After Loretta had gone to bed and they'd cleaned up the kitchen, loaded the dishwasher, capped the champagne bottle and shoved it in the fridge, Layla had escaped to the television. Her sanctuary of brightly coloured people and exotic places and nothing truly real, nothing that could break her or hurt her or ever touch her.

But Hayden had left the TV on a news channel. And when she went to change it, she couldn't find the remote. And even when she found the remote and went to switch to HGTV or Food Network or even TLC, she couldn't stop thinking about the bag of cameras and microphones and rat poison that she had found, or why he would keep it in their kitchen. Their kitchen, where she usually rarely entered anyway.

He had been off his game, that was clear. He had uttered a desperate lie that was paper-thin when there were so many better ones out there. If he'd said it was to kill raccoons that kept scratching at their front door, she might have believed him.

But even then, there was the small matter of the microphone she had found under the floor lamp when Loretta had overturned it while vacuuming the carpet. Not only that but also the camera attached to the porch swing. The microphone swaying from the boxy chandelier hanging above their living room.

"What are you thinking about?" Hayden's steps were as silent as Inky's. Or maybe it was only that she'd been so engrossed in her suspicions that she hadn't heard him come in at all.

"Why are there cameras in our house?"

"What?" He sat down next to her on the white suede sofa, and his body seemed to sag into the cushions, every muscle losing tension. It was as if he were a puppet and someone had cut his strings. Or maybe he'd snipped them himself.

"Look what I found today." She pulled out the microphone from her pocket, the one she'd found embedded into the base of the floor lamp.

"Layla, I've never seen that in my life."

"That's what they all say. That must be why I saw you with the exact same brand of microphone in a so-called trash bag in the kitchen, right? Don't play dumb with me. We're both too smart for that."

"First of all, I was the one clearing the microphones and cameras out of the house," he snapped.

She could have believed him. God, she wanted nothing more than to believe him.

But she'd seen the receipt.

"Yes, that must be why your bag has a shipping invoice for one bottle of rat poison, three sets of microphones, and four sets of cameras." Her tone curdled, sour and caustic and utterly toxic.

"I tried." Hayden sank further into the couch, but instead of curling up and seeming to dissolve, to take up less space, it had the opposite effect. There was something more sprawling about him, almost suffocating; like his presence took up more oxygen merely by the act of folding himself deeper into the sofa. "I tried."

"Tried what?" she said. "What did you try? To spy on me?"

"That doesn't even make sense," he spat. "You know that, logically, you know that. It wasn't me. I live here, Layla. Why would I want to spy on myself?"

"You're not here all the time." She kept charging forward, a train fully intent on going off the rails and off a cliff. "You can't be here all the time. Why wouldn't you want to keep an eye on me?"

"Why would you think it's me, Layla," he said slowly, "when we have a neighbour who seems intent on worming her way into our lives."

"Because..." she scrambled for a lie. For a life raft. But they'd both fired holes into this ship, and it was sinking whether they wanted it to or not. "Because."

"Because what?" he prompted, but he filled in the blanks before she could, as always. "Because the two of you are friends, and she told you her real name is Amara? Because you like her?"

"You're the one who said you liked her." She stabbed her finger into his chest. He didn't blink. Not like he'd given in, but like he was impervious to her, like she was nothing to him, a fly buzzing around a statue. "Not me."

"Who is she?" he said. "Who the hell is she, Lay?"

Layla wanted to shake him, to grab him by the shoulders and make him care about something other than Amara. But why would he? There was nothing in her for him to care about, nothing except a pair of living breathing children who shared half of his DNA. She was a vessel. Not a person. "Why would I know?"

"I think you do." He shook his head, and tugged the Ray-Bans off of his shirt collar, slapping them onto the table. They scuffed, one of the lenses scratching. He stood and pulled something from the back pocket of his jeans. A sunglasses case, and inside were the very same Ray-Bans, sans scuff. "You're just like her. A damned liar."

"Could you at least wait until your mother is out of the house before you start calling me names?" She dug her fingers into the suede couch, staring up at him with a plea. A plea for what? Mercy? For him to leave her alone? For him to stay, and to care, and to pretend that what they were was more than the inconvenient bond between two political actors with an agenda?

"Don't talk about my mother. You don't even know her."

"I know she seems a hell of a lot happier than we are."

"Young love," he said, and it was a sneer to hide the sob that was threatening to erupt from his throat. "Young freakin' love."

"What did we have, Hayden?" She stood, too, ready to shove past him, ready for this conversation to be over.

He grabbed the remote and ignored her questioning, turning the volume on the news channel up from mute.

