Rose Watches

Rose Taylor stood across the street from Claridge's at midnight and watched the lit windows of the eighth floor.

She was wearing a black coat. Her dark hair was pulled back. She had been standing in the same spot for two hours. The doormen had noticed her once. They would notice her again if she did not move soon. London hotels watched the street more carefully than New York ones. She had learned that the hard way last week.

She was holding a phone in her gloved hand.

On the screen was a photograph of her sister. She had taken the photograph six days ago through the kitchen window of the house in Notting Hill. Aria had been laughing at something Damien had said. Her face had been turned slightly toward the camera. She had not known she was being photographed.

Rose had been studying the photograph for six days.

She did not look like her sister. She had thought, when Catalina had first told her about Aria four years ago, that twins were supposed to look alike. Hers did not. Aria had grown up with food. Aria had grown up safe. Aria had grown up loved. Aria had grown up.

Rose had grown around obstacles. Different bone structure. Sharper angles. A face that had been hit too many times in too many foster homes by too many people who were supposed to be parents.

She did not envy Aria's face.

She envied Aria's mother.

The phone in her hand buzzed.

An unknown New York number.

Rose looked at the number for a long moment. Then she answered.

"Yes."

"Is this Rose Taylor."

"Who is asking."

"My name is Vanessa Sinclair. I am the woman who used to be Aria Cross's sister in law. I have been told you might be interested in some of the things I know about her. I am calling to see if we could have a conversation."

Rose was silent.

She had not expected this call. Nobody knew her name. Nobody knew her number. The fact that Vanessa Sinclair, of all people, had both, meant that someone had spoken who should not have spoken.

"How did you get this number."

"A man named Marcus Greer. He worked for me three years ago. He kept records I did not know he had kept."

"Marcus Greer is in New York."

"Yes."

"And you are in New York."

"Yes."

"And you are calling me from there."

"Yes."

Rose smiled. It was not pleasant.

"Then come to London, Vanessa Sinclair. I do not have conversations on the phone. If you want to speak to me, you fly here. You meet me in person. You bring whatever you have to offer in writing. And you do not waste my time, because my time is currently committed to ruining the woman you have already failed to ruin twice."

Vanessa hesitated.

"I do not have the money to fly to London."

"That is your problem."

"Rose."

"Vanessa. I do not need you. I am asking you nicely. If you want a seat at this table, you find a way to London by the end of the week. Otherwise, do not call this number again."

She hung up.

She put the phone in her pocket.

She looked back up at the eighth floor.

The light in the window had not gone out for two hours. She had assumed Aria would go home. Aria had not gone home. Aria was up there with him.

Rose felt a flicker of something. Not jealousy exactly. A close cousin.

She had grown up in twelve different houses. None of them had loved her. None of them had stayed.

Aria had grown up in one house, with one woman who had loved her until cancer had taken that away, and then somehow Aria had ended up in a hotel in London being adored by a billionaire who had thrown her out three years ago and was apparently now trying to crawl back in.

Rose knew that pattern. She had seen it in cheaper hotels in New York with cheaper men who had no money to crawl back with. The pattern was the pattern. Men hurt women. Women forgave them. Men hurt them again.

Aria was about to learn that lesson again.

Rose was going to be the teacher.

She turned and walked away from the hotel.

Behind her, on the eighth floor, the light finally went out.

She walked back to her hotel through streets she did not know. London was old in a way that New York was not. Old like the stone remembered who had walked over it. She kept her hands deep in her coat pockets and her head down and her eyes moving.

She thought about the first time she had heard Aria's name. She had been twenty seven. She had been living in a basement room in a women's shelter in Albany. The woman who ran the shelter had handed her an envelope with no return address and told her a man in a suit had brought it that morning.

Inside the envelope had been a single sheet of paper. A name. An address. Catalina Voss. Avenue Montaigne. Paris.

Rose had spent six months saving for the plane ticket. She had spent another month getting the passport. She had walked into Catalina's lobby with a knife in her bag because she had not known yet whether she was going to ask the woman who had given her up to explain or whether she was going to use the knife.

Catalina had explained.

Rose had not used the knife.

She had walked back out into the Paris sun with a name she had not known existed, the name of a sister she had never met, and a feeling in her chest that the world had been hiding something from her her whole life.

She had spent four years cataloging what had been hidden. Four years of building a list of grievances. Aria had been the easiest grievance to list. Aria, who had been kept. Aria, who had been raised. Aria, who had been loved by a single woman who had died and left her to inherit, eventually, a life of small private cruelties from a billionaire husband.

Even the cruelty Aria had received had been better than what Rose had been given.

Rose unlocked her hotel room and stepped inside.

She sat on the bed in the dark.

She did not turn on the light.