But Viven did not laugh. She was looking at Elias. And for the first time in many years, Vivien Blackwood felt the heat rising in her face. She turned quickly toward the window so he would not see. Elias moved into the east wing of the house.
Viven kept the west. Two bedrooms, two bathrooms, two separate lives divided by a hallway long enough to walk in silence. The rules were clear and unspoken. She left at 6 every morning. She came home after 10:00.
They nodded to each other in passing like guests at the same hotel. The staff called him Mr. Mercer and did not know what to make of him. Viven's life ran like a perfect machine. Elias, on the other hand, was a man who could not walk past a broken machine without stopping. On the 2nd of January, the special shareholder meeting came and went.
Viven walked into the boardroom with a certified marriage license in her folder and walked out with her shares intact. Damen smiled at her across the table the entire time. The patient smile of a man who had lost one hand of cards and fully intended to win the game. Elas was not there. He was on his back beneath the kitchen sink at the estate, replacing a corroded pipe.
When Viven came home that night and told him it was done, he only nodded, wiped his hands on a rag, and said, "Good. Then you can sleep." She stood in the doorway for a moment longer than she meant to. No one had told her to sleep in years. He fixed the squeaking hinge on the kitchen door.
He rewired the greenhouse heaters that had been dead for two winters. He found a leak in the boiler room that three contractors had missed. He did not ask permission. He did not tell anyone. Things simply stopped breaking.
And one cold night in March, Viven came home late and found him in her father's study, sitting at the desk under a lamp, the back of an old brass mantel clock open in front of him, a dozen tiny gears laid out on a white cloth. The clock had stopped on the night her father died. No one had dared to touch it since. "You don't have to do that," she said from the doorway. "I know," Elias said without looking up.
"Then why are you doing it?" He fitted a tiny spring back into place with a pair of tweezers because it's broken. For a moment, she simply stood there. Then something happened that had not happened in that house in a very long time. Viven Blackwood smiled.
2 days later, the clock began to tick again. She did not mention it, but the next morning, for the first time, she ate breakfast at the kitchen table instead of in the car. In April, she took him to the Blackwood Foundation Gala because a husband who never appeared would raise more questions than one who did. He wore a rented tuxedo and stood quietly at the edge of the ballroom while bankers and senators drifted past him as if he were part of the furniture. One investor handed him an empty champagne glass without looking at him.
Elias took it, set it on a passing tray, and said nothing. Vivien saw it from across the room. She crossed the floor, slid her arm through his, and turned to the investor with a smile so cold it could have frozen the fountain. "You've met my husband," she said. "He's the reason 40 people walked out of the Meridian Tower alive last summer."