Chapter 1

I'm Dominic Fox, design director at a well-known firm in Harbor City. Fifty thousand a month.

In this city I have a car, a house, and everyone sees me as a man who made it. So Joan Swanson could stay home and enjoy an easy life, the day my salary landed every month, I kept a little for cigarettes and transferred the rest, a solid fifty thousand, straight into the family account. Rain or shine.

I thought I was the perfect husband. What other man gives it his whole heart the way I do?

And Joan? Three years married, and she got lazier by the day. The place was a mess, and every night I dragged myself home dead tired only to be met by a cold face and takeout boxes.

That night I'd been out drinking with a client, a whole stomach of it, and I walked in to find the table bare. Not even a bowl of hot soup. Joan sat on the couch trimming her nails and didn't so much as lift an eyelid.

The alcohol went to my head. I flipped the coffee table in one motion, glass shattering across the floor. "I give you fifty thousand a month! And you feed me air at home? Joan, did the dog eat your conscience?"

Joan stopped what she was doing and looked up at me. None of that meek, nervous look she usually wore. She was calm in a way that made my skin crawl. She said it flatly. "Your mother only gives me three hundred a month. That's not even enough for groceries."

Eight thirty at night, Dominic pulled the Audi A6 into its space.

He pushed open the front door to a dark apartment, just one dim little lamp left on in the entryway. No smell of cooking. Not even a sign that anyone had been living.

Frowning, he reached over and flipped on every light in the living room. Under the white glare, Joan sat at the dining table with a pen in her hand, writing something in an account ledger.

She had on that gray housedress, hair twisted up carelessly, a few loose strands hanging by her ears that made her face look even more sallow.

"What time is it?" Dominic tossed his briefcase onto the couch with a dull thud. "I break my back at work all day and come home to not even a glass of water?"

Joan's pen paused. She didn't look up. She closed the ledger, set it aside, then stood, went to the kitchen, and poured a glass of warm water, setting it on the table. "You're back." Her voice was a little hoarse.

Dominic glanced at the water and didn't touch it, his eyes sweeping the empty table and the spotless, cold stove. "Where's dinner?"

"I didn't make any." Joan answered without hesitation, hands at her sides, two Band-Aids wrapped around her fingers.

"Didn't make any?" Dominic laughed like he'd heard a joke, furious enough to laugh. He paced the living room twice, then pointed out the floor-to-ceiling window at all the lit windows of the city. "Joan, look around this complex. Whose wife acts like you? I make fifty thousand a month! Fifty thousand, all of it handed to you, and I can't even get one hot meal? What do you do all day at home besides spend money? Huh?"

Joan raised her head, her eyes calm as still, dead water, watching Dominic rage. "The money isn't with me."

"Here we go again!" Dominic finally blew. He snatched the glass off the table and hurled it to the floor, the burst of glass shrilling through the quiet night. Then he gripped the edge of the solid wood dining table with both hands and heaved it over—

Crash—the fruit bowl, the tissue box, and the ledger Joan had just set down all went tumbling to the floor.

"Let me tell you something, Joan, don't give me excuses! My mom said she's just managing it for you, so you don't blow through it! You want money, you go ask her for it! She won't even give you grocery money? Go on, keep making it up!" The veins stood out on Dominic's neck, spit flying.

Joan stood in the wreckage without backing away even half a step.

She bent down, picked up the ledger, patted the dust off it, and spoke in a tone so flat it was unnerving. "Your mother gives me three hundred a month. You know what prices are like in Harbor City. Three hundred isn't enough for groceries."