MasukMarlowe I gave it two days.Two days of watching Sable's hand go to her pocket whenever her phone was silent. Two days of seeing her at breakfast without her lipstick, which she'd never once forgotten in three years, and at lunch with her sleeves pulled down over her wrists. On Thursday evening I caught her in the hall staring at the clock for so long that Beatrix asked if she'd lost something.Friday. Or I send it to him myself.It was Thursday night, and I couldn't sleep. I lay on top of the bed in the dark, replaying it, and I knew exactly what Jo would say. She'd say, You can't. She'd say it was another fire, another way to burn the plan down, and that a woman who has been paid for three years to watch me is the last person on earth I should trust.She'd be right. I'd have agreed with every word.At midnight the burner buzzed once under my pillow. Jo: Whatever you're thinking, don't. I hadn't told her I was thinking anything. Sixteen years of friendship will do that to a person.
Marlowe Sable had dressed me every morning for three years, and in all that time she had never once pulled a zip too hard.That was the thing about her cruelty. It was so clean. She didn't snap or sulk or slam anything. She'd run a brush through my hair in long, even strokes and say, in the voice of a woman reading out a train timetable, "You've lost weight, Madam. It suits you. It makes the eyes look larger. Mr. Thorne likes that." And I would sit there with my hands in my lap and feel the words go in as neatly as a needle.On Wednesday morning she caught a fold of my skin in the zip of the grey dress, and said nothing, and pulled."Ow.""Stand still."I stood still. In the mirror her face was the colour of candle wax. She was wearing yesterday's blouse. I knew because there was a coffee mark on the cuff, the size of a thumbprint, and Sable did not own a blouse with a mark on it. She wore her clothes the way some people wear a verdict.She'd come to us from an agency with a referenc
Kael I had never been in my own clinic after midnight without a patient on the table. It felt like a church. Or like the aftermath of one.I'd drawn the blinds and left on one lamp, the green-shaded one over the reception desk. The chairs in their row, the corkboard, the child's drawing of a horse. I'd always liked that drawing. Tonight it looked like a witness.It was strange being the only light on in the street. I kept thinking someone would notice and knock, and I'd have to explain to a doctor sitting alone in a dark clinic with the blinds down and a box of other people's secrets.Jo Vance arrived at ten past, carrying a shoebox in a carrier bag and wearing the expression of a woman who'd come to a wedding to object."Doctor.""Ms. Vance.""I'd say it's nice to meet you, but I'd rather not lie in a room we're about to put on the record.""Fair enough." I held the door. "Tea?""God, no. If I drink anything I'll be sick."She set the shoebox on the desk and stood with her arms cros
Marlowe The dress was Thorne's idea. Dark green silk, long sleeves, a high neckline that sat politely against my collarbone. For the board, he said. Something that says capable and calm. He looked rather pleased with himself when he said it. A man dressing a woman for the occasion he's planned to bury her at.Jo got us the fitting by ringing the dressmaker herself. That was the only reason it happened at all. Thorne has a habit of approving things so he can seem gracious, and Jo had worked it out before I did.The shop was three rooms above a florist, all pale carpet and pins. Sable took the chair outside the fitting room with a magazine. The dressmaker, a tiny silent woman with a pincushion strapped to her wrist, handed Jo a mouthful of pins and a piece of chalk, said something about fetching her tape, and drew the curtain across on her way out. I didn't think she'd left by accident.Sable looked up when the curtain closed. Then she looked down again, and turned a page. In the gap b
Marlowe He came to me at half past eleven. I'd been waiting for it since breakfast, and it still sounded like a dropped coin when his shoe touched the landing, small and bright and wrong.I was in the armchair by the window with a blanket round my legs and a novel face-down on my knee, and I hadn't turned on the lamp. The moon laid a long pale rectangle on the carpet. I kept my feet out of it.Thorne's mother had gone to bed at ten, as she always does, with her door shut and her little night-light on. Beatrix's room is at the back, over the kitchen. Sable sleeps two doors down from mine. I'd counted all of them on my fingers before I sat down, like a child before a test, and then I'd sat in the dark and waited to find out which answers I'd got wrong.He didn't knock. He never does when he's been drinking.I should explain that. Thorne doesn't drink. It isn't principle. He just dislikes anything that makes a man's face move without his permission. In three years I'd seen him finish ha
Marlowe I kept the breathing going for forty minutes after his door clicked shut. Four in, five out, the little catch at the end. I'd practised that catch in the dark for weeks and never needed it so badly, and I still don't know what gave me away. A hair on the pillow. A stillness that was too tidy. He knows my sleep better than I do. That was always the trouble with Thorne. He'd read the manual.At six I let myself stop. My jaw ached from not clenching.By eight I was downstairs in the pale blue cardigan, the one I wear when I want to look breakable. Thorne was already at the table with the coffee he wouldn't drink and a face like a freshly ironed shirt. His mother sat at the far end with her toast cut into four triangles, the way she has every morning since before I met her."You slept," Thorne said."Like a stone.""Good." He turned a page of the paper he wasn't reading. "I've some news that will please you."Nothing he calls good news has ever pleased me."Dr. Kael has been work







