Iris POV
The alarm never went off because Iris never set it.
She already knew she wouldn't sleep past six. Not today.
She lay still in the center of the king-size bed and stared at the ceiling while morning light cut through the glass walls of the penthouse. Fifty-two floors below, the city was already moving. Taxis. Coffee shops. People living ordinary lives going to ordinary jobs.
She used to have an ordinary life.
She sat up and looked at Gabriel's side of the bed. Perfectly made. Pillow completely flat. He had come in after midnight and been gone before four. She had heard him. She always heard him even when she pretended not to. Two years in this apartment had taught her the sound of his footsteps, the specific click of his bedroom door, the way his shower ran exactly eight minutes before he turned it off.
She knew him the way you know someone you are not supposed to love.
His lawyer had called yesterday afternoon. Smooth voice. Efficient. The papers are ready, Mrs. Stone. Final signatures today at noon.
Today she stopped being Mrs. Stone.
She crossed to the bathroom, showered, came back and opened the wardrobe. A row of suits Gabriel had chosen for her. Charcoal. Navy. Cream. All expensive. All someone else's idea of who she was supposed to be. She pulled out the charcoal Chanel and put it on without thinking and then looked at herself in the mirror.
She barely recognized the woman looking back.
She had been twenty-three when she walked into Gabriel Stone's office. Her mother was three weeks from surgery that cost more than Iris would earn in a decade. Insurance covered almost nothing. Gabriel's advertisement had felt like a door appearing in a wall she had been pressing against for months.
She had walked through it and become this. A woman in expensive clothes in a glass tower who learned to make herself invisible every single day so she wouldn't accidentally want more than the contract allowed.
She dropped her hand from the mirror and walked to the kitchen to make coffee.
She was measuring the grounds when she noticed the drawer.
The narrow one built into the kitchen island was open slightly. Not unusual. She had opened it herself a hundred times for takeaway menus or spare keys. But something was sticking out of it. A corner of paper she didn't recognize.
She told herself not to look.
She looked.
A small leather notebook. The kind Gabriel used for personal notes rather than business. She had seen him writing in it a handful of times but he always closed it before she got close enough to read anything.
She should have put it back.
She opened it.
The first page had a date from two months after their marriage began. Below it, one line in his sharp handwriting.
She fixed the broken shelf in the library today without telling anyone. She does things like that. Quietly. Like she's trying not to take up space.
She turned the page. Another date. Another entry.
She laughed at something on television tonight. Real laugh. I didn't know she laughed like that.
She kept turning pages.
He had been writing about her. Not business observations. Not contract notes. Small, careful, almost wondering entries about ordinary things she did. The way she reorganized the kitchen so morning light hit the counter better. The time she sat on the balcony in the rain because she said she liked the smell of it. The night she fell asleep on the couch reading and apparently he had stood there long enough to notice she always folded the corner of her pages instead of using a bookmark.
Months of entries. A gap. Then more.
She turned to the last page. Four days ago.
Two years and I still don't know how to be in the same room as her without feeling like I'm missing something I never had.
Iris stood in the kitchen with the notebook open in her hands and forgot how to breathe.
This man. This cold, controlled, impossible man had spent two years treating her like a pleasant fixture while privately writing down every small thing she did. Like he was memorizing her before she disappeared.
She put the notebook back exactly as she found it. Pushed the drawer to the same angle. Gripped the counter and breathed.
She had to go to the lawyer at noon. She had to sign the papers and walk out of this apartment and never come back. Her mother was alive. The bills were paid. She had done what she came here to do.
Whatever was in that notebook was a private thought he had never once acted on. Two years and he had never acted on it. He let her be invisible. He wrote things down and kept them in a drawer because Gabriel Stone collected feelings the way he collected everything else. Behind glass. Controlled. Never actually letting them breathe.
She poured her coffee.
Then she heard his car pull into the garage below.
Her whole body went still.
For two years that sound had done this to her. Her heart lifting without permission. Her hands needing something to do so she would look calm when he walked in. The complicated, embarrassing, deeply inconvenient thing her body did every single time he came home.
She heard the elevator hum.
She turned to face the kitchen doorway with her coffee cup in her hands and her expression perfectly arranged.
Gabriel walked in and stopped when he saw her.
He looked like he hadn't slept. His tie was already loosened. Shadows under his eyes. And something on his face she had never seen before in two whole years.
He looked afraid.
He opened his mouth.
His phone rang.
He glanced at the screen and something in his expression shifted. He held up one finger to her and turned away to take the call.
She heard the word lawyer.
She heard him say yes, everything is ready.
She heard the word noon.
She set her coffee cup down quietly and walked back to the bedroom to get her coat.
She told herself the notebook meant nothing.
The problem was she had read his handwriting. She had seen the dates. He hadn't written those entries once or twice. He had written them again and again for two years like a man who kept going back to something he refused to let himself have.
That was not nothing.
She pressed her back against the bedroom door and closed her eyes.
She had four hours before everything ended.
She had absolutely no idea what to do with four hours and a heart that had just cracked open in the wrong direction.