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But I can't. I run the calculation and I come up empty every time. I don't think it would work, and the arithmetic of that failure matters, because I'm more afraid of what Marcus is like when he's angry than I am of what he's like in psychosis—and that is the most chilling thing I know about him.

So I step out.

His immediate reaction is joy. Not the quiet, private kind that a man keeps for himself in the dark.

This is performative. Theatrical.

A chuckle that starts somewhere deep in his chest and climbs and climbs until it breaks out of him as a full, barking guffaw, loud enough to swallow the world.

And the sound of it—the sheer self-satisfaction in it—makes me regret every calculation I just ran. Makes me want to undo the compliance before it's even fully extended.

I don't let that show.

"Your mother," he says, his hand finding the small of my back again, steering me like I'm livestock he's proud of, "took pictures of you in every situation she could possibly conceive of."

He sounds almost admiring. Almost reverent. The way a collector sounds when he talks about a rare acquisition.

"In the barn, on a horse, at a tea party. Pouting in a corner. Looking out the window of a car. Sitting at the dinner table with light falling just so across your face."

He pauses, letting that image breathe, and I wonder—not for the first time, not even close to the last—if the archive is to blame for his attention.

"She has you in dresses, and pajamas, and jeans. Whole seasonal spreads, like you were a catalog and a confession at the same time. You working this very ranch. Attending church. Pictures of you cleaning your room, mucking stalls—dressage lessons, social appearances, Sunday mornings—all of it. She could drop three entirely different versions of you on the same afternoon and not one follower would blink."

I know this. I lived it. I am still livin' it, technically.

"But there's one area of your life," Marcus continues, and his voice drops just slightly, gets quieter in that way that means the next thing he says is something he's been saving, "that she never touched." He lets the silence sharpen for a moment. "Just one."

The elevator doors close behind me with a sound like a verdict.

Marcus walks over to the small table holding the brass lamp and he sets the pie down on it like he belongs here, like he's always belonged here, and then he turns to face me with that patient smile that I now understand is not patience at all but something much colder wearing patience as a costume.

"Guess, darling." His voice is honey-thick and deliberately unhurried. "Which area of your life did she skip? Hmm? I really want you to guess."

Guess?

I don't even remember the question. My mind has gone somewhere far and instinctive, like a horse that spooks before the sound is fully registered, all body and no reasoning, just the ancient knowledge that something with teeth is very close.

"Why she…" I take a breath, a deep one, the kind you take when you are tryin' to find the floor inside yourself. And the panic—which has been standin' at the door this whole time, knockin' politely, waitin' to be let in—finally just walks through.

This breath chokes me. That is the only word I have for it. I feel like I'm breathing water, like my lungs have forgotten the arrangement, like the air in this room has changed into something that doesn't work for people anymore.

Marcus closes the small distance between us without hurry, without any sound at all, and reaches up to drag the back of his hand down my cheek. His knuckles are soft. His hands have never done a single hard thing and I can feel that in the touch—the unblemished certainty of a man who has only ever taken what was handed to him.

"What part of this picture are we missing, sweet-pea?" His eyes move over my face like he's framing a shot. "What part didn't she give me?"

My eyes squint in confusion and I hate myself for it, because confusion is the wrong response here and some part of me knows that, some deeper part that is still workin' even when the rest of me is standing here blank, and useless, and trying to find solid ground in a room that keeps shifting like the floor's been greased.

"Hmmm?" He encourages it, that confusion, like it pleases him. Like he's a teacher and I've gotten the answer nearly right, nearly, and all I need is one more nudge.

He leans in and presses his lips to my neck—soft, deliberate, a flutter of warm breath and intention—and I feel it the way you feel a spider on your arm before you've seen it, that horrible wrongness of something touching you that has no right to.

But I can't think about the question. I can't think about anything at all except how completely, bone-deep repulsed I am right now. My stomach doesn't just turn—it revolts, hard and decisive, like it has better judgment than the rest of me and it is done being polite about it.

For one long, terrible second I am absolutely certain I am going to be sick.

Marcus takes my hand, and I let him, because the alternative is some kind of resistance I don't have the architecture for right now, and I am standin' here in the wreckage of my own composure tryin' to locate the part of myself that knows how to fight.

"That's okay, sweetheart. I'll give you a hint."