff glides through the rooms, picking up glasses and whispering comfort. Everyone pretends Annie’s collapse is just a blip, not a fault line running through the house.
I start asking questions.
“Who was with Annie?”
A cousin shrugs. “I only saw her near the west hall.”
“Did she speak to Lexi?”
“I don’t think so.”
“Did my mother speak to her?”
A pause. Too long.
“She may have,” the woman says. “I couldn’t hear.”
I keep moving. Mrs. Kingsley says Annie looked upset before she fainted. Patricia Knight thought she’d overheated. Some guy from the preservation board saw my mother near the small corridor, but can’t say if they talked. Nobody knows anything. Everyone knows just enough to watch their words.
By the time I find my mother, she's standing near the morning room doors with a staff list in one hand, calm as polished silver.
“What did you say to Annie?”
Catherine looks up. Her ivory mask is gone. Without it, her face is serene and faintly tired, the face of a hostess enduring inconvenience with grace. “Reed, this is hardly the time.”
“What did you say?”
“I found her distressed. I tried to calm her.”
“About what?”
Her eyes move over my shoulder, then back. “Perhaps you should focus on your wife instead of interrogating guests.”
“My wife just left this ridiculous party looking at me like she didn’t know me.”
“And whose fault is that?”
The words are soft enough that anyone nearby would hear only concern.
I step closer. “What did you say to her?”
Before she answers, a hand lands too heavily on my shoulder.
“Rough night,” a man says.
I turn. Harrison Bancroft. Second cousin by marriage, maybe, or just another old family friend. He’s been at Stanhope tables my whole life. He’s loud after his third drink, useless after his fourth.
“Not now,” I say.
He leans in close. “You’d better go up there and make sure she’s not losing another one.”
The edges of the room freeze. My skin turns cold.
“What did you just say?”
Harrison’s hand drops from my shoulder. “Nothing. I only meant... after everything.”
“What did you mean?”
His eyes dart toward my mother. “Reed, come on.”
I grab his arm before he can turn away. Not hard enough to hurt him, but hard enough that he stops. “What did you mean by another one?”
His face drains under the party flush. “I assumed it was common knowledge.”
The words sink in, slow and heavy. Common knowledge.
“What is?”
He swallows. “That Annie’s had a hard time. With the babies. Everyone’s been worried.”
Everyone.
The chandelier light cuts sharper. Masks turn my way, then look off again. A group of relatives by the mantel turns into a pack of witnesses. A woman in black lace lowers her glass. Someone else stares at the floor.
I look at my mother. Her face is composed.
I look across the room. Lexi stands near the ballroom arch, still in that dark-red gown, still mimicking the lines of my wife. She’s watching me with more attention than innocence allows.
My stomach drops through the marble. Annie’s voice comes back, flat and controlled.
If the kiss were the only thing that happened tonight, maybe I could live through it.
The room tilts. Every unmasked familiar face turns into a villain.
Every polite group stands holding an invisible blade.
Suddenly, I see what Annie must have seen.
A whole room looking at her through the ghost of grief.
Treatments, miscarriages, the stack of pregnancy tests, a glimmer of hope snatched away too soon.
That belonged to us.
Then the memory opens: Glen’s kitchen, bourbon, my hand shaking around the glass, Tara’s footsteps overhead, the chance I had to stop talking and didn't take.
We lost the baby.
Then more. Specialists. Needles. IVF. Annie crying in the bathroom, trying not to wake me. Sex turned into windows and numbers and timing. My helplessness poured across my brother’s counter because I needed somewhere to put it.
I told myself I was allowed one person. I told myself Glen was safe. I told myself a lot of things that made it easier to spend pain that wasn't only mine.
I never told Annie. I should have told her I’d broken her trust.
You and me against the world.
Now Harrison Bancroft is standing in my mother’s ballroom saying everyone’s been worried.
I release his arm. It’s not his fault that Reed Dillon betrayed his wife’s trust.
The music keeps going. The candles burn on. Stanhope House shines around me, spotless and crawling with secrets.
I didn't knowingly kiss Lexi. But I did tell. And worse, I didn’t warn my wife that this day could someday happen. She was unprepared.
I opened the door on the most private room in our marriage, and now I have no idea how many strangers have been walking through it.