Serena's POV
Dominic calls me at ten to ten from the top of a lighthouse.
I know it's him before I answer. Nobody else lets a phone ring once, stops, and rings again. It's a trick from the early days, when nobody was safe, and we've both kept it like a habit of the heart.
"Serena."
"Where are you?"
"The lantern room." His breath is ragged. "I've read it. The letter. He knew, Serena. My father knew everything."
"Are you hurt?"
"No. I'm..." A short, cracked laugh. "No. I'm all right. I'll tell you when I get home. There's something odd with the lens. It lit up. By itself, just now, I think..."
"Dom."
"It's all right. There's a wire. I can see it. It's been fixed under the housing. It's a tripwire, with a battery pack and a tiny camera, set to start when the panel opens." His voice goes flat. "He's been watching. Whoever it is, they've been watching the lighthouse for years."
"Brandt."
"Brandt."
"Marcus is on the stairs. He's been outside since I got here, in the car, and I never even..." He stops. "He's coming up now. I have to go."
"Dom."
"What?"
"Come back."
"I've never been anywhere else," says my husband, and hangs up.
***
I tell Tessa about the pier at midnight, in the safe apartment on East Eighty-First that Torres has found for us, with its rented furniture and its two agents in the kitchen.
She's sitting up in bed with a cup of cocoa and her bandaged hand on a pillow, watching a late-night cooking programme with the sound off. She looks about fourteen, though she's thirty-one. She turns her head as I come in, and sees my face, and sets down the cup.
"Rena."
"Dad was murdered."
I don't know why I say it like that, flat, abrupt, with my hand still on the doorknob. She doesn't flinch. She just looks at me with her tea-brown eyes, and pats the mattress.
I tell her all of it. The USB. The practice pages in a forger's hand. The tape, the wind, the long soft footsteps on wood. Let's walk to the end. I tell her about the note on the lighthouse floor and the cup of tea.
She just puts her good arm round my neck, and pulls my head down onto her shoulder, and holds it there.
"I always knew he didn't do it," she says, at last, very quietly.
"You were nineteen."
"I was nineteen. I knew." She strokes my hair. "He couldn't have. He used to turn spiders out of the bath with a teacup. He wouldn't have left us."
"I'm so tired, Tess."
"I know."
"I'm tired of being angry."
"Then stop."
"It isn't that easy."
"No." A small, wry sound. "I'm told it isn't."
We sit like that, in the half-dark, with the television flickering and a very small, very sticky quiet between us, the quiet of two people who have said the unsayable and survived it.
"Rena," says Tessa.
"Mm."
"I want to do something."
"No."
"You don't even know what it is."
"I know your face." I sit up. "It's the face you had when you wanted to climb the Hendersons' oak."
"Edmund texted me."
"What?"
"Tonight. On a number I didn't know. He thinks I'm still his." Her mouth trembles. "He said, We should talk about your sister. Tomorrow at eight. The Cormorant Club. He said, Come alone. We can clear up all this unpleasantness."
"You are not going."
"I am."
"Tessa..."
"Listen. Listen to me." She seizes my wrist. "He thinks I'm weak. He thinks I'm frightened. He thinks I'll do whatever he says, because I did, once. He's used to it."
"That's what I'm afraid of."
"But I could wear a wire."
"No."
"Torres could fit it. They've done it a hundred times. And he'd talk, Rena. He loves it. He loves to hear himself. He told me, in that cellar, eleven different things he never meant to say, just because I was standing there and looked like I was listening."
"It's too dangerous."
"I know."
"He's killed people."
"I know."
"You're my sister."
"That's why." She is crying now, soundlessly. "I did the worst thing, Rena. I did it for money. I gave a man your address, because he told me you'd hurt my husband. I'd do anything not to have done it. And I can't. I can't undo it."
"Tess."
"But I can do this."
At the bruised cheek, the swollen hand, the ridiculous, brave, trembling jaw.
I think of a girl of nineteen, in a cardigan too big for her, standing at the back of a church with her hands in her sleeves, watching a closed coffin.
I'd rather be forgiven twice than right once.
"I'll ask Torres," I say.
"You will?"
"I'll ask. I won't promise."
I hold her, in the dark, with the television silent and a woman on the screen soundlessly whisking an egg.
***
On Thursday morning at nine, I walk into a small windowless room on the eleventh floor of the federal courthouse at Foley Square, and face twenty-three strangers.
They sit in two curving rows of tiered seats, like a very quiet congregation. Twelve women and eleven men, in plain clothes, with plain faces, eating the free sandwiches the government provides. A retired schoolteacher. A bus driver. A man with tattooed forearms who looks as though he's come from a building site. A tiny elderly woman with a knitted hat.
There's no judge.
There's only a witness chair, a microphone, and Dana Torres beside me in her black wool, with her glasses pushed up into her hair.
"State your name," she says.
"Serena Quinn Hale."
A murmur goes round the seats.
"Spell it."
"Where were you on the night of October the fourteenth, three years ago?"
I look at the faces.
I look at the woman in the knitted hat. She's holding a pencil in both hands, like a child. Her eyes are very bright.
And I begin.
I tell them about the yacht. The anniversary. The champagne. A card in my husband's handwriting that wasn't. I tell them about the explosion, as well as I can, which is badly, because I never have the words, only the sensations, the white and the heat and the roar. I tell them about Abel's boathook.
I tell them about my father.
I tell them about a man at the end of a pier, and a voice on a recording, and a note in a forger's hand. I tell them about a ledger, a brown envelope, a cup of tea.
I think I've used it up.
The knitted hat has put down her pencil.
"Ms Hale," says the bus driver, quite gently, raising his hand. "Can I ask a question?"
"Of course."
"This Brandt. Is he, like, an old man?"
"He's sixty-nine."
"And he did all that?"
"Yes."
"With a smile."
"He's always smiling."
"My grandmother used to say," he says, "watch the ones who bring you soup."
The tattooed man laughs, once, and stops.
"Thank you, Ms Hale," says Torres.
My legs are water. Torres takes my elbow. In the corridor, she hands me a paper cup of coffee, and I realise my hands are shaking so hard that the lid chatters.
"That was..." She stops. For the first time since I've met her, her face does something unguarded. "That was the best witness I've ever put in front of a grand jury."
"Will they indict?"
"Brandt? Vance? Rusk?" She smiles thinly. "By Friday, I'd say. They'll want to hear your sister, too."
"And then?"
"And then I arrest them."
"All of them?"
"If the evidence holds." She sips. "Which brings me to Tessa."
"She wants to wear a wire."
"I know. She phoned me at seven."
"And?"
Torres is quiet for a moment.
"It's the only way to get Vance to say the words," she says. "He's too careful on paper. But he trusts her. She's the weakest link he has."
"She's my sister."
"She's also the best chance of putting Augustus Brandt in a cell for the rest of his life."
I think of a girl of nineteen, in a church. I think of a man in a cardigan.
"Tonight," I say.
"Tonight."
"Eight o'clock. The Cormorant Club. With a van outside."
"With two."
"And if she says the word..."
"Then we go in."
I nod.
My phone buzzes in my pocket.
I take it out.
It's a text, from Marcus.
Tessa's left the safe apartment. Alone. Five minutes ago. She left a note.
I stop breathing.
I read the next line.
"Edmund just texted. He moved it. Not eight tonight. Now. I'm going before he changes his mind. Don't follow. I love you."