Vivienne's POV
The estate always felt like a held breath.
Like the whole building was waiting for something it couldn't name.
I changed out of my work clothes slowly, trading the blazer that smelled like Delilah's perfume for something softer, something that didn't remind me of today. I stood in front of my mirror for a moment and looked at the woman looking back. Twenty-seven years old. Platinum hair pulled back too tight. Eyes that used to be bright and were now just... careful.
You're a whore, Vivienne. Everyone knows it.
I turned away from the mirror.
Dinner was in twenty minutes.
The private dining room sat between our two worlds — my wing on one side, the medical wing on the other — like a neutral country neither of us had claimed. The nurses always had it set before I arrived. Two plates. Two glasses. Candles, because someone on staff believed in the performance of normalcy even when nothing was normal.
I sat down. Folded my napkin. Waited.
The sound of wheels came first. Then voices — the nurses murmuring instructions, the soft mechanical rhythm of the chair. Then the door opened wider, and my husband was brought in.
Dante Hawthorne looked, as always, like a man the world was slowly finishing off.
Pale. Thin in the way that suggested muscles that had given up. A blanket across his lap even though the room was warm. His dark hair fell slightly over his forehead, unwashed, dull. His hands rested loosely on the chair arms like lifting them required a decision he didn't always have energy to make.
The nurses positioned him at the head of the table, asked him the same three questions they always asked — pain level, medication schedule, water or broth — and then quietly disappeared. They were good at disappearing. It was the most useful thing about them.
Dante looked at me across the table.
"Vivienne," he said. That thin, rasping voice. Like speaking cost him something.
"Dante," I answered.
We began.
This was the ritual. Twice a week, sometimes three times if Elena Hawthorne was visiting and wanted to believe her grandson was living a normal life. We sat. We ate. We maintained the architecture of a marriage that had never had any walls.
I had stopped trying to make conversation after year two. In the beginning I'd brought things to talk about — books I was reading, news I'd heard, questions about his life before the illness. He'd answered in short, flat sentences, and I'd eventually understood that he didn't want conversation. He wanted the performance. The wife at the table. The appearance of a life.
So now I gave him silence, and he gave it back, and we called it dinner.
I was cutting into my food when he spoke.
"You look tired."
I glanced up. He was watching me over his water glass — and something about the way he was watching made me pause for just a half second. Not the unfocused, glassy observation of a sick man. Something sharper. Like the look had a point to it.
"Long day," I said automatically.
"At the company?"
"Yes."
He was quiet for a moment. Then: "Did something happen?"
I looked at him. This was not a question Dante usually asked. He asked how was your day and accepted fine and moved on. He didn't ask follow-up questions. He didn't press.
"Nothing I can't handle," I said carefully.
His jaw shifted. Slightly. Like something in my answer had landed wrong and he was deciding what to do with it.
"You don't have to handle everything alone," he said.
The words were so unexpected that I actually set my fork down.
Five years of twice-weekly dinners, and Dante Hawthorne had never said anything like that to me. I stared at him, looking for the angle — was he having a good day? Had the medication changed? Was this just the illness making him sentimental?
His face told me nothing. He was looking at his plate now, and he looked exactly like he always did — sick, quiet, tired.
But those words hung in the air between us.
You don't have to handle everything alone.
"I'm fine," I said. My standard answer. My armor.
He looked up at me again. And there — just for a moment, so brief I almost missed it — something flickered behind his eyes. Something that didn't belong on a dying man's face at all. Something alert and controlled and almost—
Almost angry.
It was gone before I could be sure it was real. He reached slowly for his water glass, that familiar weak, careful movement, and everything was back to normal.
I told myself I'd imagined it.
I was tired. I was humiliated. I was sitting across from a man whose death I had been quietly waiting for like a rescue boat that refused to arrive. My mind was looking for things that weren't there.
We finished dinner in silence.
The nurses came to take him back. I stood, folded my napkin, said goodnight.
"Vivienne," Dante said, just before they wheeled him out.
I stopped.
"Whatever happened today," he said, not looking at me, his voice back to that rasping, careful quiet, "it won't always be like this."
I didn't know what to say to that. So I said nothing.
I walked back to my room alone, and I lay in my enormous empty bed, and I stared at the ceiling, and I thought about those words until they blurred.
It won't always be like this.
What did a dying man mean by that?
I should have slept. I didn't. I kept replaying dinner — that flicker behind his eyes, the questions he didn't usually ask, the words that sounded less like comfort and more like a promise.
Sick men didn't make promises. Sick men made peace.
Something was wrong.
Something had always been slightly wrong, and I had been too exhausted, too beaten down, too focused on surviving each day to stop and look at it directly.
I pressed my hands over my face in the dark.
I was being ridiculous. He was a dying man who had a better day than usual. That was all. I was projecting because Delilah had destroyed me this morning and I desperately needed something to think about that wasn't her face.
I closed my eyes.
I ordered myself to sleep.
But in the darkness, one question kept circling.
That flicker in his eyes at dinner — sharp, controlled, aware—
Why did it look nothing like a man who was dying?
And why did it look exactly like a man who was watching?