Chapter Eight: The Cousin's Room

Elena

The phone buzzed again in my hand and I nearly threw it across the room.

Another message. Same blank number.

*You should look closer to home. She knows more than she's telling you.*

I read it twice, my pulse hammering so hard I could feel it behind my eyes, in that same place the cancer liked to sit. She. There was only one she it could mean in this house, and my stomach dropped straight through the floor, taking something with it I hadn't realized I still had left to lose. A small, stupid hope that at least Sophia's cruelty toward me had limits.

I didn't sleep. I lay there running through every conversation I'd ever had with her, every cup of tea, every morning she'd asked if I was alright and I'd believed she meant it, searching for the one moment I'd missed something. By four in the morning I gave up and just lay there in the dark, listening to Marcus breathe beside me, waiting for the house to wake up around us both.

He left for the airport at six. A Geneva trip, gone until Thursday. I stood at the window in my robe, arms wrapped around myself, and watched the car disappear down the drive, and something in my chest loosened the way it does when you've been holding your breath without noticing.

Sophia had a studio appointment at nine. I waited until her car crunched over the gravel and the sound of the engine faded, and then I stood outside her door for a long moment with my hand flat against the wood, my heart going so hard it actually hurt behind my ribs.

Her room still smelled like her perfume, the one Marcus once told me overwhelmed him on my skin. I remembered that conversation so clearly, him wrinkling his nose at a department store counter, telling me it was too much, and I'd put the bottle back on the shelf that day feeling embarrassed for wanting something so small. I stood there breathing in the exact scent he'd once called overwhelming and felt something ugly and tired twist in my chest before I made myself move.

I started with the dressing table drawer, my hands not quite steady. Lipsticks worn down to nothing, a tangle of thin gold chains, a pharmacy receipt folded into quarters that turned out to be for vitamins. I closed the drawer and felt a small, humiliating flicker of disappointment, like some part of me had wanted this to be easy, wanted the ugliness to be simple for once instead of buried.

The wardrobe next. I went through coat pockets with my stomach in knots, guilty even doing it, some old part of me still apologizing to a woman who had helped poison me. Nothing. A hat box with an actual hat inside. Bed linen still in its plastic. My hands were sweating and every creak the house made, a pipe ticking somewhere, wind against the glass, sent my pulse spiking like I'd been caught already.

The desk was last, and I told myself it was the final place I'd try before admitting this whole search had been born out of an anonymous text and my own exhausted, frightened imagination. Studio sketches. Fabric swatches. A stack of unopened mail. Nothing.

I stood there with my hand pressed flat against the desk, breathing too fast, feeling foolish and small and tired in a way that had nothing to do with the cancer for once. I thought, for one weak moment, about just sitting down on her floor and staying there until someone found me, because I was so tired of being the only person in this house who was actually looking for the truth.

I turned to leave instead. My hand was already on the door.

Then I saw the dust.

A thin, undisturbed layer along the top edge of the closet frame, the kind that collects in a house cleaned every week by someone who never quite reaches that high. Except low down near the floor, one narrow section had been wiped clean in a smear, recent enough to still show the faint shape of fingers.

My heart did something strange, a lurch and a settle at once, hope and dread arriving together the way they always seemed to lately.

I crouched down and pulled out the row of shoes I'd only glanced past the first time. Most still had their tags on. Bought and never worn. The kind of thing you buy because buying it is the whole point, a small private comfort nobody else needs to know about. I understood that better than I wanted to.

Behind them, in the shadow the light didn't reach, sat a shoebox that didn't match the others. Older. Softer at the corners. The kind of box you keep because of what's inside, not because of what it once held.

My hands had gone properly cold by the time I lifted it into my lap and sat down with my back against her bed, my own breathing loud in my ears.

Photographs first. Old ones, curling at the edges. Sophia at maybe nineteen, standing beside a car I recognized from an old album of Marcus's, his father's estate car. Beside her, one arm slung easy around her shoulders like they'd known each other a long time, stood a man in a driver's uniform, smiling at whoever was holding the camera like the day had been ordinary and good.

I turned the photo over. A name written in pencil, faded but legible.

*Thomas Reid. Summer, before everything.*

Before everything. I sat there with my thumb resting on those two words, feeling something tighten in my throat that I didn't have a name for yet.

Further down was a newspaper clipping, folded so many times the creases had gone soft and yellow. I opened it with hands that had started shaking again, worse this time.

FORMER BLACKWOOD DRIVER FOUND DEAD IN APPARENT SUICIDE.

Two years old. I had to set it on my knee to keep reading, my eyes blurring at the edges.

Thomas Reid, 34, formerly employed as a personal driver for the Blackwood family, was found dead at his home Tuesday morning in what police have ruled an apparent suicide. Reid had worked for the family for nearly a decade before his sudden resignation eighteen months prior to his death. Friends described him as increasingly withdrawn in his final months. No note was found.

I read it three times, my whole body gone still. Eighteen months prior to his death. I did the math without wanting to, my chest going tight and cold at once. Eighteen months before he died would put his resignation right at the time of my parents' accident.

I thought of the widow Damian and I had been trying to trace, the one who'd said there was a second man in that car. I thought of how unlikely it would be for two men to be tied to two separate tragedies in the exact same narrow window of time, in the exact same family's employ.

This was him. I knew it the way you know your own name.

And he was dead. Ruled a suicide. No note.

I sat on that floor with the clipping trembling in my hand and something inside me cracked open that had nothing to do with strategy or evidence or any of the careful, cold planning I'd built my last weeks around. A man had died. A real man, with a face and a smile and an arm slung easy around a young woman's shoulders in a photograph from a summer that came before everything went wrong. And somewhere in the space between his resignation and his death, something had happened to him that a person doesn't come back from.

I pressed the back of my hand hard against my mouth, my eyes stinging, and I let myself grieve him for a moment, this stranger I never met, because it was the only honest thing I had left to give him.

Then the front door opened downstairs.

Every muscle in my body locked at once. Footsteps in the hallway. Too soon. Sophia wasn't due back for another hour.

I shoved the clipping and the photograph back into the box with hands that could barely obey me, my breath coming in short, useless pulls, and pushed it into the closet behind the shoes, as close to where I'd found it as my shaking hands would allow.

The footsteps reached the top of the stairs.

I stood too fast and the room tilted, dark spots crowding in at the edges of everything, and for one long terrifying second I thought this was it, the seizure finally arriving, choosing this exact moment out of every moment it could have chosen. I grabbed the edge of her dresser and held on, my heart slamming so hard I could feel it in my teeth, until the room settled back into place.

The footsteps stopped outside the door.

There was nowhere to hide in a room this tidy. Nothing to duck behind. No lie fast enough or good enough for why I was standing in the middle of Sophia Langford's bedroom with my whole body shaking.

The handle turned.

I opened my mouth, some half formed excuse about a borrowed dress already forming, useless, and the door swung open.

It wasn't Sophia.

It was Marcus.

He was supposed to be on a plane to Geneva. He was supposed to be gone until Thursday. Instead he stood in the doorway of his mistress's bedroom in his travel suit, looking at his wife standing in the middle of that room, and for one endless second neither of us said a single word. I could hear my own pulse. I could feel my hands still trembling at my sides.

Then he smiled. Slow. Cold. Nothing at all like the smile he'd given me over coffee that morning.

"Interesting place to be standing," he said quietly, "for a woman who told me she had no idea what her husband gets up to in this house."