STIGMA

Caspian had been working overtime through the entire New Year holiday. Veyra Solenne decided she would surprise him. She'd fly out, knock on his hotel door, watch his tired face crack into a smile.

Only business class seats were left. Although she felt bad about the ticket price, she thought it was worth it.

She sat there for a full minute, unable to figure out how to lower the tray table.

The woman beside her - polished, bored, gorgeous in the particular way that costs money - let out a short laugh.

"Never flown business before?"

Veyra managed an awkward smile. "Sorry. You must run a company or something. You've got that air about you."

"Me? No." The woman waved a manicured hand. "But my benefactor does. If I'm not in business class, he sends a private jet."

"A benefactor," Veyra said. "Those must be hard to come by."

"Not really." The woman's mouth curved. "I'm his subordinate. I keep making expensive mistakes at work. He scolds me until I cry, and then-" she smiled, letting the sentence finish itself.

A small chill moved down Veyra's spine, though she couldn't have said why. "Funny," she said slowly. "My husband has a colleague like that too. Always making mistakes."

"You're married?" The woman's eyes swept over her, cataloguing. "His wife's about your age, actually."

She examined her nails.

"He says he got tired of her ages ago. Says touching her feels stale. Less interesting than watching me flip my hair."

Veyra's stomach turned, quietly, the way it does before you know why.

"I told him I wanted to see him over the holiday," the woman went on, pleased with herself. "So he told his wife he had to work."

That was when Veyra saw it. The ring on the woman's finger. A diamond, cut exactly like the wedding band she had lost two years ago.

She went still.

Caspian is an ordinary employee, she thought. So, calm down. Similar rings don't mean anything.

Her eyes fixed on the ring.

"That's a wedding band," Veyra said, her voice coming out strange to her own ears. "Did you marry him?"

"This?" The woman - Xiomara, she introduced herself, admiring the stone as it caught the cabin light - "I made him take it from his wife."

The air went out of Veyra's lungs.

"I wasn't trying to make trouble for her, honestly," Xiomara said. "But on my birthday she had a miscarriage and dragged him to the hospital. I spent it alone."

Veyra's hand drifted, without her permission, to her stomach.

The memory came back whole and freezing: black ice on the walk home from the market, a fall she hadn't seen coming, three months along, and then nothing but blood on frozen concrete. Caspian at her bedside for three days straight, not sleeping. Waking to find her ring gone along with the child.

It's okay, he'd said, voice breaking. We'll have another baby. I'll make you a new ring.

Don't, she'd told him. They're doing layoffs. Save the money. When you make it, get me one then.

She had believed, at the time, that this was a small and noble sacrifice. She had not known she was negotiating away her own ring to a woman she hadn't met yet.

"So he gave you his wife's ring," Veyra said carefully.

"He didn't want to, at first. Said he'd buy me something better." Xiomara tilted her hand, watching the light slide across the diamond. "But that old thing acts so superior just for being his wife. If I don't put her in her place, she'll think she owns the world."

"When a woman lets herself get that pathetic," Xiomara added, almost kindly, "there's really no saving her."

Veyra's fingers found the hem of her sleeve and held on. "If he spends this much on you, he must be paying her a fortune to keep quiet."

Xiomara laughed, bright and careless, and leaned in close enough that her perfume became a wall.

"Here's the funny part," she whispered. "That pathetic woman doesn't even know he runs a company."

---

"Why keep it from her?" Veyra asked. Something in her was still hoping - stupidly, stubbornly - that there was an explanation that didn't end where she thought it did.

"Because what's the point?" Xiomara turned her nails toward the window light. "She already spent her best years slaving beside him while he built everything. If you were a man and you finally made it, would you keep spending on a wife who's already worn out? Money doesn't buy back anyone's youth."

Veyra caught her own reflection in the cabin glass - hollow-cheeked, shadowed under the eyes, ten years of scraping by written into her skin. She used to look better than this. She used to look like Xiomara.

"You know, sis, you've still got some looks left," Xiomara said, studying her with the clinical warmth of someone appraising livestock. "A little cosmetic work wouldn't hurt. Your husband hasn't been that interested lately, has he?"

Veyra said nothing.

"My benefactor gives me half a million a month just for living expenses," Xiomara added, unprompted, unbothered. "Procedures are separate."

"How long," Veyra made herself ask, "has this been going on?"

"Since June twelfth, last year." Xiomara checked her nails again, already bored of the question.

Veyra's grip on her own sleeve went white-knuckled.

June twelfth. The day her mother had needed five hundred thousand dollars for surgery she never got. Caspian had begged everyone he knew and come back with three hundred fifty thousand - everything I have, he'd told her, weeping, and she had believed him, had scraped together eighty thousand more herself and still watched her mother die eighty thousand short of enough.

I'm sorry, he'd said into her hair. I'm worthless. I couldn't even save your mother.

She had wiped his tears instead of her own. You gave everything you had. That's enough. Just wait a little longer, she'd told him, and he'd gripped her hand like a man drowning and sworn they wouldn't suffer forever.

He'd had the other hundred and fifty thousand the whole time.

"Funny thing," Xiomara said, watching her now with real interest. "That woman's mother needed exactly five hundred thousand that same month."

Veyra looked at her and said nothing at all.

Xiomara winked. "He was going to pay it. Originally."

"You took it," Veyra said. "For an allowance."

"Please, he's got plenty more where that came from. I just told him - once her mother's dead, that woman has no family left. Nowhere to go. If he ever gets caught keeping me, she won't dare make a scene." Xiomara smiled, cat-content. "I wanted a Chanel piece that month. Five hundred thousand, as it happens."

"Aren't you afraid she'll find out?"

"I'm smarter than that." Xiomara stretched, satisfied. "It was my idea - tell his wife he'd scraped together everything, let her think he gave his all. She'd be too grateful, too guilty over the shortfall, to ever look for someone else in the picture."

Then, almost as an afterthought, she added the last piece.

"The annoying part is, the only reason he finally agreed to do it was so that if I ever got found out, his precious wife wouldn't leave him." She snorted. "Tch. Some women have all the luck."

The slap landed before Veyra had decided to throw it.

"What is wrong with you?" Xiomara shrieked, hand flying to her cheek.