Serena's POV
I don't remember the rest of the ride.
I remember the doors opening on fifty-nine. I remember Marcus's big hands, a blanket, a cup of something sweet and awful that turned out to be tea with four sugars. I remember a thin voice in the corridor, calling my name, and a pair of warm, dry palms taking mine.
"My dear girl. My dear girl. What a dreadful thing."
Augustus Brandt.
He's in an overcoat, with a scarf thrown round his neck and his silver hair on end, like a man who dressed in a hurry. His eyes are wet.
"I came the minute I heard. I was at the club. I rang the building and they told me you were stuck. Dominic, you should have called me."
"It was only a power cut, Augustus."
"It's never only." He squeezes my hands. "Are you hurt, Ms Lowell? You're white as a sheet."
"I'm fine."
"You're trembling."
"I don't like small spaces."
"Of course. Of course you don't." He pats my knuckles twice. "Dominic, get this girl a cab. She isn't to walk home."
I almost laugh.
I live on the fifty-ninth floor.
He knows that.
He watches my face as he says it, a mild, concerned, perfectly pleasant look, like a man at a bedside, and I understand that he's checking to see if I'll correct him.
"I'm in the building tonight, Mr Brandt," I say hoarsely. "The company apartment."
"Ah. So you are."
"Yes."
"How convenient." He lets go of my hands. "Well, rest well. I'll see you both in the morning."
He goes.
He walks away down the red-lit corridor, an old man in a good coat, and the sound of his shoes dies slowly in the dark.
I wait until the stairwell door has closed.
Then I put a hand on the wall and let my knees go.
***
"You said nothing," says Dominic.
It's twenty minutes later. We're in the studio. The power has come back; the whole floor is bright and humming. Marcus is on the landing with a technician and a metal detector, and I'm sitting on the arm of my own old chair, with a mug of tea going cold in my hands and a throbbing headache.
"I said nothing?"
"You said you were frightened."
"That's all?"
"That's all."
"I thought I..." I stop.
I don't know what I thought.
There's a hole in the evening where the smoke was. I remember the smell. I remember the dark, and a light flickering, and a face that looked like a man's face shaped out of water. I remember holding on to something.
I remember a word.
It's right on the edge of my mind, a soft, rounded, dangerous word, like a pebble worn smooth by the sea.
"Did I say anything else?" I ask.
"No."
"You're sure."
"Quite sure."
He's standing at the window with his back to me. The light is behind him; I can't see his face. His voice is very even.
He's lying.
I know it the way you know when you've left the stove on. A cold little pull in the stomach.
But I'm so tired.
And he's holding himself so carefully, as if he were made of glass. As if he'd been given something that might break.
I let it go.
"Thank you," I say. "For what you did."
"It was nothing."
"It wasn't."
"Vera." He turns. His face is very pale. "I need to tell you something, and I want you to listen before you react."
"All right."
"That wasn't an accident."
I go still.
"The smoke. The outage. The elevator." He's choosing every word. "Marcus found a canister in the vent. Smoke, not fire. Chemical. Designed to make a lot of noise and no damage. Somebody wanted us stuck in a very small room."
"Why?"
"Somebody wanted to watch you."
My hands are cold.
"They put a camera in the elevator?"
"Camera feeds are routine. They go to the security desk." His mouth tightens. "But Marcus says the feed from tonight was routed elsewhere. Live. For about twenty minutes. To an IP address that doesn't belong to us."
"Whose?"
"We'll know in the morning." He holds my eyes. "But I'll tell you now what I think. I think someone is trying to find out who you are."
I put the tea down.
Very carefully, because my hands are shaking.
"Who am I?" I say.
"I don't know."
"What do they think I am?"
"I don't know that either." He crosses the room. He kneels in front of me. His hands settle on his knees, not touching me, and his voice goes low and gentle. "But whoever's watching, Vera, they saw your face tonight. They saw what you did."
"I panicked."
"You broke."
"Yes."
"And a person who's afraid of fire is a person who's been in one."
The silence is huge.
I think of the toothbrush. The call to the records office. The smoke in the vent. I think: They're not guessing. They're checking.
Somebody has built a net, thread by thread, and tonight, in a stalled elevator, I walked into it.
"What do you want me to do?" I whisper.
"Nothing different."
"Dominic."
"Act as you always have. Don't run. Don't hide. If they're watching, let them." His eyes are steady. "I'll protect you. All right? You're not alone any more."
It's the sort of thing a man says in films.
It shouldn't make my eyes sting.
"I don't need protecting," I say.
"Of course not."
"I mean it."
"I know." He smiles, a very small, weary, crooked smile. "You never did."
You never did.
My heart stops.
"Never did what?"
"Need it." He gets to his feet, and brushes the knees of his trousers, and doesn't look at me. "It's a figure of speech."
"It isn't."
"It is."
"You said..."
"Vera."
He says it quietly. A warning, and a plea, and a very tired sort of tenderness, all at once.
I look at him.
He looks back.
He has the face of a man at the edge of a diving board.
And I realise, with a quiet, terrible clarity, that he's been standing there since the day we met.
Something is going on.
Something I don't understand. There's a door in this conversation, a locked one, with a light burning under it, and my husband is standing with his back against it.
"The IP address," I say slowly. "You'll tell me?"
"In the morning."
"Dominic."
"I swear."
"All right."
"Goodnight."
"Goodnight."
He goes to the door.
His hand is on the knob. His shoulders are rigid.
He says, without turning: "Vera?"
"Yes?"
"Whatever you said tonight, whatever they heard." His voice is hardly there. "Don't be afraid of it."
"Why?"
He doesn't answer.
He goes out, and the door clicks shut, and I'm alone in the studio with the dust sheets and the north light and a pit in my stomach as wide as the sea.
I stand up.
I cross the room.
I take the sheet off my painting.
The small red boat sits at the edge of the harbour, patient and unfinished, where I left it.
I've never added the figure on the dock.
I don't know why I've never done it.
I stand there for a long time, with a brush in my hand I don't remember lifting, and when my phone buzzes, I almost don't look.
Odile.
Call me. The IP address on the elevator feed. I traced it myself.
It's registered to Vance, Whitlock and Strand.
And Serena: the feed was archived. Someone's already watching it again.
I stare at the screen.
My name.
She used my name.
Odile never uses it. Not once in two years.
Which means she's too frightened to be careful.
Which means she knows what I said.
I close my eyes.
And somewhere, in a quiet room in midtown, a man with a surgeon's hands is replaying the one word I can't remember.