Chapter 5 ⋆˚࿔
I woke with Adrian’s back turned toward me and the answer to yesterday’s message lying in plain sight.
The scar crossed the upper curve of his left shoulder, pale against his skin in the gray light before sunrise. I had seen it hundreds of times. I had kissed it, traced it absently while we talked in bed, watched the muscles beneath it shift when he reached for me.
Until yesterday, it had belonged only to Adrian.
Now it felt like evidence.
I lay still beneath the sheets, listening to the soft hum of the city beyond the windows and trying not to think about the words that had sat on my phone screen all afternoon.
SIX STITCHES.
HE HATES WHEN YOU TOUCH THE CENTER OF IT BECAUSE IT’S STILL NUMB.
The first part might have come from a doctor, an old friend, someone who had seen the injury. The second was different. It was intimate in a way that made jealousy rise before I could reason it away.
Of course Celeste had touched him.
She had been his wife.
The thought should not have bothered me. Adrian had lived an entire life before me, just as I had lived one before him, and I had never expected otherwise. Yet knowing something in the abstract was very different from being reminded of it by a stranger who seemed determined to make Celeste present in our bed.
I reached out before I could stop myself and ran one finger lightly along the scar.
Adrian shifted.
His eyes opened a moment later.
“If this is your new method of waking me,” he murmured, voice rough with sleep, “I approve.”
Heat rose into my face. “Go back to sleep.”
“You’re touching me. That traditionally discourages sleep.”
His hand closed loosely around my wrist before I could pull away.
“What happened here?”
The question changed him just enough that I noticed.
Not alarm. Not even suspicion.
Awareness.
“You know what happened.”
“You told me it was an accident.”
“It was.”
“What kind?”
Adrian watched me for a second, then released my wrist and rolled onto his back.
“A boating accident.”
“When?”
“Years ago.”
The vagueness irritated me now that I was listening for it.
“Before Celeste died?”
His gaze returned to mine.
There was no mistaking the pause.
“Yes.”
I tried to keep my voice casual. “Were you married to her then?”
“Yes.”
That quiet, familiar guilt pressed against my ribs again. I hated turning his past into an interrogation, especially here, while we were still half tangled in his sheets and he was looking at me without any of the armor he wore for the rest of the world.
But I needed to know.
“Was it serious?”
“Six stitches.”
I went very still.
Adrian frowned.
“What?”
“Nothing.”
“Claire.”
“I said nothing.”
“And you became terrible at lying sometime yesterday.”
I looked away.
His fingers moved through my hair, pushing it back from my face with unexpected gentleness.
“The boat hit another vessel in bad weather,” he said. “A window shattered. I was standing too close to it.”
“Was it in the news?”
A faint crease appeared between his brows. “No.”
“Why not?”
“Because wealthy families are capable of having accidents without issuing press releases.”
Despite everything, I almost smiled.
“Celeste was there?”
“Yes.”
The answer landed harder than it should have.
Adrian saw that too.
“Are you jealous of my dead wife?”
“No.”
His eyebrows lifted.
“That sounded convincing.”
“I’m not jealous.”
“You’re interrogating me about an injury I received while married to another woman at six in the morning.”
“When you say it like that, I sound unbalanced.”
“You said it, not me.”
I shoved his shoulder.
He caught my hand and pulled me toward him until my forehead rested against his chest. The familiar warmth of him made the situation feel briefly absurd again. Whatever this stranger knew, this was my life now—the scent of Adrian’s skin, his hand at my waist, the steady rhythm of his heart beneath my cheek.
Real things.
Present things.
“I love you,” he said quietly.
The teasing had disappeared.
I closed my eyes.
“I love you too.”
That should have made telling him easier.
Instead, it made me more determined to understand what I was putting in front of him before I did.
By the time I reached the museum two hours later, I had decided on a narrower question.
Not who is pretending to be Celeste?
That had become too large.
I needed to know who could have known about the scar.
I searched old articles first, then archived society pages, photographs, even gossip columns preserved on sites that looked as though they had not been redesigned in fifteen years.
Nothing.
The boating accident did not exist publicly.
No mention of stitches. No hospital photographs. No vacation story. Not even a grainy paparazzi image of Adrian wearing a sling or bandage.
I searched Celeste’s name beside yacht, boating accident, injury, hospital.
Still nothing.
By lunchtime, I had filled half a page in my notebook.
Celeste knew.
Doctor knew.
Possibly family.
Possibly crew/security.
Anyone Celeste told afterward.
The list was longer than I wanted it to be, but at least it was finite.
For the first time since the messages began, I allowed myself to consider that the sender might genuinely have known Celeste.
Not be Celeste.
That was impossible.
But a sister. A friend. An assistant. Someone carrying a grievance on behalf of a dead woman.
Someone who believed I needed to know something about Adrian before I married him.
The thought unsettled me more than the prank explanation had.
My phone vibrated beside the notebook.
I stared at it for several seconds before picking it up.
Unknown number.
No text this time.
A photograph loaded slowly onto the screen.
Adrian was asleep.
Younger, though unmistakably him, lying on his side beneath dark blue sheets in a bedroom I had never seen. His hair was longer, his face softer with sleep, one bare shoulder exposed above the blankets.
The photograph had been taken from close beside the bed.
Close enough that whoever held the camera could have reached out and touched him.