Layla didn't bother to keep asking. She didn't want an answer. She wanted something else from him, something substantial, something that could finish breaking them with its weight. Instead, she stood glued to the floor, feet planted on the carpet as she stared at the TV.

"Coming on now, with breaking news about the last election, is D.C. correspondent Vihaan Bakshi. Mr. Bakshi is a columnist for the Maryland Herald. Vihaan, what can you tell us about these new developments?" said the news anchor, a sunny blonde clad in a blue sheath dress.

"Well, Tara, I can't say it's looking good for Cytex." Vihaan shook his head, his dark hair perfectly coiffed and his navy tie perfectly straight. "Three different members of the U.S. Senate, as well as the Attorneys General of several states, have come forward to accuse Cytex of rigging the last presidential election."

"Shouldn't it be Attorney Generals?" Hayden muttered.

She slapped his arm to shush him. "I'm watching this."

"You would be."

"I see. And can you name any names on who gave you this information? It seems no other outlet has reported this development so far," said Tara Stone.

"I'm afraid my anonymous source will have to remain anonymous," he said, giving a tight-lipped smile.

"And has the CEO of Cytex given out any statements?" asked Tara.

"Not yet, though I have heard some whispers from Mr. Lionel Russell," said Vihaan.

"The owner of Cytex and other subsidiaries? That's quite high-up, Mr. Bakshi," said the reporter with raised eyebrows. "What can you tell us about these... whispers, as you call them?"

"Well, I definitely think Cytex won't go down without a fight."

"Thank you, Mr. Bakshi. That's all the time we have for today, but I look forward to reading your column tomorrow," said Tara. "Now, moving on to the latest tax hikes..."

"He found out," Layla said, heedless of the fact that her husband was right beside her and could hear everything she was saying. "How did he know? Where did he get this information?"

"Did he steal your story or something?" Hayden's eyes narrowed.

"No... I don't know..." she murmured, pacing the floor with a hand resting on her abdomen. "How could he have known?"

"He and Lionel Russell went to the same school," Hayden said suddenly. "Maybe they're old friends."

She fixed her gaze on him. "How would you know that?"

"At the party for your work, he mentioned it."

She couldn't read his eyes, to see if there was any truth to them. She was beginning to think that she should have joined him for his monthly poker nights, just to see what he looked like when he bluffed. "I see. But how did you know what school Russell went to?"

"He's a bit of a name-dropper, that Vihaan." Hayden sat back down on the couch as if nothing had ever happened. "He likes to brag."

"No, he doesn't." Even when he'd given her the phone number for Senator Underwood, it had been with humility, off-handed nonchalance. "He likes to stay out of the radar."

"Maybe with you," he said, and she felt the lines between her reality and his were blurring. "Not when he was talking to me. Shook my hand a little too long, too."

"He views me as a younger sister," she said, still processing the shock of it all. She'd discussed Cytex with Tatiana that very morning. Now, Vihaan was reporting it on national news less than twelve hours later.

Hayden opened his mouth like he wanted to fight. But the fight had gone out of both of them. There was nothing left in their stockpiles of ammunition to lobby at one another. All they had were smoking, charred ruins.

"I think it's Amara," he said finally. "She has to be the one who hid these cameras here. She's the one trying to ingratiate herself into our lives."

She couldn't argue, for once. "I agree."

"The only question is, what are we going to do about it?"

#

Hayden walked briskly along the sidewalk, wishing for once that he had a dog instead of a cat so that he could have an excuse to be out here for a stroll. People took walks in their neighbourhoods all the time. It wasn't some sort of abnormality, surely. But it would have been nice to have a prop of some sort.

"Hey! Amara, right?" he said, flagging down Amy Tang when he saw her walking in his direction.

Was it just his imagination, or did she blanch at the sound of her name?

"Yep, that's me." She played along easily. "What can I do for you?"

"I wanted to return the sunglasses you dropped off," he said. The early morning sun hadn't yet peeked out of the clouds, but the heat was oppressive enough that he was clad in cargo shorts and a white t-shirt. "I don't know whose they are, but they're not mine."

She took the sunglasses from him with an expression that was entirely unreadable. If he was bold enough, he might have said it was the same one Layla wore. But then again, he had no reason to say it. "My mistake. I've been having a lot of guests over recently, and I suppose yours looked similar to someone else's."

"Who else have you met in the neighbourhood?" he said, stuffing his hands into his pockets. Birdsong seemed to have vanished from the neighbourhood, the only sound being their conversation.

