Serena's POV
On Monday morning at five to ten, I walk into the boardroom of Hale Tower as a woman who does not exist.
She is called Vera Lowell.
She wears a charcoal suit and a silk shirt the colour of old wine. She has a sleek auburn bob and a mouth painted a careful matte red. She walks like a woman who has never been afraid.
Her hands, in the pockets of her jacket, are shaking so hard that she has to hold them still.
"Breathe," says Dominic, beside me.
"I am."
"You're not."
"I'm trying."
"Count with me."
"One."
"Two."
"Three."
The doors open.
It's a long room on the sixty-first floor, all glass on the east side, with the whole of Manhattan laid out below like a map. A table of black walnut, twenty feet long. Eleven leather chairs. A bowl of white lilies at the centre.
I look at the lilies and nearly turn around.
Someone's sense of humour.
Seven people are seated already. Helen Aldridge, ex-judge, silver-haired and stern. Prescott Wynn, a retired banker who has never in his life said a sentence under forty words. Marguerite Osei, who runs a hospital group. Theodore Lund, who owns half of Delaware. Two I don't know. And at the head of the table, in the chair that used to be Charles Hale's, an old man in a navy suit with a white carnation in his lapel.
Augustus Brandt rises.
He smiles.
It's the same smile. The warm, crinkled, grandfatherly one I saw across a table at the Pierre, and at the head of a grave, and over my own empty coffin.
"Dominic. My dear boy."
"Augustus."
"And Ms Lowell." He crosses the carpet with his hand out. "At last. I do beg your pardon for the delay. I've heard so much about you."
I take it.
I don't flinch.
It's a dry, warm, papery hand, and I have the oddest sensation that it knows mine, that the bones remember. I look into his kind, watery blue eyes, and I think of an envelope on a table in Mercer's notebook, and a man saying grace over forty thousand dollars.
Say it, I think. Say it, you old bastard.
"The pleasure is mine," I say.
"Do sit."
I sit.
Dominic takes the chair beside me. On the other side of the table, at an angle, a thin, grey figure in a dove-coloured suit slides into his seat with a leather folio under his arm.
Edmund Vance doesn't look at me.
He looks at the lilies.
"We're quorate," says Brandt. "Shall we begin?"
***
It takes twenty minutes.
There are apologies. There's the minutes of the last meeting, read by a nervous secretary. There's a motion about Caleb Hale's directorship, proposed by Wynn and seconded by Lund, tabled for a vote at the end. I listen, and I take notes, and I do not look at the clock.
At ten-twenty, Brandt folds his hands.
"Item four," he says. "A matter of some delicacy."
The room quietens.
"I want to say first that I have the greatest respect for Ms Lowell." He bows his head to me. "Her fund has behaved honourably in a difficult market. She has been generous with her time. And I am told she has also been, in recent weeks, an extremely close friend of our chief executive."
A rustle.
Dominic doesn't move.
"I raise it only because it bears on the question of governance. There's a rule, as you'll recall, against conflicts of interest at board level. And I confess I've been uneasy."
"Augustus," says Dominic. "Get to the point."
"I'm getting there."
"Then get there faster."
"I'm so sorry." The old man smiles, mild as milk. "I'm afraid I'm rather old for speed. But I think you'll find it's worth the wait."
He glances at Vance.
Vance opens the folio.
I feel it happening before it happens, a sort of settling in the air, as before a thunderclap. The skin on my arms prickles. Every chair in the room seems to lean in.
"Ms Lowell." Brandt turns to me, gentle as a priest. "Would you be so kind as to tell the board where you were born?"
"Halifax. Nova Scotia."
"Of course. And your mother's name?"
"Is that relevant?"
"I do hope so."
"Margaret." I say it evenly. It's written in a passport in my handbag. "Margaret Lowell."
"And she's living?"
"She died in 2011."
"I'm so sorry." He seems to mean it. "And your father?"
"I never knew him."
"How very sad."
"What is the point, Augustus?"
"The point, my dear," says Brandt, almost tenderly, "is that I don't think there ever was a Margaret Lowell. I don't think there was ever a Vera. And I don't think there's a Halifax."
The silence is absolute.
I hear the building hum. I hear my pulse, in my wrists, in my ears. I hear a long way off, down in the street, a siren.
"I beg your pardon?" I say.
"Mr Vance."
Vance reaches into the folio.
He takes out a single sheet of glossy paper, a photograph, and slides it down the length of the walnut table. It travels the whole twenty feet in a long, whispering skid, and stops, with a soft click, against the edge of my notebook.
I look down.
It's a woman.
She's twenty-four years old. She's standing on the deck of a boat, in a pale blue dress, laughing at the camera with her head thrown back and her hair blowing across her face. A sunburnt nose. A chipped front tooth. A dozen freckles, and a silver ring on her left hand, and a look of such open, uncomplicated happiness that, for a moment, I don't recognise her at all.
Then the whole world goes quiet.
It's me.
It's me, nine years ago, in Newport, on the afternoon I met my husband.
I hadn't known anyone took the picture.
"A remarkable likeness, isn't it?" says Augustus Brandt.
My throat has closed.
"Not remarkable in the features," he goes on, kindly. "You've had work done, of course. It's very good. But the eyes. The shape of the brow. The way you hold your head when you're afraid."
"Mr Brandt..."
"I've known that girl since she was a baby," he says. "I held her hand at her father's funeral. I watched her marry my godson, God rest her. I stood at her grave."
"I don't..."
"And I'd like the board to know that she's dead."
"I'm not," I say.
It leaves my mouth before I can stop it.
It's a whisper, a croak, cracked down the middle like a plate.
Somebody gasps.
Dominic's hand closes hard on my knee.
"I'm sorry?" says Augustus.
"I'm not. I'm..."
"Serena," says Dominic, very softly. "Don't."
Too late.
Eleven faces have turned toward me. Eleven pairs of eyes, wide and shocked and thrilled, with the greedy delicious horror of a crowd at an accident. Helen Aldridge has put her hand to her mouth. Prescott Wynn has dropped his pen.
And Augustus Brandt, at the head of the table, leans back in Charles Hale's chair.
His face is full of sorrow.
His eyes are full of light.
"There it is," he says gently. "Ladies and gentlemen. A confession."