Prologue
There is a particular cruelty in being a woman who possesses everything the world tells her she should want and yet finds that nothing of it ever quite fits the hollow space carved between her ribs.
Ryann Daniels understood this intimately.
She was twenty-eight years old, a prodigy of code and systems architecture, a woman whose mind could untangle the most labyrinthine cybersecurity infrastructure in the span of an afternoon. She was also, by any measurable standard of the world she inhabited, beautiful — not the kind that demanded attention, but the kind that commanded it without permission. Warm brown skin that held the golden undertones of both her African and white heritage in perfect, devastating harmony. Full lips the colour of ripe plum. Burgundy waves that fell to her shoulders like something out of a commercial. A body that curved and dipped with a precision that no amount of oversized blazer could obscure entirely.
She despised it. Or rather, she despised what it invited — the reduction of her entire existence to a collection of aesthetics. Men looked at her the way collectors regarded rare objects: with hunger dressed up as admiration, with possession disguised as interest. It had been this way since she was sixteen. By twenty-five, she had perfected the art of being seen without being known.
And then there was Jacob.
Jacob Ellison — handsome, charming, persuasive — who had spent two years convincing her that she was more than her face and body, who had pressed a ring onto her finger and whispered promises into the dark. She had believed him. She had turned down a promotion, a new city, a new life, all for the architecture of a future she was building with him.
She found him on a Tuesday evening.
She had come early, wanting to surprise him after his flight from Toronto. She had a bottle of his favourite wine. She had worn the deep green dress he always said made her look like a painting come to life.
The sounds reached her before the images did. A low moan. The rhythmic percussion of the headboard against the wall of his bedroom. She did not move for a long, suspended moment — long enough to be absolutely certain of what she was hearing. Then she pushed the door open.
Marcus was on his back, his secretary straddled above him, both of them blind and deaf to the world. The bottle of wine met the floor without Ryann’s conscious instruction. Neither of them heard it over the noise they were making.
She turned and walked out. She did not slam the door. She did not make a sound.
This was not the first time. That was the part that shattered her — the quiet, terrible knowledge that she had already given him a second chance after seeing him disappear into a room with his ex-girlfriend at a company party, reappearing two hours later with adjusted clothing and flushed skin. She had confronted him. She had listened to his apologies. She had chosen to believe in the version of him she had invented.
Now she stood on the pavement outside his building in the cooling October air, the green dress entirely wrong for the weather, the wine forgotten, and she thought: I wasted three years. I could have left after the first time. I should have left after the first time.
She called her future employer the following morning and accepted the position she had almost talked herself out of.
One week later, she was gone.
She did not know, as she drove away from the city that had briefly been her home, that somewhere three hundred miles to the north, a man with dark eyes and darker secrets was about to walk into her life dressed in a janitor’s uniform, pushing a cleaning cart, and changing absolutely everything.
