We were married eleven days later in a room with no one in it who loved either of us.
There was a judge who owed him something, and two witnesses off his staff, and a photographer for exactly four minutes because a marriage has to be seen to be a marriage and being seen was, I would come to understand, the entire point. My mother was too weak to come. I told her it was small and civil and that I'd bring the photos. I did not tell her the groom and I had exchanged perhaps forty sentences, and that half of them had been about the care contract.
He put a ring on my hand — cold platinum, a stone with no flash in it, chosen by someone who understood that flash draws the eye and he did not want eyes drawn. I put a ring on his. His hand was warm. I remember being obscurely offended by that. I'd expected it to match the rest of him.
"You may—" the judge started, and Damian said, quietly, "That won't be necessary," and the judge cleared his throat and finished the ceremony without the kiss, and that was the first mercy my husband ever showed me, though it didn't feel like one at the time. It felt like being told, again, in front of witnesses, that I was a clause.
His house sat forty minutes up the coast where the road runs out of towns.
You couldn't call it a house, really. It was a long grey building of stone and glass laid along a spit of land with water on three sides, the kind of place that has a name instead of a number, and the name was carved into the gatepost in letters worn soft by weather. Saltmeer. The sea was everywhere in it. You heard it in every room, under everything, the way you hear your own blood when a house goes quiet enough.
And the smell.
I stopped just inside the front doors with my one suitcase in my hand, and it went through me like a cold wire, and for a second I couldn't have told you why.
Salt. Diesel from the boathouse down the rocks. And under it, faint, that other thing — the freezer-cold, the switched-off cold, the smell I would not connect to a dying stranger's clothes for a long time yet.
"You'll get used to it," Damian said, behind me. "The salt. It's in the walls."
"I doubt I'll be here long enough."
"No," he agreed. "You won't."
A woman came to take my case. Older, silver-haired, a face like a closed ledger. "This is Sofia," he said. "She runs the house. She'll show you your rooms. If you need anything, you ask her, not me. We won't see much of each other."
"Rooms," I said. "Plural."
"You have the east wing. Bedroom, bath, a sitting room, a study if you want one. Yours. No one comes into it without your say, including me. You'll find that's true and you can stop bracing for it to be a lie." He was already turning away, already halfway to being somewhere else. "There are two rules, and then you can live however you like. One. When we're seen — dinners, the office, the harbor, anywhere with eyes — you're my wife, and you're convincing, and that's the whole of what I ask of you in public. Two."
He stopped. He looked at me then, full on, and the frost had something in it I couldn't read.
"The north wing is mine," he said. "The doors at the end of the long gallery, past the piano. You don't go in. Not out of curiosity, not to be kind, not to bring me anything. Ever. It isn't a test and it isn't a game and there's no romantic secret behind it. There are things in that part of the house that are dangerous to know, and I'd like you to leave here in a year knowing as little as possible. That's not cruelty. That's the most generous thing I have to offer you."
"Bluebeard had a room, too," I said.
The thing in the frost sharpened — almost, almost a smile. "Bluebeard's wives died of curiosity," he said. "Mine won't, if she has any sense. Do you have sense, Ms. Quinn?"
"It's Mrs. Voss now, isn't it. You paid for the name."
Something flickered. "I told you," he said. "I didn't buy you. You'll believe me eventually. It'll be inconvenient when you do." And he walked away down a corridor that smelled of the sea, and left me standing in my new husband's house with a suitcase and a stopped watch and no idea at all what I'd married.
Sofia showed me the east wing. It was beautiful and it was mine and I hated how much I wanted to lie down in it.
That first night I couldn't sleep. The bed was too soft and the sea was too loud and my whole life had changed shape in eleven days, and around one in the morning I gave up and went walking in my own wing in the dark, learning the geography of my cage.
That's when I heard the piano.
It came from somewhere past my rooms, down the long gallery, low and slow and unbearably tender — a piece I half-knew and couldn't place, the kind of melody that sounds like someone remembering out loud. It didn't fit the man. Ice doesn't play like that. Ice doesn't play at all.
I followed it because I am the kind of person who follows the sound into the room. I know. He'd told me not to and I'd been in the house nine hours.
I got as far as the mouth of the gallery. I could see him at the far end, at a black piano by a black window, only the shape of him, his hands doing something his face never did. And past him, past the last of the light, the doors to the north wing stood shut in the dark like a held breath.
I didn't go closer. I want that noted, since so much of what comes after is me not listening.
Because that was when I heard the other sound.
Not the piano. Under it. Behind the north doors.
A sound a house does not make on its own. A dragging. A weight moved across a floor by something that did not want to be heard moving it. And then, faint, so faint I told myself for weeks I'd invented it — a voice that was not my husband's, because my husband's hands were still on the keys in front of me, saying a single low word I couldn't make out.
The piano didn't stop. His hands never paused.
Which meant he knew.
Whatever was behind those doors, my husband was playing a lullaby over the top of it so that it wouldn't be heard.
I went back to my rooms and I locked my own door, for all the good a lock is against a thing you've already let into your head, and I lay awake till the window went grey, listening to the sea in the walls and thinking about a man who'd looked at my father's watch like it hurt him, and telling myself I'd leave in a year with as little as possible.
I have never in my life been good at knowing as little as possible.
