The shoe buckle slips. It knocks softly against the floorboards. You clamp one hand over your mouth and freeze so completely you can hear your own pulse in your ears, thick and violent, like fists pounding on a locked door.
Carmen laughs.
It is not a warm laugh, not even a particularly loud one. It is small, dry, efficient. The sort of laugh a woman uses when discussing a problem that has already been solved.
“Perfect,” she says. “First, we take the apartment and the money. Then we make sure people think she’s unstable. A few medical statements, the right attorney, a concerned husband, and she’ll be dismissed before she can even explain herself.”
The room tilts.
Your apartment. Your money. Your life.
You sit there on the floor with one shoe on and one off, staring at your own reflection in the mirror as if it belongs to somebody else. You are thirty-two years old, an architect, financially independent, the sole owner of the apartment you bought after eight brutal years of overtime and promotions and one very lonely summer spent eating takeout over construction plans. You have no close family nearby because your parents died within fourteen months of each other, and your only brother lives in Seattle and rotates on an oil platform in Alaska half the year. Daniel knows all of that. Carmen knows all of that.
That is why the plan works.
“Once she signs the marriage paperwork, it gets easier,” Daniel says.
You have never hated a voice so quickly in your life.
Carmen lowers hers, but not enough. “And remember, sweetie, fragile women are very easy to discredit. Especially the successful ones. People love seeing them crack. The trick is to make it look like concern, not greed.”
You close your eyes.
For one sharp, wild second, you picture storming into the kitchen in one shoe, throwing the other at his face, screaming until the neighbors bang on the walls. It would feel good. It would also be exactly what they could use. Hysteria. Instability. Emotional volatility. They are already writing a script for your destruction, and the first rule of survival is simple.
