Heart pounding, heels clicking, Layla rode the elevator up to the office. Replaying the conversation in her mind, she tried to figure out how guilty she had sounded. Her father had always said, a rumour was only false until you denied it. Had she denied it? Should she have played dumb? Should she have left it off? When the doors parted with a ding, she was so distracted, she almost ran into Vihaan.

"Sorry," he said. He didn't look sorry. For most people, the mere sight of her would have been enough to send them scrambling away. Vihaan, however, remained unfazed by her icy glares and bitter words.

"It's fine," she said, getting out of the elevator.

"You look upset," he noted.

One's long-lost sister's sudden reappearance in their life could do that to a person, but it was her husband showing up that had pushed her over the edge. "Well, I didn't have a great lunch."

"Bad sushi?" he said.

She nodded, not trusting herself to speak.

"I thought women weren't supposed to have sushi when they're..." He made a rough gesture toward his abdomen.

She marched toward her desk. "My culinary choices are none of your business. Get back to work, Bakshi."

As she plunked down in her office, putting her purse up on the table like a shield, Layla thought she felt eyes on her. This sense of surveillance wasn't unusual for her, though. Ever since the advent of social media and smartphones, she had felt watched. Wary. So what about this moment was atypical?

Maybe because you have something to hide... Reaching into her purse, she pulled out an unsealed white envelope and opened it. A rush of warmth washed over her, the sensation almost involuntary. Instinctive, yet all the more powerful for being so. For the past few weeks, she had lived in a state of such paralyzing fear that any thought of loving her child had been quashed by a self-defence mechanism: don't think about it, they might not even survive.

But now, gazing at the black and white sonogram that proved to her that her baby was real and her child was healthy, she could allow herself a breath or two. Not a total sigh of relief, but a simple exhalation.

When she had exited the ob-gyn's office, Amara had been standing in the parking lot, dressed like a shadow and inconspicuous as a ghost. There were no traces of the free-spirited, reckless teenage sister that Layla had known and loved and lost over a decade ago.

The memory surfaced, and she tried to shove it down, but her fingers wandered to the scar on her arm, anyway. A memento of how her sister's last appearance in her life twenty years ago had ended. Amara had been eighteen, Layla eight. She had adored her older sister, following her around every time she was home from her expensive, girls' only, East Coast prep school in Maryland.

Amara had promised to be home for spring break, and have a girls' day with Layla, dressing up in silly costumes and singing Spice Girls hits. That day had never come, and Layla, in a fit of pre-adolescent rage, had smashed her sister's makeup palettes and perfume bottles, leaving her with a mess of scented, colourful broken glass. She had also given herself a diagonal scar that spanned from where her left wrist met her hand to cover half of her forearm.

Blinking, she tried to focus on the screen in front of her. Blaring headlines and an open Word document stared back. Sighing, she began to write her latest article and found herself in the middle of typing the victim's name when the letters changed, as if by their own accord, from Heller to Hayden. Hayden.

He was buried in her mind: not just buried in a way that she could lobotomize, but in a way that was hopelessly tangled. Where every thought traced his and chased him in ways that she both despised and found amusing. It would take surgical precision or maybe a stick of dynamite to remove Hayden Song from her life. Even if he died. All she had were words: loss of her sister. Those were febrile fantasies. Her sick delusions. Her burning suspicions. Words and none of the truth.

She quickly erased the mistake and finished the article about a teenager who had been fatally shot while involved in gang activity, but when she sent it off to her editor, she couldn't help but think again of her sister. The article's subject matter certainly hadn't aided in deterring her train of thought away from Amara Lee.

Why now? Why emerge from the woodwork now, when Layla's life seemed on the verge of heaving a dying gasp, and strike the death blow? It wasn't the first time she had seen Amara in the past few months. Nor was it the first secrets she had kept from Hayden. So why did this incident, in particular, make her feel so sick with guilt?

Your husband wants to kill you, Amara had said, appearing on the balcony in the dead of night like a cat burglar, three months ago. Layla had scoffed, but the seed had been sown. And oh, how it was blooming. Take today, for example.

The fact that he had come here, to her place of work, waiting for her when she had been dropped off in Amara's car... It almost scared her. But was she scared of getting caught in a lie, or was she scared of who he was and the things he would do?

And maybe she wasn't even scared of him, per se, or the marks he might leave, the pain he could inflict. Maybe what scared her was herself. Herself, and the monsters she might have let into her life. She didn't know who to trust or what to believe, but the truth. And these days, even the truth could be distorted, warped and claimed as one's own.

#

His wife was giving him the silent treatment.

When he arrived home earlier than she did, Hayden shot her a text about dinner, telling her that he would be cooking tonight. She left him on read for half an hour before sending a thumbs-up emoji. From his usually verbose wife, it was practically radio silence. He considered following up his message with a 'we need to talk' text, but then thought better of it.

He was about to turn off his phone when he got a call. "Hello?"

"This is the Department of Justice. We have a warrant for your arrest..." came the pre-recorded voice.

He rolled his eyes and hung up even as a pang of cold guilt went down his spine like someone had dropped an ice cube down the back of his shirt. His back was ramrod-straight and just as stiff. It was nothing. A scam call. He busied himself by scrolling through his call history, which he and Layla shared. When he saw five deleted calls, a frisson of panic coursed through his body. He put down the phone.

