Serena's POV
My toothbrush is gone.
That's how I know, standing in my bathroom on Friday morning with Odile behind me and the whole apartment holding its breath.
Not the laptop. Not the three burner phones in the lining of my winter coat. Not the passport in the false-bottomed tea tin.
A blue toothbrush.
"They took it with gloves," says Odile, scrolling through the footage on her tablet. "Look. He bagged it. He bagged the hairbrush too."
I look.
A heavy man in a navy windbreaker, filmed from above, moves around my bedroom with the unhurried care of a plumber. He opens a drawer. Closes it. Lifts the corner of the mattress and puts it down. He never looks at the camera hidden behind the smoke detector.
He goes into the bathroom, takes a clear bag from his pocket, and spends four minutes on my life.
"A DNA sample," I say.
"Of course it's a DNA sample."
"For whom?"
"Somebody who's wondering."
"About me."
"About someone," says Odile. "Which is a different thing, and not an entirely bad thing. If they'd known, they wouldn't have needed it. They suspect. That means the face and the voice are doing their job."
"Or it means somebody's got a reference sample, and they're checking."
She looks at me for a long moment.
"Yes," she says. "That too."
My coffee has gone cold. I've been on my feet for twenty hours, and I want to put my head down on the cheap Formica counter and sleep for a year.
"We move you," Odile says. "Tonight."
"Where?"
"Somewhere with a doorman and no windows on the street."
"If I move now it looks like I'm running."
"It looks like a girl who got burgled."
I shake my head.
"It looks like I was afraid. Whoever was here wants to see what I do. If I bolt, they'll know I had something to hide."
"Serena."
"Don't." I hold up a hand. "Not here. Not in that voice."
She closes her mouth.
I've never said it out loud in this apartment. We don't say it. We say V. We say her. A name is a thread, and a thread can be pulled.
"Sorry," says Odile, lower. "Habit."
"I know."
"So what do we do?"
"We wait," I say, "and we see what they do next."
***
What they do next is much stranger than I expect.
On Monday morning, Dominic Hale walks into my office, closes the door, and says, "There's been a burglary in your building."
I look up from the board packs.
"I'm sorry?"
"Marcus has been looking into the security of our staff." He stands in front of the desk with his hands in his pockets, apparently fascinated by a pen on the blotter. "Someone broke into a flat on your floor on Thursday. A neighbour. Marcus thinks the lock was bumped."
I think: Marcus.
I think: He's lying.
The strangest thing is that I can't tell why I'm sure. It's something in the angle of his shoulder. The way his gaze slides off my face and settles on the pen.
He was always a terrible liar.
"I don't live on the same floor as my neighbours," I say. "I'm on four."
"Then it's a different neighbour."
"Dominic."
He looks up.
"I'm not going to say it was mine," he says. "I'm going to say the company has a duty of care. The chief of staff holds the keys to this firm. I won't have her stuck in a building with a bad lock."
"I'll move."
"We have a company apartment. It's on fifty-nine. It's been vacant a while."
I put my pen down.
I know every flat on fifty-nine.
There's the corporate guest suite, the one with the rooftop terrace. There's the old caretaker's flat, now used for storage. And at the end of the corridor, behind a plain white door, there's one that has never appeared on any property register or insurance schedule, because it was built for a woman who didn't want anyone to know she was there.
"Which one?" I say.
"The east end."
My mouth goes dry.
"Isn't that..."
"It's empty," he says, a little too quickly. "Marcus will bring the key."
He's already gone.
***
The key is brass. Old. Heavy in the hand.
I stand outside the white door for ninety seconds before I put it in the lock.
Stop, I tell myself. You knew. You knew he kept it. Odile said he'd never sold it, never touched it.
Knowing is different.
The lock turns with a sound I remember.
The door swings open, and I smell turpentine.
Not stale. Not shut up and forgotten.
Turpentine and linseed oil and the cold mineral smell of old stone. Light falls through a wall of north-facing windows onto a bare maple floor. My easel stands in the middle of the room under a dust sheet, my trolley of brushes beside it, my stool pushed back at an angle, as though I stood up a minute ago to get a glass of water.
I forget how to breathe.
It's exactly as I left it.
My old green apron hangs on the hook. My CD player sits on the windowsill, and the little speaker still has a smear of cobalt on the corner. On the shelf, in a row, are the tins of pigment I ordered from Venice the week before the end.
I walk in on legs that feel borrowed.
There's no dust.
That's the first thing that's wrong.
Three years, and not a speck. The floor shines. The windows are clean. Someone has kept this room alive.
I put out a hand and lift the corner of the dust sheet.
My painting.
An unfinished canvas, three feet by four. A harbour at dawn, grey on grey on silver, with a small red boat at the edge of the frame. I started it for him as an anniversary present. I never added the figure on the dock.
It's still waiting.
I'm making a noise. I don't know what it is. It's a small, animal noise that comes up out of my chest, and I press my fist against my mouth until it stops.
"Stop it," I whisper. "Stop it."
The window is full of Park Avenue. Behind me, in the corridor, the elevator hums.
I can't be here.
I can't be here and be Vera Lowell.
Because every single thing in this room says Serena, and the woman who made it is dead.
I turn to go.
And I see the chair.
An armchair, dust-sheeted, in the corner by the window. It's where I used to sit when I was stuck, and watch the light change on the buildings.
Something is lying on the sheet.
I move closer.
A lily. A single white lily, long-stemmed, its throat gold with pollen. Just cut.
A bead of water slides down the stem and falls onto the cloth.
It's still wet.
Somebody was in this room an hour ago.
And whoever it was, they knew exactly what I would think when I saw it.