The map was laminated.
Ana stood in the entrance hall of the penthouse at eleven the next morning, still in yesterday's mascara, and held it up to the light to make sure she was seeing it correctly.
She was. Somebody had drawn the fifty-second floor of the Hartley Meridian in clean architectural lines, shaded one half pale blue and the other half pale gold, and printed a legend in the corner. Blue: D. Gold: A. Grey cross-hatching: shared.
The kitchen was cross-hatched. So was the library.
"You commissioned a map," she said.
Dominic was standing at the window with a cup of black coffee, already dressed, already shaved, looking as if he had slept nine perfect hours on a bed of folded twenty-dollar bills. "Felix commissioned it."
"On your orders."
"On my suggestion."
"Is there a difference?"
"Felix would say no." He turned around. "It seemed simpler than negotiating every room."
"It's very thorough." She found a small grey square on the map, labelled with a tiny asterisk. "What's this?"
"The laundry room."
"Why does it have an asterisk?"
"Because I don't know how the machine works," Dominic said, "and it seemed dishonest to claim it."
She looked at him. He looked back, perfectly serious, holding his coffee. Ana folded the map in half, which was difficult because it was laminated, and put it in her bag.
"Tell me about the trustee," she said.
He'd told her the short version at the end of the reception, in the car, both of them too tired to argue. A man named Abernathy Pell. Executor of Augustus Hartley's estate, independent, impossible to bribe. He would visit once, at the end of the year, to confirm that the marriage was real.
"Define real," she'd said.
"He'll decide that."
So the map was for the eleven months before Mr. Pell. Fine. She could work with a map.
The rules held for eleven days.
Breakfast was neutral territory. On the first morning she came into the kitchen at seven and found him already there, reading three newspapers at once, and she made her coffee in silence and left. On the second morning he had moved two of the papers to make room for her mug. On the fourth, there was a second cup already poured, with exactly the right splash of milk, and when she looked at him he turned a page and said, "You leave the carton on the counter. I can count."
"That's surveillance."
"It's breakfast."
On the sixth morning, she discovered he had cleared his calendar until nine every weekday. Felix told her that, accidentally, in a lift, and then looked like he wanted to climb out through the ceiling panel.
"He used to take calls at six," Felix said. "Tokyo. He moved Tokyo."
"You can't move Tokyo."
"He moved it," Felix said grimly. "Tokyo is very upset."
She didn't know what to do with that, so she did nothing.
She went back to work, because the settlement wouldn't pay out for a year and the bakery's rent was due on the first of every month in the meantime. Dominic had offered an advance. She'd refused it in a tone that made Okafor wince over the phone. She took three corporate events and a quinceañera in Fairmount. She came home late, gold side of the map, and sometimes heard a piano through the wall on the blue side, which she had not known he played. He played badly. He played the same eight bars of something over and over, stopping at the same place, as if the rest of the music had been lost.
On the ninth night she found him in the shared kitchen at three in the morning, trying to fry an egg.
The egg was winning.
"Move," she said.
"This is shared territory."
"This is a crime scene. Move."
He moved. She cracked two new eggs into butter, low heat, salt from high up the way her father did it, and slid them onto a plate. He ate them standing at the counter, in a grey T-shirt she had never imagined he owned, and said, "I could have done that."
"You could not."
"No," he agreed, and something in his voice made her look away first.
On the eleventh night there was a storm.
It came off the river at nine o'clock like a train, rain flattening against the glass in sheets. She was on the gold sofa with her laptop when the lights went out. All of them at once. The hum of the building stopped. Fifty-two floors up, the silence had a weight to it.
The emergency lights came on in the hall, red and dim. She found candles in the shared kitchen, because of course there were candles, tall white ones in a drawer, labelled. She lit three and went to find her husband, because it was the decent thing to do and not for any other reason.
His study was on the blue side. She had never been inside it. She knocked, and nobody answered, and the door was open an inch.
He was asleep at his desk.
His head was on his folded arm, his shirt sleeves rolled up, a cold cup of coffee by his elbow. He looked younger. He looked like someone who had sat down for a minute and been unable to stand up again. The candlelight moved over his face and she stood there longer than she should have, telling herself she was checking he was breathing.
Under his hand was a photograph.
It was old, the colour gone soft and orange the way photographs went in the years before phones. A woman in a pale blue coat stood on a pavement, laughing at whoever held the camera. Dark hair, falling loose. A white cake box tied with string in both hands. Behind her was a shopfront with a striped awning and a painted window.
Ana leaned in, and the candle in her hand dipped and steadied. Something in the woman's laugh tugged at her, faint as a song through a wall, and she put it down to the candle and the hour.
She knew that awning. She had climbed up and repainted those letters herself when she was fifteen, standing on a stepladder while her father held it and shouted instructions.
REYES BAKERY. EST. 1987.
And beside the laughing woman, one floury hand raised to shield his eyes from the sun, stood a young man she had only ever seen in one other photograph. The one on the wall above the cash register.
Her father.