Rolling up his sleeves, Hayden got to work making beef with bitter melon. As he opened the packaging for the meat, blood splattered onto his white shirt. He cursed. Just as he was about to go change, the lock clicked. Keys jangled, and he went to greet Layla at the door.

Normally, she would have said a cliche, like "honey, I'm home!"

Today? Today, she saw his shirt and took a step back on the porch. It made him flinch. "You should see the other guy," he tried to joke.

Instead of responding, she clutched her purse to her torso, as though he were a mugger in a back alley, and marched up the stairs. The smell of her perfume and the sound of her huffed sigh drifted down the stairs and lingered with him.

"Layla," he said, following her into the bedroom.

He stripped off his shirt and threw it in the laundry hamper before searching for another, the old, ratty college baseball shirt that Layla had borrowed from time to time. He tugged it over his head just as she exited the bathroom, trying to reach her side of the closet. He stood in her way. A jerk move, maybe, but an effective tactic.

"You should scrub your shirt before you throw it in the laundry," she said. With her hair down and framing her face, she looked younger, like the spunky, idealistic journalist that he had met five years ago. "Blood tends to stain pretty badly if you don't tend to it quickly."

"I'll do it later." Were they going to talk about laundry and nothing else?

"You hate doing the laundry," she said, as though reading his mind and deliberately aggravating him.

"Stop doing that," he said, still not moving.

"I'm not doing anything, thanks to you blocking my way." She glared up at him, sans heels and shorter in a way that made her no less formidable.

"I wouldn't have to block your way if you would just talk to me."

"Oh, so now everything is my fault, including your insane and irrational bouts of jealousy, right?" She shoved at his chest, her palms small and warm through the worn-out cotton of his T-shirt. Strong, yet ineffectual. He barely stumbled.

"I'm sorry, Layla. I was stupid, and I wasn't thinking straight. It's not your fault, none of it is. I feel like I'm losing my mind sometimes. These past few days when you kept cancelling on me... I don't know what kind of story I made up in my head, but I should have just talked to you." He reached for her hands, which still rested on his chest. She didn't hold on, but neither did she pull away. "Can you forgive me, Layla dear?"

"Yes, but... The dear was overkill." She let him grasp her hands. Then she stretched up and kissed his cheek. "Now get out, I need to change."

He left the closet and went through the motions of cooking mindlessly: washing rice and putting it in the electric cooker, stir-frying the bitter melon and beef, blanching gai lan and steaming fish. When Layla emerged from their bedroom and "helped," which meant denying that she was crying while chopping onions and garlic, he became somewhat more centred on the moment.

But all the while, he felt like he was in the early stages of dating again. Reading too much into every word, glance, and touch. Probing every breath for hidden meaning. It was maddening, what she did to him. What he was doing to himself.

"So, did you get anything good out of Senator Underwood?" he asked between bites of rice.

Layla paused in taking a spoonful of fish, crisscrossed with golden strips of ginger and spring onion. "Um... not much. Just his opinion on voting reforms."

Before meeting his wife, Hayden had watched the news rarely, whenever he had the time, mostly because of his job and its demands. No, he kept up with his new subscriptions to WaPo and NYT, but he also got a good portion of his news straight from the source: his wife's work.

"What is his take on it?" Hayden said.

Layla drizzled soy sauce on her fish. "I can't remember... Something about lowering the voting age, getting more lax voter ID laws... I've been in a lot of meetings today. I barely remember his."

"All right, I was only curious," he said, feeling like the dinner table was becoming a minefield.

They ate in silence for a few moments, chopsticks clanking against their china, the ugly blue floral pattern that his mother had given them on their wedding day. He kept meaning to buy new plates, but neither of them ever had the time. It had become, he supposed, just another thing to complain about. Another disappointment lying between them, forever unresolved.

"Your...work," she said the word work as though it were a foreign sound she was testing out, unsure of its meaning. "How's that going?"

"You sound so uncertain," he said. "What do you think I'm doing all day? "

"I don't know?" she said. "Deleting phone calls?"

He tried to laugh, but the same panic and paranoia from earlier seized him and its icy grip. "It's for a good cause."

"Like what?" She took a sip of water, her brown eyes fixed on his. Something dangerous danced there, and for a moment, in a trick of the light, he saw the candle flame flickering in her eyes. Then Layla turned her head, and it was gone.

"Like a surprise," he said casually. As casually as one could speak with the underarms of his Navy t-shirt becoming stained with sweat and a fidgety posture that years on a task force run by the FBI had beaten out of him. Quite literally. Though, Hayden surmised, not thoroughly enough.

"You had your birthday surprise." She pointed a metal chopstick at him, another wedding gift from his Korean mother. "That doesn't mean I want one, too."

He carded a hand through his hair, poker face firmly welded in place on his visage. "Too bad. I'm not taking it back."

"I think your 30th is supposed to be a bigger milestone than your 29th birthday," she suggested, getting up to rinse her plate. "But what do I know?"

Yes, he thought. What do you know, indeed, about me and what goes on inside my head?

"A lot," he said. "Last time I checked, that's how you got your promotion."

"Smart-ass," she quipped, taking his empty plate from him.

"Do you want a beer?" he said. Hayden didn't hold his breath.

"No thanks, I'm doing the dishes."

He was safe, for now. Well, safe from his wife, at least. His other enemies were a different story.