Chapter 15

Diana knocked on my door at seven.

She had a bottle of wine — something from the estate's cellar, the label understated in the way that meant it wasn't — and two glasses, and the smile she'd been deploying since she arrived. The one doing a great deal of work.

"I thought we should get to know each other," she said. "Given that we're all in rather strange circumstances."

I stepped back and let her in.

The room had nothing in it she hadn't already photographed, and I'd moved the one genuinely sensitive thing — my annotated notes on the medication log — to the library panel two hours ago, tucked behind the Alderton volumes in a spot I'd found by pressing the section of wall Thomas had indicated. The panel was small. Dry. Had the smell of a space that had been waiting for something to be important enough to hide.

Diana looked around the room with the professional interest of someone remeasuring a space they'd already measured.

She poured the wine. Handed me a glass. I held it without drinking.

"You've been here longest," she said, settling into the chair by the window — the same chair Celeste had taken in the library, which made me think that chair specifically faced the door at an angle that let you watch someone's whole face while appearing to look out the window. "You must have a sense of what this selection is actually about."

"Care and companionship," I said. "For a recovering patient."

She smiled. "Of course." A pause. "Do you find it strange that he hasn't spoken to any of us yet? Beyond the formal meeting Harlan arranged?"

"He's recovering."

"Celeste said he spoke to you this morning."

"Briefly." I watched her over the glass I still hadn't raised. "How did Celeste know that?"

"She seems to know most things." A slight edge beneath the pleasantness — not directed at me, I noted. At Celeste. Diana found Celeste genuinely irritating, which meant Celeste had gotten under her defenses in a way Diana hadn't anticipated. "What did he say to you?"

"He asked about my background. My experience with long-term care."

She nodded as though this satisfied her, and I knew it didn't, and she knew that I knew. We were two people having a conversation in a completely different conversation, and the gap between them was filling up with things neither of us was going to say directly.

"Can I ask you something?" I said.

"Of course."

"Why did you come to this selection?"

She looked at me with the systematic gaze. Recalibrating. "The same reasons anyone comes to something like this. The family's reputation. The — opportunity."

"The opportunity for what, specifically?"

A pause. Something moved in her face. The fear I'd caught at breakfast, showing itself again briefly before she covered it. "A better position. Social, financial. The usual things."

"Diana." I set the glass down on the nightstand. "I'm not working against you. I want you to understand that before I say this." A pause. "Whatever you were told about this selection before you came, whatever information you were given or asked to find — I think the people who sent you here didn't tell you what you were actually walking into."

The silence lasted four seconds.

"I don't know what you mean," she said.

"I think you do." I looked at her steadily. "And I think you've been realizing it since you arrived. The look on your face at breakfast wasn't the look of someone surprised that Mara left. It was the look of someone who'd just understood something about why she left."

Diana looked at the window. Her jaw was doing something careful.

"Mara knew something," I said. "She warned me, and then she was gone. If she'd left of her own choice, her room wouldn't have been cleaned that thoroughly at midnight." I kept my voice even. "I'm telling you this because I think you're in a position you weren't adequately prepared for, and the people who put you here will not protect you if this goes wrong."

She turned the glass in her hands. The wine dark and still in it.

"I was asked to find a document," she said finally. Low. The voice of someone making a decision they weren't sure about. "A specific document. Medical authorization records, covering a period of approximately two weeks, four months ago."

The falsified signature pages.

Crane wanted them. He was sending Diana to retrieve the evidence of his own crime — not to destroy it, I realized. To control it. To have it before anyone else could use it.

"He wanted them to use as leverage," I said. "Against Reeves, or against Eleanor."

Diana looked at me sharply. "You know more than you should."

"I know what I've found." I paused. "Did you find the pages?"

"No." Her voice was flat. "They weren't where I was told they'd be."

Because they were in the library panel now. Along with my annotated notes.

"Diana." I leaned forward slightly. "Victor Crane is not going to be in a position of power in this house much longer. When that changes, anyone associated with him is going to need to have made different choices." I held her gaze. "I'm not asking you to do anything. I'm asking you to think about what you want to have done, when this is over."

She looked at the wine in her glass for a long moment.

Then she set it on the windowsill, untouched.

"The company that recruited me," she said carefully. "The intermediary firm Crane used to make contact. They operate out of a registered address on Greaves Lane."

My pulse did something sharp and quiet.

The same address Thomas had mentioned. The holding company. The dissolved subsidiary.

Diana was looking at me with the gaze stripped of its systematic quality — just a woman in a complicated room, trying to navigate toward something that wasn't a bad outcome.

"I have the recruitment contract," she said. "With the Greaves Lane address on it. And Crane's personal letterhead on the attachment."

Physical documentation. Connecting Crane directly to the recruitment of a selection candidate for the purpose of retrieving evidence.

I thought about Elliot, arriving at the service entrance in three hours.

About the drive he was bringing.

About an irrefutable case and how many pieces it still needed.

"Keep it safe," I said. "Don't give it to anyone yet. Not Harlan, not anyone on the staff." I paused. "When the time comes, I'll tell you."

She studied me for a moment with the last remnant of the systematic gaze.

Then she nodded. Once. The decision made.

After she left I sat on the edge of the bed and looked at the untouched wine on the windowsill and thought about Crane sending Diana in to retrieve the very pages that would implicate him. About Eleanor's name on a storage unit. About Reeves removing samples in the dark.

A conspiracy eating itself from the inside.

All I had to do was stay out of the way of the teeth.

Three hours until Elliot arrived.

I looked at the clock.

And my phone buzzed — not the anonymous number. A number I didn't recognize at all.

A single image. No message.

I opened it.

Mara. Sitting in what looked like a hotel room, a newspaper in her lap, her face pale and still. Alive. Clearly alive.

But on the newspaper's front page, visible enough to read, was today's date.

And written across the bottom of the image in what looked like her own handwriting:

*They know about tonight. Don't use the service entrance.*