Serena's POV
The knock comes at eight on Saturday morning, soft and uneven, three taps and a pause.
I know it before I open the door.
It's the knock she used on my bedroom when she was nine and had a nightmare. Three taps. A pause. A fourth, so quiet you could miss it.
I haven't slept. I stood at the window of the studio all night, watching the sky go from black to indigo to grey, and I rehearsed. Dominic, I'm not who I said I was. Dominic, I have to tell you something. Dom.
Tessa stands in the corridor in a long camel coat, with her hair tied back and no make-up. Her eyes are red-rimmed and unnaturally bright. In her arms, held against her chest like a shield, is a battered blue sketchbook with a rubber band round its spine.
"Hi," she says.
"Tessa."
"Can I come in?"
She walks into the studio and stops in the middle of the maple floor. She looks at the north windows, the easel under its dust sheet, the stool, the trolley of brushes. She turns very slowly on the spot.
"I haven't been in here for three years," she says.
"I know."
"Dom said no one was to come. He said it was his."
"Yes."
"He's been sleeping in here, you know. Sometimes. On the floor." A shiver goes through her. "Caleb told me. He found him one morning, in the middle of the night, curled up under your dust sheet. He thought he was sick."
I think of a man at a glass desk with a pen, drinking cold coffee. A man on a chair in a stairwell.
"I'm sorry," I say. "I shouldn't be hearing this."
"Aren't you?"
"I'm sorry?"
"Aren't you supposed to hear it?" She turns. She hugs the sketchbook tighter. "I've been trying to decide since the pier. I couldn't sleep. I kept thinking I was insane."
"Tessa..."
"I want to ask you something."
"All right."
"And I want you to answer without thinking."
"Ask."
"The night before Dad's funeral."
"What did we eat?"
She's twenty-eight again, standing barefoot on a kitchen floor in Rockland in a black dress too long for her, with a face as pale as paper and a wooden spoon in her fist.
I hear my voice come out of my mouth, low and unsteady, in the old key, the one that isn't husky or foreign or rebuilt.
"Cold spaghetti. Out of the pot. With our hands."
"We sat on the floor of the kitchen with the lights off," I say. "We didn't have any forks, they were all in the dishwasher. We ate it with our fingers. And you said, Rena, I don't think I'll ever be hungry again."
"And?"
"And we sang. All night. We sang 'Tiny Dancer' with the wrong words until three in the morning, and then Mrs Pruitt from next door knocked on the wall and told us to shut up, and we laughed so hard we were sick."
It's a little, cracked, broken sound, like a plate falling in another room.
"Oh," says Tessa.
"Tessie..."
"Oh."
It hits the floor with a smack and lies there, spine up. She doesn't pick it up. She stands with her hands over her mouth and her whole face crumpling like paper, and then I'm across the room, and she's in my arms.
We're both crying. We're both holding on so hard that our bones hurt. She's saying something into my shoulder, over and over, and it takes me a long time to hear it.
"You're alive. You're alive. You're alive."
"I'm here."
"I knew. I knew, I knew, I knew. I was so sure and I thought I was mad." She pulls back and takes my face in both hands. Her thumbs are wet. She's staring at my cheekbones, my mouth, my jaw, the stranger's face I've been wearing. "It's so different. Rena, what did they do to you?"
"I'll tell you."
"You look so tired."
"I know."
"Where have you been? Where were you? I went to the grave every month. I wrote you letters. I wrote you thirty-six letters, I told you everything..."
"I read them. I found the box in the storage unit, the night Drummond came. I followed Dom. I was the lamp post."
She laughs, a high, hysterical whoop that turns to sobbing, and she folds back into my arms.
We stay like that for a long time.
The sun comes up over the East River, and falls through the north windows in long gold bars across the floor, across the easel and the two of us, and the blue sketchbook lying open on the boards.
***
"I need to tell you what I did," says Tessa.
We're sitting on the studio floor with our backs against the wall and a pot of tea between us. She's pulled off her coat. She's holding her mug in both hands, and she hasn't taken a sip.
"You wrote it already."
"It's not the same."
"Tess."
"I need to say it. Out loud. To your face." She stares into the tea. "I've got to say it to you."
"All right."
"Three years ago, on the Halcyon, an hour before dinner, Edmund Vance came and sat beside me on the sun deck. He asked how I was. He asked about my work. He said you and Dom had been quarrelling, and he was worried, and he wanted to do something to bring you together." She takes a shaky breath. "He said Dom had arranged a surprise. A bottle of champagne, a card, flowers. He needed to know which cabin was yours, so the steward could take it down at the right moment."
"And you told him."
"The lower aft cabin. Until ten." Her voice breaks. "I thought I was doing something sweet."
"I know."
"I'll never forgive myself."
"I know that, too."
"You should hate me."
"Tessa."
"You should."
"I don't." I put down my own cup. "I tried. Believe me. For about eleven minutes, in a spare room in Maine, with my face in bandages, when I first understood that only four people knew where I was sitting."
"I thought it was you."
Her face goes white.
"It was an awful thing to think. I'm sorry." I take her cold hand. "It lasted about eleven minutes, in a spare room in Maine with my face in bandages. Then I remembered you at nine, falling off your bicycle and apologising to it."
A laugh breaks out of her. It sounds like a hiccup.
We're laughing, and crying, and I put my forehead against hers and breathe in apple shampoo, and I think: This is what I came back for. Not Hale Meridian. Not Brandt. This.
"I forgive you," I say.
"You can't."
"I do."
"Not yet. You can't, not so quickly. It's not..."
"Tessa."
"It's not fair."
"It isn't," I agree. "It never was. It isn't fair that Vance used you. It isn't fair that you've been alone with this for three years. It isn't fair that I didn't come home." My voice cracks. "But I'm here now. And I forgive you. And you'll just have to put up with it."
She cries for a long time, and I let her.
Eventually she pulls back and wipes her face on her sleeve and looks at me, red-nosed and shining, with an expression I haven't seen since we were children.
"What do you need?" she says.
"What?"
"For whatever it is you're doing. You're doing something. It's obvious. The Lisbon thing, the shorts, Lowell Ridge. It's you, isn't it?"
"How..."
"You're an idiot, Rena. You always leave the lights on." She sniffs. "Tell me what you need."
"I need..." I stop.
I need a sister. I need a hand. I need a person who knew me before the fire.
"I need to know whom to trust," I say.
"Me."
"Tessa."
"Me," she says firmly. "Always. Whatever I did. I'm going to be so good. I'm going to be so useful."
"You don't have to..."
"Let me."
She's thirty-one years old and she's holding my hand like a lifeline.
"All right," I say.
Her whole face lights.
"Okay. Okay. Right. First thing: you need to tell Dom."
"I know."
"He's been..."
"I know."
"He loves you so much, Rena. You've no idea. I've never seen a man so..." She stops.
Her eyes have gone round, and wide, and still.
"Tessa?"
A shadow has fallen across the gap under the door. Two narrow shapes. Shoes.
Then a voice, thin and polite, with a courtesy that I'd know anywhere.
"Tessa, dear? I thought I'd find you here."
My sister goes the colour of ashes.
"He followed me," she whispers. "Oh God, Rena. He followed me."
I didn't lock the door.
The handle begins, very slowly, to turn.