Chapter 3 — The Terms

The Sterling house had nine bedrooms and it was the quietest place Josie had ever stood in.

She did not say that out loud, because people took it badly. Hearing people wanted her to be lonely in a house like this. They wanted the silence to be a tragedy.

It wasn't. It was beautiful. In her mother's house the floors carried everything — footsteps, doors, the washing machine, her mother's temper coming up the hall. Here, nothing came through at all. The rugs ate it. She could stand in the middle of the front hall in her sister's shoes and feel absolutely nothing, and for one strange moment she was almost happy.

Then Julian appeared in a doorway and made a small gesture with two fingers, and she followed him.

The study was dark wood and green glass. He had taken his jacket off somewhere between the car and this room, and his tie was gone, and he looked less like a photograph and more like a man who had been awake for two days.

There was a folder on the desk.

He turned on a lamp before he spoke to her.

She noticed that. He turned the lamp on, then moved it — moved it so the light came onto his own face instead of into her eyes. He did it without ceremony, the way a person straightens a chair.

Then he sat on the edge of the desk, so that he was lower than her, and his mouth was level with her eyes.

"Sit down," he said.

"I'll stand."

"You've been standing for nine hours in shoes that don't fit you."

"How do you know they don't fit me?"

"Because you've been walking on the outsides of your feet since the cathedral."

Josie sat down.

He pushed the folder across.

It was twelve pages. She read it the way her father had taught her to read anything — last page first, then the money, then the exits, then back to the top.

Twelve months of marriage. Public appearances as required. Separate rooms unless agreed otherwise. Her mother's name appeared twice, in the part where a very large family debt stopped existing. There was a number at the bottom with her own name beside it, and she looked at that number for a long moment and then had to put her hand flat on the desk.

She looked up.

"Why me?"

"Because—"

"No." Her voice came out flatter and harder than she meant it to. It did that when she was frightened. "You had my sister. You had the beautiful one, the easy one, the one who knows which fork it is. You signed papers for her. And then you stood at that altar and you weren't surprised for even half a second, and I want to know why."

Julian reached past her, opened a drawer, and put two photographs on the desk.

She turned the first one around.

It was her.

Three years ago, in a bad gray blazer she had since thrown out, standing at a podium in a conference hall in Chicago. Mid-sentence. One hand up. The room in front of her full of people twice her age, all of them leaning in.

She had given that talk with no interpreter because the organizers had forgotten to book one, and she had done it anyway, and it had been the best forty minutes of her professional life.

"Where did you get this?"

"I was in the fourth row," Julian said.

Josie's head came up.

"You were in—"

"Fourth row. I came for someone else. I stayed for you." He said it without warmth, like a fact about weather. "Everybody else in that room was there to be seen. You were the only person on that stage who wanted to be right."

She turned over the second photograph.

It was not a photograph. It was a scan of a page, and the page was torn along the top edge, and the handwriting on it was small and slanted and had a hook on the letter g.

Josie stopped breathing.

She would have known that hand anywhere on earth. She had learned to write copying it. She had two birthday cards in a shoebox in her mother's attic with that hook on the g.

"Where," she said, "did you get that."

"It was mailed to my office eleven months ago. No return address." Julian let that sit. "Your father found something, Josephine. And then your father died."

"My father died in a car."

"Yes."

"In a car, on a Tuesday, in the rain, six years ago."

"Yes," Julian said. "Six years ago. On a Tuesday. In the rain."

And then he stopped, and let her hear the shape of what he had not said.

Josie's hands had gone very cold.

"I can't trust anybody in my own company," he said. "Not an auditor, not a lawyer, not a friend — I've tried all three and all three leaked inside a week. I can't have someone on a phone. I can't have someone in an email." He leaned forward slightly. "But nobody can make a wife testify against her husband. And nobody in that building will ever, ever guard their mouth in front of you."

"Because they'll think I'm furniture."

"Yes."

"You're counting on it."

"Yes," he said. "And it's the most useful thing I own, and I'm sorry about that, and I'm going to use it anyway."

The awful part was that she respected it.

She picked up the pen.

She thought about her mother's face saying prison. She thought about her father's hook on the letter g, on a page that had come out of nowhere eleven months ago. She thought about the fact that this man had turned a lamp toward himself without being asked.

She signed her name.

Her hand did not shake this time.

He walked her to the door of the study and then stopped her there, with one hand, barely touching her arm.

He waited until she had turned all the way around. Then he put his fingers under her chin and tipped her face up, so she had a clean straight line on his mouth, and held it there — a second longer than the sentence needed.

"One more thing."

She could feel her own pulse in her throat, under his thumb.

"Everyone in this house will lie to you."

His eyes went over her face.

"So learn to read me first."

Then he let go and walked out, and she stood alone in the study with her heart going like a bird in a box.

The lamp was still on.

She turned toward the window to steady herself, and the black glass gave her the whole hallway behind her in reverse — the long runner, the stairs, the little table with the flowers.

And Dom Reyes standing at the bottom of the stairs with a phone at his ear.

His mouth was moving.

Backwards, and small, and forty feet away in a sheet of dark glass — but she had been reading reflections since she was twelve years old, and she was certain enough.

"She's in."

Her stomach turned over.

"Kill the other one."