My name is Evelyn Vance, and on the second night in the Chicago penthouse I had paid for in full, my husband casually announced that his bankrupt brother, his sister-in-law, and their three screaming children were moving in before dinner.
He said it as casually as if he were asking me to pass the salt. No discussion. No hesitation. No softening phrase to make it sound like a shared burden. He stood there with a glass of expensive bourbon in his hand, his bare feet resting on the heated marble floor, radiating that maddening, parasitic confidence of a man who had mistaken his proximity to my success for the authorship of it.
The penthouse sat fifty stories above the Magnificent Mile, a sprawling sanctuary of glass, dark wood, and quiet, untouchable money. The floor-to-ceiling windows turned the city’s grid into a glittering electric ocean. The private library was larger than the damp, mold-smelling studio apartment I had rented ten years ago when my career was nothing but a stack of rejection letters and a dying laptop.
I had bought this property three weeks after signing an eight-figure adaptation deal for my fantasy book series, The Obsidian Court. Cash. No mortgage. No investor strings. No family money. And absolutely no financial contribution from my husband hidden in some forgotten joint account.
The world I built had been mine before Marcus ever entered the picture. So were the brutal, agonizing years. The carpal tunnel, the panic attacks, the editors dissecting my soul on a page, the nights I sat on my bathroom floor trying to steady my breathing because I had twelve dollars in my checking account and a deadline I couldn’t meet. When the studio deal finally closed, I didn’t feel glamorous. I felt like a soldier who had crawled out of a decade-long trench and was finally, blessedly, allowed to stand up straight.
Marcus loved to stand near the finished product. At the closing for the penthouse, he smiled at the real estate broker and said, “We finally found our dream home.” At the Hollywood premiere, he told a reporter, “We worked incredibly hard for this universe.” That word—we—was his favorite magic trick. He used it whenever there was something polished, lucrative, or prestigious enough to attach himself to. I had noticed it. I just had not yet accepted what noticing it truly meant.
He leaned against the sleek kitchen island, taking a slow sip of his bourbon. “David is bringing the family over around five today. Sarah’s packing up the kids now. They need a place to crash since the bank foreclosed on their house.”
