Chapter 4 — Wife, Tuesday

She did not sleep.

She lay in a bed the size of a lifeboat in a room she had not chosen, and at 3 a.m. she got up and put her palm flat against the adjoining door.

Nothing came through it. No footsteps, no voice, no light under the gap.

Kill the other one.

She took the words apart a hundred times before morning. Backwards in glass, forty feet, a man in profile. She'd had maybe sixty percent of it. Maybe less. That was the thing nobody understood about reading mouths — half the language happens behind the teeth where nobody can see it. She was not a machine. She was a very good guesser with a very good memory, and sometimes the guess was wrong.

But the other one had come off him clean. She'd have bet her hands on it.

Vanessa was the other one.

Unless Josie was.

In the morning there was a sheet of paper on the breakfast table with her name at the top.

HOUSE NOTES FOR MRS. STERLING

Breakfast is at seven. Mr. Sterling does not take calls before eight. The east wing is not in use. Staff will not enter your rooms without knocking twice.

Josie read it twice, and the second time she got to the last line and felt something go tight and hot behind her eyes, which was ridiculous.

Staff will not enter your rooms without knocking twice.

Somebody in this house had thought about the fact that knocking once was useless to her, and had decided the correct answer was to knock harder and longer, and had written it on a piece of paper, and had not made a single speech about it.

She folded the sheet into a square and put it in her pocket.

Julian came in at 7:04 with his sleeves already rolled.

He sat down across from her instead of at the head of the table, which meant she could see his face without turning her whole body, and she was starting to suspect he knew exactly what he was doing every single time.

"You didn't sleep," he said.

"I slept beautifully."

"You've got the newspaper upside down."

She turned it over. "It's a bad paper either way."

Something happened at the corner of his mouth. It was gone immediately.

"Wednesday night," he said. "The Foundation gala. You'll come as my wife. It's your first appearance and it will be the only thing anyone writes about for a week, so wear something that photographs."

She put her cup down.

"That wasn't a question."

"No."

"Do you ever ask?"

"Not often," Julian said. "Does it work?"

"You could try it and find out."

He looked at her for a second. Then he said, "Josephine. Will you come to the gala on Wednesday night."

"Yes."

"Wonderful. That was very moving for both of us."

And Josie laughed — actually laughed, out loud, an ugly surprised bark of a laugh — and immediately hated herself, because it was nine hours into a twelve-month contract and she was not supposed to be enjoying anything.

Julian stood up, buttoned his cuff, and paused at her chair.

"Wednesday," he said.

Wednesday still goes.

"Wednesday," she agreed.

Nobody was looking for her sister.

She established that by lunchtime.

Vanessa's phone rang out into nothing. Vanessa's apartment had been cleared — she got that from the building manager, a nice tired man who said the cleaners came Sunday, all of it, even the curtains. Her mother answered on the fourth try and then spent ninety seconds on video not looking at the camera, which was the same as hanging up.

"Mom. Mom, look at me."

Diane looked.

"Where is she?"

"Vanessa is a grown woman."

"Her curtains are gone."

"She'll call when she wants money," her mother said, and smiled, and there was a wobble in it. "They always do."

"You're not even worried."

"I'm tired, Josephine."

And then Diane Rourke said the thing that Josie would think about, off and on, for the rest of her life:

"One of you was always going to have to go."

The call ended.

Josie sat very still for a while.

The east wing was not in use, which meant nobody would come and be kind at her.

It was a long room with sheets over the furniture and a window that faced north — the good light, the flat light, the kind you can read a face in at ten feet. She pulled the sheets off. She dragged a desk under the window and angled it so that anyone coming through the door would arrive in front of her, not behind her.

Then she went out to the car and brought in the canvas bag.

It had been her father's. It had his initials worn down to a ghost on the flap, and inside it were the only three things of his she had kept: a dead calculator with the rubber worn off the 7, a shoebox of cards and paper, and the ugly green desk lamp he used to click on at midnight when he couldn't sleep.

She set the lamp on the desk and turned it on, and the bulb was warm and yellow and exactly the wrong color for the room, and for about four seconds she had to stop and put both hands flat on the wood.

Six years ago. On a Tuesday. In the rain.

Then she got to work.

By four o'clock she had built herself a wall.

Not a real one. A paper one — everything she could find with a Sterling name on it, going back four years, printed out and pinned in rows across the plaster. Annual reports. Charity filings. Old newspaper spreads. A photograph of Julian's father, Arthur Sterling, cutting a ribbon in 2019 with Crawford Vale two steps behind his left shoulder.

She did not read it like an accountant. She read it like a lipreader.

That was the trick nobody ever got. You did not need every word. You needed the shape. You needed to know which words kept showing up and which ones were being carefully walked around, and once you had that, the gaps started to have edges, and the edges started to have a name.

She stood back and let her eyes go soft, the way you do.

And one name came up off that wall the way a face comes up out of a crowd.

It was in the 2021 report, small. It was in a photo caption, smaller. It was on a guest list from a hospital opening, misspelled.

Three times in four years, and never once explained.

Meridian.

Josie stopped.

She turned around and crossed the room and knelt down at the canvas bag, and her hands were not steady, and she pulled out the shoebox and dumped it — cards, receipts, a dog-eared photo of a girl with a bad fringe on a man's shoulders — until she found the torn half-page she had kept since she was twenty, because it was the last thing he ever wrote and she had never been able to throw it out.

Small, slanted handwriting. A hook on the letter g.

Three words and a number, in her father's hand.

Meridian — ask Arthur.