As she rattled off a few of their neighbours with eerie accuracy and knowledge of their tics and idiosyncrasies, he couldn't help but be impressed. If she was a con woman, she was well-trained in the art of deception. "Everyone around here has been quite polite."

"Yes, I like the neighbourhood for that reason, too." Hayden glanced at her shirt and recognized it as one from his alma mater. "So, you went to Penn, too? I got my undergrad there."

"Really?" she said. "I didn't see you there."

"What year did you graduate?"

She rattled off a year that was a few years ahead of him before correcting herself. "Oh, I didn't graduate at all. I dropped out in my sophomore year."

"What did you major in?"

"Communications." Anara gave him the side-eye, clearly uncomfortable with his interrogation.

Perhaps he should dial it back. Offer up his own drops of truth. "That's what I was in, too."

"Then how did you end up as an accountant?"

"I double-majored in business and communications."

"I guess you weren't cut out for the entrepreneur life?"

"I don't mind being my own boss," he said. "But I prefer working as part of a team, for a greater good."

The best way to convince someone that you were trustworthy was to hand them the truth. Even part of the truth, twisted and warped as it might be, could still be recognizable as veritas.

"I'd hardly call bookkeeping part of the greater good."

"I was an FBI profiler for a few years before that, but I retired about six months ago," he admitted. Would that fact make her more or less suspicious of him?

Her demeanour didn't change. Perhaps she wasn't involved in some nefarious criminal plot after all. If anything, she seemed more wide-eyed, innocent, naive. But it seemed as fake as the pearls around her neck and the lipstick she wore. It was all part of an elaborate act. "Really? What was that like? It sounds incredible."

"Nothing that exciting," he lied. "I hardly ever saw any real action. Mostly just waiting for tips from informants."

"Really? But wasn't there that big drug cartel case a few years back, where the FBI led a raid on some gang?" The way she widened her brown eyes was a performance. A convincing one, but a performance all the same.

"You remember that?" he said. Most people didn't keep such things in mind, even if they were huge cases. For most people, the news cycle moved too quickly for such things to be anything more than a blip in their minds. Not to mention it had barely been covered in the news, merged into a political campaign for the sitting president to seem tough on crime.

"I like crime." She shrugged. "I mean, you know, true crime podcasts and that kind of stuff."

The FBI was a bit different from true crime podcasts or from any sort of Forensic Files-type show, but he wasn't about to shatter an illusion. Either the illusion of a show or the illusion that she didn't know more than she was letting on. "Do you stalk serial killers, too?"

She laughed like he'd told a hilarious joke. "Oh, Hayden. You never know what someone might be. Or who they might be."

"Is that why you planted cameras in the house where my wife and I live?" he said, letting a protective edge slip into his tone all too easily. "Because you wanted to know who we might be?"

"Where are you pulling these accusations from?" Amy stopped dead in her tracks. "I don't even know what you're talking about, Mr. Song, but if I were you, I'd be getting my head checked out."

"This invoice for a bottle of rat poison, cameras, and microphones doesn't ring a bell?" he said flatly, pulling the slip of paper from his pocket. "It's meant to be sent to A. Tang. But the address was mistakenly sent to our house."

It was all an act, of course, just as much as hers was. He'd copied the invoice for his own shipment and changed the name. But Hayden liked bluffing. He liked the risk, the thrill, the ease of winning when you had nothing to win with.

Amara pulled her shoulders back. "You're mistaken."

"Really."

"The cameras and microphones are for my garage. I think someone's trespassing there and sleeping in the garage at night." She batted her lashes at him like a woman who was genuinely scared that someone might be squatting on her property. "I was scared, so I bought the stuff. The rat poison is for the rats... which are also in my garage."

"My wife and I found the same model of camera in our house," he said. "And last time I checked, your house didn't even have a garage. It only has a driveway and a front lawn that took the last homeowner two hours to mow."

She seemed to give in, to accept the truth. But instead of giving up or playing dead, she bared her teeth and struck. "My other property. I'm renting it out and the tenants keep complaining about an... infestation. This brand of the camera's pretty popular, too, Hayden."

"I'm sorry to hear about your vermin infestation." He went to keep walking, but she put a hand on his arm.

"I'd be careful, Hayden Song," she said. "If I were you, I wouldn't keep going down this path."

"Why not?" he said, folding his arms over his chest.

"I think you know." She tilted her head back, staring up at him. "You're threatening someone I care about."

"You only care about yourself, then?" The words slipped easily from his mouth, but he had the feeling they were nothing more than a general retort, nothing really targeted that would strike at a weak spot.

"Watch your step." Amy Tang pushed past him and kept walking.