Dominic's POV
I order the coffee at ten to four.
My hands are steady. That's the worst part. I write the order on the sleeve in my own handwriting, the way I wrote it for five years every Sunday morning in a kitchen in Camden, and I hand the cup to Posy and say, "For Ms Lowell."
Posy gives me a look.
I have never in my life delivered coffee.
"Is this a hazing ritual?" she asks.
"It's a welcome."
"It's strange."
"Take it."
She takes it.
Then I do what I've done every day for six years, which is sit at a glass desk and pretend I'm reading a spreadsheet.
I have the cup on my own side of the desk. Same order. I haven't touched it. I'm not sure I could keep it down.
Through the glass wall I see her pick it up.
I see her read the sleeve.
I see her stop.
It is a very small movement. Her shoulders lift a quarter-inch and stay there. Her head goes down. She turns the cup once, twice, and I know exactly what she's reading because I know exactly what I wrote.
Not stirred.
Serena once threw a spoon at me for stirring her coffee.
She goes very still, and then she does something I'll remember for the rest of my life.
She drinks it.
All of it. Slowly. Like a woman at a graveside, accepting a communion she doesn't believe in.
She doesn't ask who told me.
She doesn't ask why.
She doesn't say, how did you know?
That's the proof. A stranger would say it. A stranger would be spooked, or flattered, or confused. A stranger would look over at me through the glass and ask.
She drinks the coffee, sets down the cup, and goes on typing.
I put my head in my hands.
Behind the glass, my wife is answering emails.
***
"Boss."
"Don't."
"Boss, you need to eat."
Marcus has come into the office at six, shut the door, and stood in front of my desk with the stubbornness of a man who once talked a head of state out of a window.
"I know what I saw," I say.
"You saw a woman with the same coffee order as your wife."
"Cinnamon, sugar on the rim, not stirred."
"Ten thousand women take cinnamon."
"Nobody takes it with sugar on the rim."
"Boss..."
"She counted the steps, Marcus."
He's quiet.
"She counted seventeen steps in the lobby. Her lips moved. I watched her. And she has Serena's eyes. And she turns an imaginary ring on her left hand when she's nervous. She did it three times during the interview."
"People fidget."
"She was wearing a ring that isn't there."
He doesn't argue.
I know what it sounds like. I know exactly what Dr Hamid, the grief therapist Caleb made me see in the second year, would say. The mind builds what the heart needs.
But I've been the mind and the heart both for three years, and I've never once built a woman who drank a coffee to the bottom without asking me how I knew.
"Say it," I tell him.
"Say what?"
"What you're thinking."
He folds his arms.
"I think a woman with a perfect false identity and a Rockland paper trail has walked into your building and got hired the same day. Either she's been sent by someone who wants you to react like this, or she's a woman who has a reason to be here under a false name."
"Or."
"Or what?"
"Or she is who I think she is."
He looks at me for a long time.
"Boss," he says, in the voice he uses for bad news. "If Serena Hale is alive, she's been alive for three years and hasn't called you."
I flinch.
He goes on, not unkindly. "That's either because she can't, or because she doesn't want to. And if it's the second, she has a reason. And the reason is either that she thinks you did it..."
"I didn't."
"I know."
"I was on the phone with Cho."
"I know. I've heard the call. Twice. But what does she know?"
He's right.
That's the part that's been at the edge of my mind all afternoon, a cold little animal I keep refusing to feed.
She was in the lower aft cabin. I told her to stay there. I told her I'd be an hour, I'd be back before the fireworks. I kissed her forehead, and I said, Stay, I mean it, I'll explain everything.
What does it look like, from the water?
My wife, thrown from a burning boat. Her husband gone eight minutes before the blast.
An argument the crew overheard. If you do this, you'll destroy everything.
I said it. God help me, I said it, and she said, You don't get to decide what I do with my father's name.
What would I have thought, in her place?
"She thinks it was me," I say.
"Maybe."
"And she's come home to burn my life down."
"Or to find out who she can trust."
"Or both."
Marcus nods, once.
It's a very quiet room.
"There's one more thing," he says. "If you're right, and you've kept her here..."
"I'm not going to confront her."
"I wasn't going to suggest it."
"If I say, Serena, I know it's you, she runs. She's done it before. She's very, very good at disappearing." I press my thumb into my eyebrow. "And someone in this family tried to kill her. If they find out she's alive..."
"They'll try again."
"Yes."
"So you let her think she's fooling you."
"I let her come in. I keep her where I can see her. I give her access." My own voice sounds odd. "If she's planning something, I want to be standing next to her when she does it."
"That's insane."
"Yes."
"You'll tell no one."
"No one but you."
"And Posy's going to wonder why you're bringing her coffee."
"Posy will be told that my chief of staff reminds me of someone."
Marcus lets out a breath. The first big one I've heard from him in years. He crosses to the window and looks at the grey line of Central Park for a minute.
"There's a way this goes badly," he says finally.
"Yes."
"A very big way."
"I know."
"And the way it goes well?"
I think.
I think of a woman in a paint-streaked cardigan, laughing with her hand over her mouth.
I think of a pulse in a wrist.
"I don't know," I say. "I haven't let myself picture it."
***
The Hale family has dinner on Tuesdays.
It's a rule my father made forty years ago, and Caleb and I have kept it even when we couldn't stand each other. Tonight it's at the penthouse. Caleb arrives at seven fifteen with a bottle of Barolo and a smile that reaches everyone in the room.
"Little brother," he says, and kisses my cheek, and I think, as I always do, that he looks like our mother. The dark curls. The wicked mouth. The kind of face people forgive.
"You're late."
"I was saving the economy of the Eastern Seaboard. Where's my future sister-in-law?"
"Tessa's coming straight from the Foundation."
"God bless her. Is it true you hired a woman today?"
"I hire women every day."
"You hired a woman," he says, raising the bottle like a toast, "who made you laugh. Posy told me."
"Posy talks too much."
"Posy is a national treasure." He pours. "What's she like?"
I take the glass and look at the wine and think of a woman who drank a cup of coffee like a sacrament.
"Competent," I say.
"Dom."
"Sharp."
"Dom."
"She reminds me of someone."
Caleb's smile doesn't change.
But something behind it does.
It's quick. A shutter, going down. A fraction of a second.
"Of Serena?" he says, lightly.
"Yes."
"Is that why you're so pale?"
"I'm not pale."
"You look like you've seen a ghost."
He laughs at his own joke. I laugh too. He drinks. I put down the glass untouched.
Four names on a wall in a locked room.
Caleb. Tessa. Vance. Brandt.
Every one of them knew where she was sitting when the world went white.
One of them knew what was under her feet.
I look at my brother's easy, handsome face, and I think, I will find out. I will find out which of you it is.
And then I think of green eyes over a paper cup, and the way she wiped her thumb, and the terrible thing I understand, with the clarity of a man seeing the bottom of a lake.
She came to kill someone.
I'm going to make sure it's the right person.