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“Absolutely not. My job doesn’t allow for it. But when I heard that she was pregnant with my child ... I don’t know, it was like something lit up inside me. Hope that there could be something wonderful in this dark, black, dreadful world I live in, day to day. But that feeling was fleeting, almost instantly replaced by the most intense fear I’ve ever experienced. Me having a child would make me vulnerable to my enemies. The child would have a target on its back from the day it was born. So, I knew I had to keep the pregnancy a secret, and I didn’t know if I could trust Valerie to keep this secret, so I married her.”

“So that you could keep her close, under your watchful eye.”

“Right.”

“That feels drastic.”

“Does it? I impregnated her. I felt like it was my duty to protect her and our unborn child.”

“You have a very skewed sense of chivalry, do you know that?”

This earns me a half smile.

“Then what?”

“Well, I married her and moved her in with me, and I tried to make it work. Honestly, it wasn’t hard because every time I looked at her growing belly, I felt excitement and joy—two feelings that were very foreign to me. I tried to force a loving relationship between us. She tried too, I think. But it didn’t work.”

“I find that hard to believe. You can be very persuasive.”

He takes a deep breath. “Valerie had severe depression, and the pregnancy only made it worse. She became more and more unstable. She started resenting me for taking away her independence and demanding she take a bodyguard with her anytime she left the house. We fought all the time. The kind of arguments that make you want to pull your hair out, you know what I mean? Like two insolent children, neither trying to understand the other’s perspective, instead just screaming over each other. And that’s when I abandoned hope that we might have feelings for each other. Instead, I began building a wall of protection around her and Chloe, thereby making Valerie dependent on me for survival. It was manipulative, but I did it to protect my child.”

He looks at me, the guilt palpable. But as I listen, I can’t help but remember Prishna’s words ...

“He loves her. Her only. When Astor finally gets sick of toying with you, you will be forgotten the instant you leave his sight. He does not care about you, not in the way that you wish he would, and he will never care about anyone like he did his wife ... He cries out for her in his sleep, but you wouldn’t know that, and you never will. Because Astor never allows his whores to stay in his bed with him.”

“After Chloe died,” he says, “Valerie became even more unstable. She’d barge into my office unannounced, screaming obscenities while I was in the middle of meetings. She tried to kill herself multiple times. It got so bad that I asked her sister, Prishna, to come stay with us.” He clears his throat. “And this is where that story begins.”

I tuck my leg under my body and turn fully to him.

“Prishna has her own demons. She’d become estranged from her sister and family a long time ago and began running with a really rough crowd. She was on a downward spiral and was having some major health issues when Valerie and I married. At the time, she was more than happy to help with Valerie because she didn’t have much else going for her. So, I opened my house to her and gave her a fresh start at life, offered her a job.”

“You gave her a fake identity.”

“Correct. Prishna died and Asha was born.”

“Asha? Why doesn’t she go by her new identity?”

“She doesn’t need to here. Cillian and Leo know about it, and also Valerie hated calling her sister by a different name. So, we all just kept calling her Prishna.”

“Did Valerie not approve of what you did?”

“She was so self-absorbed by then, she didn’t care. Having Pri around helped anchor her for a while, but eventually, Valerie wanted out of the apartment—and New York—because she said it reminded her too much of Chloe. So, I packed us up and we came back here. But this place reminded her even more of Chloe, because we’d vacationed here a few times while she was a baby.”

“You guys moved into this lake house?”

“Yes.”

“So, that’s why there are so many pictures of her everywhere. This wasn’t a vacation home, it was an actual home.”

“Correct. And she put them up, to be clear.”

“She put up pictures of herself?”

“Yes. She became obsessed with the thought that I was cheating on her and might leave her.”

“Which you were.”

“Right.” He sighs. “So, she put little pieces of herself everywhere. It was one of the many strange things she did before she completely lost it.”

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