Chapter 6
Five weeks in and her body was beginning to keep its own ledger.
She wasn't sleeping. Not in the dramatic way — not lying awake for hours staring at the ceiling, not pacing the house at three in the morning, nothing that would register as a symptom to anyone watching.
She was sleeping in fragments: two hours, then awake, then another hour and a half, then awake again, then a thin, unsatisfying stretch until the alarm.
The kind of sleep that left her tired enough to feel it in her bones but not tired enough to justify it to anyone, least of all herself.
She had lost four pounds. She knew because the dress she'd bought for the Parallax anniversary screening — a fitted black thing she'd tried on three weeks ago and liked — now hung slightly loose at the waist, and when she looked at herself in the bedroom mirror while getting ready, she saw the difference.
Not gaunt. Not dramatic. Just the slow erosion of a woman running on vigilance and adrenaline and the particular caloric cost of lying with her whole body for five weeks without a break.
Cassian walked past the bedroom doorway, half-dressed, and paused.
"You look beautiful," he said.
"Thank you."
"I mean it. That dress. You should wear it more."
She turned back to the mirror and fastened an earring and did not look at him.
The compliment landed the way all his compliments landed now — accurately, automatically, and from such a practiced distance that it could have been addressed to anyone standing in front of a mirror in a black dress.
He wasn't seeing her. He was seeing the event they were about to attend and confirming that the woman standing next to him would be adequate for it.
"Ready in ten," she said.
"I'll be downstairs."
She heard his footsteps on the stairs. She looked at the woman in the mirror — brown eyes, dark hair, earrings, the dress that was a little loose — and she thought: You are running out of time.
#
The screening was at a private venue in West Hollywood — one of the converted spaces that production companies rented for events they wanted to feel exclusive without being pretentious.
Low lighting, good sound system, servers with champagne flutes, the usual mix of industry people arranged in their usual constellations.
Cassian moved through the room the way he always did — gravitational, easy, pulling people toward him with the casual magnetism that had been part of his operating system since before she'd known him.
Anders was there. Of course Anders was there. Standing near the bar, managing, his pleasant face scanning the room with the attentiveness of a man whose job was to ensure that nothing went wrong. He nodded at Nell when she came in. She nodded back.
Soleil was not there. Nell had checked the guest list — she'd seen it on the kitchen counter two days ago, and Soleil's name was absent. Whether by coincidence or by design, Nell didn't know. She didn't know if Anders had arranged that too. She didn't know if the arranging extended that far.
She took a glass of champagne she wouldn't drink and positioned herself at the edge of a conversation group — the comfortable perimeter, the place where a wife could stand and smile and nod and not be required to speak.
She was good at this. She had been good at this for twenty years.
The industry wife. The woman who knew enough about the business to contribute when asked and who knew better than to contribute when not asked.
The woman who had once had her own career, her own eye, her own name on a festival program, and who had folded that career into a drawer like a winter coat that was no longer needed.
The film was a short — twelve minutes, something Parallax had produced for a streaming platform, a pilot for a series about corporate whistleblowers that was competently made and emotionally inert.
Nell watched it with the part of her brain that still evaluated film, the part that never turned off, and noted the lazy dolly shots and the dialogue that tried too hard and the lead actress who was doing excellent work with mediocre material.
She wondered if Cassian saw it too. He probably did.
He was good at film, even when the film wasn't good.
After the screening, people milled. Drinks were refreshed.
Conversations formed and reformed. Cassian was across the room with a director Nell vaguely recognized — a tall man with glasses and a beard and the demeanor of someone who believed his opinions were particularly valuable.
Fragments of the conversation drifted over.
Something about distribution windows. Something about international markets.
Cassian was nodding, listening, performing the particular brand of attention that made the person talking to him feel like the most important person in the room.
Then the director left, and Cassian turned to someone else — a woman Nell didn't recognize, mid-thirties, dark hair, attractive in the industry way that meant well-maintained — and the spike came.
