Dominic's POV
Caleb cooks when he's guilty.
It's a family joke. When he was nine, he broke our mother's Waterford vase and made soufflé for a week. At twenty-five, after the first gambling loss Dad bailed him out of, he produced a seven-course tasting menu for forty guests.
So when I step out of the elevator into his Tribeca loft on Saturday and smell rosemary and browning butter, I stop.
"You're cooking," I say.
"I'm hosting."
"What did you do?"
"Nothing." He's wearing an apron that says KISS THE CHEF, and a smile like a man being photographed. "Can't a man cook for his brother and his fiancée?"
"Not you."
"Dom."
"Is it money?"
"It's never money." He flips a pan. The flames leap, and my whole body goes cold. He sees it and turns the gas down at once, softer. "Sorry. Sorry. I forgot."
"It's fine."
"It's not fine."
"Caleb."
"Sit, brother. Sit. Eat. Be loved."
I sit.
The loft is all brick and steel and hundred-year-old beams, the kind of place a man buys when he wants everyone to know he's doing very well. There's a Basquiat on the wall that isn't a Basquiat, and a wine fridge the size of a bank vault. On the sofa, folded and ironed and conspicuously unworn, is a grey cashmere scarf.
Serena's.
My stomach turns over.
"Tessa found it in a box," Caleb says gently, behind me. "She said she'd bring it for you. I think she's afraid to give it."
"Where is she?"
"Powder room. Crying a bit. It's been a week." He puts a hand on my shoulder. "The memorial's coming. She gets this way in October."
"I know."
"We all do."
I look at him.
My little brother has the eyes of a boy who has never once been punished for anything. I've loved him since the day he was born. I put him on my shoulders when he was three. I taught him to sail and to lie to my father.
He sat beside me at the funeral and held my hand.
Four names on a wall.
I hate that his is one of them.
***
Tessa comes out with her eyes freshly washed and her hair pinned back, a small, dark girl with her sister's mouth and none of her sister's certainty. She kisses my cheek.
"Hi, Dom."
"Tess."
"Did Caleb tell you about the scarf?"
"Yes."
"I wasn't sure if..."
"I want it. Thank you."
She nods, too fast. Then she looks at her shoes.
I've known her for eight years, since she was a student at Pratt with paint under her nails, begging her sister for ten dollars. I put her through a master's degree. After the yacht, I gave her the Foundation, because someone had to run it and because I couldn't bear to see her face at any other table.
She has never once mentioned money.
She's never asked me how I felt.
She's never, in three years, been able to look at me for more than five seconds.
That used to feel like grief.
Now, as I watch her smooth the arm of the sofa for the fourth time, I think: It might be something else.
I hate myself for thinking it. But it's there, in the same drawer as the other thoughts, the ones I take out at three in the morning.
"Dom?" says Tessa. "You're staring."
"Sorry. I was thinking about work."
"Caleb says you hired someone."
"I did."
"What's she like?"
"Efficient."
Caleb snorts. "Efficient. That's his word for a woman who frightened an entire team of bankers."
"I heard she brought you noodles," Tessa says, with a small, tired smile.
"Posy talks too much."
"Posy says you laughed."
"Posy is going to be moved to the basement."
Tessa laughs, a thin, relieved sound. She reaches for a glass.
"What's her name again? Vera?"
"Vera Lowell."
"Where's she from?"
"Halifax."
"Do you like her?"
There's a ring of the wrong note in it. I look up.
Tessa's glass has stopped halfway to her mouth.
"I'm just asking," she says. "Everyone says she's good."
"She's good."
"Does she remind you of Serena?"
The room is very quiet.
Caleb has stopped chopping.
I think: Four names. I think: She's afraid.
"No," I say. "Not in the slightest."
I watch her.
The corner of her mouth releases. Her shoulders drop. She takes a swallow of wine, and it's relief, plain relief, written all over her. A woman who's heard what she wanted to hear.
Why would she be afraid of that?
***
We have lunch.
It's the best meal Caleb has ever made. Duck confit, a rosemary jus, a tarte Tatin like a stained-glass window. I eat it all. I talk about the Lisbon notes and he teases me about my bankers and Tessa tells a story about a donor's toddler who set fire to a tablecloth.
She watches Caleb's face when she tells it.
He watches hers.
They look, I think, like two people who are in love and afraid of the same thing.
At four, my phone buzzes in my jacket.
Marcus.
"Excuse me."
I take it out on the terrace. The wind off the Hudson is cold and smells of rain. Below, a ferry ploughs slowly across grey water.
"Boss."
"Tell me."
"The alarm was a hidden one. Someone installed a pinhole camera behind a smoke detector in her hall, and a sensor on the lock. I found it when I swept the building this morning."
"Hers?"
"Hers. Not ours."
"She's put in her own security."
"A quiet, professional job. Which tells me something."
"That she's afraid."
"That she's careful." A pause. "Boss, someone was in her apartment on Thursday. Two men with a locksmith's key, in at 8:51. Out at 9:12. We didn't see them because we weren't watching until Friday."
My grip tightens on the rail.
"You should have been watching on Thursday."
"I know."
"Marcus."
"I know. I'm sorry." He takes a breath. "But here's the thing. They took almost nothing. Her laptop's untouched. Her papers are untouched. The bedroom's been searched, but carefully, like they wanted it to look like nobody had been in."
"What did they take?"
"I've been through her camera footage. She had the pinhole running. I've got a clear shot of one of the men."
"Who?"
"I don't know him yet. A heavy man in a navy windbreaker. A pro. He goes into the bathroom with a small plastic bag. He spends four minutes."
"Doing what?"
"Taking a toothbrush."
The wind drops.
For a moment I can hear nothing but the horn of the ferry.
"A toothbrush," I say.
"And the hairbrush from the bedroom. Both bagged and gone."
"Marcus."
"Yes."
"Somebody wants her DNA."
"Yes."
They want to compare it.
Not to anything in a database. Not to a stranger's file.
To the only thing that could matter: a sample, kept in a locked drawer, from a woman who is supposed to be dead.
The toothbrush from our bathroom in Windward.
The one that was never thrown away.
Who in this world still has it?
I turn and look through the window at my brother, laughing, pouring wine into Tessa's glass. At the cashmere scarf folded on the sofa. At the whole sunlit lie of a family lunch.
"Boss?" says Marcus quietly.
"Yes."
"Somebody else knows."
I close my eyes.
"Yes," I say. "And they got to her before I did."