Serena's POV
I give myself sixty seconds.
That's all. Sixty seconds with my forehead against the white door and my husband's footsteps fading down the corridor. Sixty seconds to breathe, to be sensible, to remind myself that I'm a grown woman with a plan.
Then I put my coat back on.
Unit 114.
Tessa.
I heard it through an inch of door. A sentence. A name. And I know, the way you know a stair is missing in the dark, that if I don't go now, I will never forgive myself.
I take the stairwell. Fifty-nine floors would kill me in ordinary shoes; I do it in four minutes with my heart in my teeth. In the lobby, a night guard glances up and I nod like a woman who left something in a taxi.
A cab. A cab with a driver who doesn't speak. I give him an address in Long Island City and sit with my hands pressed between my knees while the Queensboro Bridge slides by in the rain.
I know what I'm going to see.
I'm not ready for it.
***
Storage Express is a squat grey building under the elevated tracks, with a flickering sign and a chain-link fence. At half past three in the morning, it's the loneliest place in New York.
I get out two blocks away and walk the rest.
There's a black van parked across the street, lights off. There's a dark sedan beside it, which I know, because I once spent a whole winter learning the sound of its engine.
I put my back to a lamp post and wait.
At 3:41, a door opens on the first floor of the building. A square of weak yellow light falls onto the wet concrete.
Dominic comes out.
He's alone. He's changed his jacket. He walks the way he walks when he's frightened, very straight, very slow, and he goes to the open unit at the end of the row and stops in the doorway.
I can't see inside.
But I can hear.
"Tess," he says.
Nothing.
"Tess. It's me."
A sound. Scraping, as of a body shifting on concrete. A thin, wet, hiccuping breath.
"Dom?"
"Yes."
"Oh, God. Oh God, Dom."
He crouches. I see his back bend.
"It's all right."
"It isn't. He took her box. He took Rena's box, Dom, there was only one, I couldn't..."
"Who took it?"
"I don't... a man. I saw a man at the end of the row, I think... I came and he was already..." Her voice dissolves. "They were going to sell her things. I got a letter. They were going to put it all in an auction."
"Who sent you the letter?"
"I don't know!"
"Tess."
"I don't know! I've paid for this unit for three years and nobody's ever..." She sobs. "I don't want anyone to touch it. I don't want anyone to see."
"See what?"
"Nothing."
"Tess."
"Nothing, Dom, please."
There's a silence that goes on too long.
Dominic's head bows.
I hear him say, in a voice I've heard him use twice in my life, once at my father's grave and once on a boat in a thunderstorm: "Come here."
I press my knuckles to my teeth.
He holds my little sister while she cries.
It goes on a long time. Marcus gets out of the van and stands near them with his hands in his pockets, looking at the wall.
At last, Dominic helps her to her feet. Wraps his own coat around her. Walks her to the car, murmuring something I can't hear.
Tessa looks up.
For one second, she looks straight at the lamp post where I'm standing.
My heart stops.
Then her eyes slide away, red and blind, and she lets him fold her into the passenger seat.
The doors shut.
The tail-lights swing round the corner and are gone.
***
The unit is a mess.
Boxes ripped open. Lids hurled across the floor. A framed photograph of my parents' wedding lies face down in a puddle, the glass starred. Someone has gone through every box with a knife.
I stand in the doorway with my flashlight and I don't move.
Three years.
Three years, and she kept everything.
My winter coat. My sketchbooks, forty-three of them, with their rubber-banded spines. My mother's sewing machine, my father's old transistor radio. The blue bicycle I rode up Camden Hill, with a flat tire and a wicker basket. My wedding dress, in tissue, in a plastic bag, wept over and sealed. A row of tins of pigment, because I couldn't be buried without them.
I sit down on the floor.
I just sit.
It takes a very long time before I realise I'm crying.
There's a small pile of paper at the back of the unit, under the shelf. A packet of envelopes, bound with a ribbon. They've been kicked out of a box and scattered, and one of them is lying in the middle of the floor, face up, in the light of my flashlight.
For Rena.
In my sister's handwriting.
I pick it up.
I open it.
Rena,
It's the first of October. I've been coming here once a month since they said you were gone. I don't know why. Maybe because it's quiet.
I'm not good at this. You were always the one who could write.
I wanted to tell you that Caleb and I are engaged. I know. I KNOW. Don't look at me like that. He's been so kind. I think he's as lost as I am.
I wanted to tell you I'm sorry.
I told them where you'd be.
I thought it was a surprise. I swear on Dad's life I thought it was a surprise. A bouquet, a champagne thing, Dom said he'd planned something. I thought they wanted to know which cabin to put the flowers in.
I didn't know.
I will never, ever stop being sorry.
Your Tess
The paper trembles in my hand.
I told them where you'd be.
I read it again.
I read it a third time, and the words crawl on the page like ants.
Not Caleb. Not a stranger. A they. A surprise. Dominic said he'd planned something.
Dom said he'd planned something.
I can't breathe.
The air in the unit is thick with dust and plastic and a cold smell like old rain. I put my hand over my mouth. I look at the other envelopes, all of them addressed in the same careful hand, all of them dated.
There are thirty-six.
One for every month.
My sister has been writing to a dead woman for three years, and every one of those letters is a confession.
"Vera."
I turn so fast I drop the flashlight.
Dominic stands in the doorway.
He's back. He's soaked. He's looking at me and at the letter in my hand, and his face is a blank, quiet, careful nothing.
"I took Tessa home," he says. "Marcus is with her. I thought I'd come back and lock up."
"I..."
"You followed me."
"Yes."
"How?"
"I heard you." My voice is steady, which is a miracle. "Through the door. You said Queens. You said Tessa."
"You took a cab."
"The stairs and a cab."
He almost smiles.
"Of course you did."
He comes in. Slowly. He crouches in front of me, and he looks at my face, and he looks at the envelope.
"Those aren't ours to read," he says quietly.
"No."
"What does it say?"
I told them where you'd be.
Dom said he'd planned something.
I look at my husband.
He looks back, steady and grey and grave, with the rain still on his lashes.
I don't know whether he's the man who tried to kill me.
I don't know if he's the man who has been protecting my sister.
I don't know anything, except that I'm sitting on the floor of a ruined storage unit, holding the proof that someone used his name.
I fold the letter in half.
I put it in my pocket.
"Nothing," I say. "It's just a birthday card."
It's the second lie I've told him.
I see him hear it.
I see him decide not to say so.