It wasn't Soleil. She knew it wasn't Soleil. The woman was too short, too pale, and Nell had memorized Soleil's face from the photos on the tablet until it was burned into her retinas like an afterimage. This was just a woman at a party. Another face in the room.
But the spike happened anyway. The involuntary surge of heat, the tightening in her chest, the rapid calculation: Is he flirting?
Is that the laugh? Is his body angled toward her the way it angles when he's interested?
She watched for ten seconds, fifteen. Professional.
The standard Cassian Ridley charm, deployed equally toward men and women and waiters and parking attendants. It was nothing.
But the spike told her something. Five weeks of surveillance had rewired her nervous system.
She couldn't look at him talking to a woman without the jolt, the check, the rapid assessment.
It was exhausting. It was corrosive. It was turning her into a person she didn't want to be — paranoid, watchful, interpreting every gesture as evidence.
She set her untouched champagne on a tray and went to find a bathroom.
In the bathroom, she locked the door and stood at the sink and looked at herself.
Brown eyes. Tired face. The earrings she'd put on twenty minutes ago in a bedroom that smelled like his cologne.
She turned on the faucet and let the water run cold and pressed her wet hands against the back of her neck and breathed.
Get through tonight. Get through this room. Get through the car ride home and the putting-away of the dress and the brushing of the teeth and the lying down next to him in the bed. Get through it and then tomorrow you can go to Yara's office and hold a camera and be a person.
She dried her hands. She went back out.
#
He found her twenty minutes later, standing near the exit, trying to calculate when they could leave without it being noticeable.
He appeared at her side with a fresh glass of something and handed it to her and put his arm around her waist, and she let him, because the alternative was to flinch, and flinching would end the mask.
"Having a good time?" he asked.
"It's fine. The film was—"
"Terrible. I know. The director's going to get notes on Monday that he's not going to like."
"The actress was good."
"She was. She deserves better material." He paused. Took a drink. The ice clinked against the glass. "Hey. I've been thinking."
"About what?"
"About us. About what you said the other night — about whether we really talk."
She went still. Every nerve in her body pulled taut, the way they did when the camera caught something unexpected and she had to hold perfectly steady to keep the shot.
"I think you were right," he said. His voice was lower, directed at her, not for the room.
"I think I've been coasting. On us. On the fact that we work well together and the house is good and the routine is good and I've let that be enough.
And I know it's not enough for you. I know you need more than routine. "
She didn't speak. She couldn't. The mask was holding but the thing behind it was moving, pressing against the surface, the way water presses against a dam when the level rises.
"I want us to be what we were," he said.
"When we first — do you remember the apartment in Brooklyn?
Before the company, before all this." He gestured at the room, the event, the industry.
"We used to talk about everything. We used to sit on that terrible couch and drink cheap wine and just — be together. I miss that."
"I miss that too," she said, and her voice was wrong.
It was the wrong tone. Too flat, too thin, with something underneath it that she hadn't meant to let through. She heard it the same instant he heard it — a fracture, hairline, in the smooth surface of the woman who had been performing a marriage for five weeks without a single slip.
He looked at her. Not the reading-the-room look, not the casual assessment. A real look. His brow creased slightly. His arm around her waist tightened a fraction.
"Hey," he said. "Are you okay?"
"I'm fine."
"You don't sound fine."
"I'm tired. It's been a long week."
"We can go. If you want to go, we'll go."
"I'm fine, Cass."
He studied her for a beat longer than was comfortable.
She held his gaze and forced the mask back into place — jaw loose, eyes soft, the slight smile that said I'm here, I'm present, I'm your wife and everything is normal.
She watched him decide to believe it. The concern faded, not because he'd seen through to the truth, but because the truth was inconvenient and the mask was easier and he was, as she'd learned in Chapter 4, a man who would always choose easier.
"Okay," he said. He kissed her temple. "But let's go. You're tired. I'll get the car."
