Page 19 of Belong to Me
He thinks I’m performing. He thinks the trembling is technique. He thinks the balcony kiss was strategy and the coffee I threw away was a gambit and the tears I didn’t cry were discipline, and he is cupping my face and calling me remarkable and what he means is: you’re the best liar I’ve ever met.
I try one more time.
“Anton.” His name in my mouth. It costs me everything. “I’m telling you the truth.”
His eyes hold mine. His thumb is still on my cheek. His expression is tender and certain and immovable, the expression of a man who has already decided and whose decision is reinforced by every word I speak, because in his world the more passionately someone insists they’re innocent, the more skilled the deception.
He leans down. His lips press against my forehead. The kiss is gentle. The kiss is a verdict.
“I know you believe that,” he tells me, his mouth against my skin.
I close my eyes. His lips are warm on my forehead. His hand is warm on my cheek. His voice is warm and his conviction is warm and all of it, every degree of warmth, is the temperature of a man who thinks he’s being kind while he breaks the last piece of me that was holding.
I step back. His hand falls.
His eyes follow me. They are calm and grey and fond, the eyes of a man who admires a performance, and the fondness is worse than cruelty because cruelty I could fight. I don’t know how to fight fondness. I don’t know how to fight a man who dismisses my truth with a kiss on the forehead and the gentlest voice I’ve ever heard.
“Thank you for hearing me out,” I tell him, and my voice is level, and the levelness isn’t composure. It’s the silence after the monitor goes dark.
I walk to the door. I don’t look back. I press the lift button and the doors open and I step in and I press the lobby button and the doors close and he doesn’t follow. He doesn’t follow because he thinks I’ll be back.They always come back.
The lift descends. Monaco rises around me through the glass walls, the harbour expanding, the yachts becoming real, and I am sinking through a building that belongs to a man who kissed my forehead and called me remarkable and told me he knows I believe my own story, and the city below me is blurred because I’m crying now. Silently. Hands at my sides. Tears running down the cheeks he just touched.
The lobby. The concierge. The glass doors. The night air.
I walk home. It takes a long time. I don’t call a taxi. I walk because walking is the only thing that belongs to me and the pavements of Monaco are real under my feet and the tears dry somewhere along the way and by the time I reach my apartment I’m not crying and I’m not shaking and I’m not anything at all.
ANTON
The lift doors close and she’s gone.
I stand in the hallway with my hand still raised where her cheek was and the warmth of her skin is fading from my palm and the penthouse is silent and the harbour burns through the glass and I lower my hand and I walk to the bar cart and I pour myself another drink and I sit down.
She was perfect.
The trembling. The cracked voice. The way she clasped her hands and buttoned her cardigan to the throat like a girl going to church. The balcony-kiss confession, timed to the exact moment when sincerity would hit hardest. Even the forehead, tilting into my kiss instead of pulling away, letting me feel the warmth of her scalp against my mouth, a submission so exquisite it borders on art.
I’ve seen women perform innocence in six countries and four languages. I’ve had mistresses who could cry on command and lovers who could tremble with surgical precision. Daisy Fletcher is better than all of them. Daisy Fletcher almost made me believe.
Almost.
I finish the drink. I pour another. The ice cracks in the glass and the sound is too loud in the empty penthouse and I press the cold glass against my forehead where her skin was and I close my eyes.
The problem is the almost.
Because I’ve been doing this for years and I’ve never almost believed. Not once. Not the woman in Geneva who wept real tears and turned out to be recording the conversation. Not thelawyer in Milan who quoted Rumi and was wearing a wire. I’ve built an empire on the ability to read people, and the foundation of that ability is the knowledge that everyone performs. Everyone lies. Everyone has a version of themselves designed for the person across the table, and the real self is behind it, protected, calculating.
Daisy Fletcher stood in my penthouse and told me she was the exception.
My chest hurts. Somewhere behind the sternum, in a place I don’t have a name for, something is pressing outward, and I don’t know what it is because I haven’t felt it before, not since my father’s funeral when I was fifteen and Andrei gripped my hand so hard the bones creaked and I swore I would never let anyone close enough to make my chest do this again.
I pick up my phone. I call Alexei.
He answers on the second ring. My eldest brother does not make people wait for answers and does not wait for them himself.
“She came to the penthouse,” I tell him. “The girl from Keyes. She told me a story. Elaborate. Detailed. She claims the aunt lied, the firm misrepresented her, and she’s been genuine from the start.”
Silence. Alexei’s silences are not empty. They are full of calculations I will never be privy to, run on hardware I don’t understand.