He left to find Anders and say goodnight. She stood by the exit and breathed and felt the fracture in the mask like a crack in a pane of glass — invisible unless you knew where to look, but structural, the kind that spread.
#
Zadie called the next morning.
"How long are you going to do this?" Zadie asked. No preamble. No hello. Zadie had never been good at preambles, and five weeks into this particular situation she had stopped trying.
"I don't know."
"That's not an answer. Nell. You've been living with a man who is actively sleeping with another woman and lying to your face every single day, and you're losing weight and you're not sleeping and you're spending your days building evidence like a prosecutor instead of living your life.
This isn't watching anymore. This is self-harm. "
"I'm working. The documentary—"
"The documentary is good. I'm glad about the documentary. But the documentary is also a place to hide, and you know it."
Nell was sitting on the back patio of the house, her coffee going cold, the canyon spread out below her in its morning light. Cassian had left for work an hour ago. The house was empty.
"He almost said something last night," Nell said.
"What do you mean?"
"At the screening. He started talking about us, about the early days, about wanting to get back to what we were.
And for a second I thought — I don't know what I thought.
That maybe he'd say it. That maybe the door I've been leaving open would actually work.
That he'd look at me and tell me the truth. "
"And?"
"And then he didn't. He saw something on my face and he got worried and he decided to take me home instead of dealing with it. He chose comfortable over honest. Again."
Zadie was quiet for a moment. When she spoke, her voice was softer, but the edge was still there.
"Nell. Listen to me. I love you. You are the smartest person I know.
But you are waiting for something that is never going to happen.
He is never going to confess. Not because he's a monster — because he's a coward.
A comfortable, charming, well-funded coward who has never had to face a consequence that his money and his partner and his smile couldn't smooth away.
And you standing there holding the door open is not going to change that. It's just going to break you."
"Maybe I need it to break me."
"Why?"
Nell looked at the canyon. The light on the chaparral. The distant sound of a landscape crew somewhere up the hill.
"Because if I confront him before I'm finished, I'll always wonder.
Did he have it in him? Was the man I married still in there somewhere?
I need to know that I waited long enough.
That I gave him every chance. So that when I leave — and I am going to leave, Zadie — I know it's not because I gave up too soon.
I know it's because he never came through the door. "
"And how will you know when you've waited long enough?"
She didn't have an answer. She picked up the coffee and took a cold sip and thought about the woman in the bathroom mirror at the screening — the tired face, the dress that didn't fit right, the fracture she'd heard in her own voice when she'd said I miss that too.
"Soon," she said.
"Define soon."
"I don't know. I just — I know it's soon. I can feel it. The mask is slipping. Last night at the screening, he saw something. He didn't know what it was, but he saw it. I can't keep this up much longer."
"Then don't."
"Not yet."
Zadie exhaled. The sound of a woman who loved her friend and could not save her from herself.
"I'm here," Zadie said. "When the mask comes off. Whatever time it is. I'm here."
"I know."
She hung up and sat on the patio and looked at the view — the expensive, curated, perfectly maintained view from the house that Cassian had bought eleven years ago because it had good tile and real plaster walls and a kitchen that faced west. She thought about the apartment in Silver Lake that she'd started looking at online.
She thought about Yara's office with its paper stacks and thriving plant.
She thought about the Canon C300 in its bag in the trunk of her car.
She could feel it coming. The end of the watching.
The end of the mask. The thing she'd been building toward for five weeks — the architecture of an exit, the documentary, the financial separation, the attorney, the evidence, the understanding of who he was — all of it was nearly complete.
She almost had everything she needed. Almost.
One more week. Maybe two. Then the door she'd been holding open would close, and she would be the one closing it, and he would not understand why until it was too late to ask.
She went inside and washed her coffee cup and put it in the cabinet and stood in the kitchen where he'd made pancakes and where she'd watched him in the dark and where she'd told him everything was fine, and she pressed her hands flat on the counter and closed her eyes and breathed.
Not yet.
But soon.