Dominic's POV
I stand in the stairwell for twenty-two minutes.
It's an emergency stair, concrete and steel, with a single yellow bulb and a door that opens onto the fifty-ninth floor. I know the door by heart. I know the hinge that squeaks and the place on the wall where Serena once scratched a tiny sailboat with a key.
Through the crack I can see the corridor.
I can see the white door at the end.
It's closed.
She went in at ten past three. I know because I was watching the elevator indicator climb, the way a man watches a fuse.
I told myself it was a test.
Give her the studio, I told Marcus. If she's Serena, she'll break. If she's a stranger, she'll say it's a lovely room and ask where the bathroom is.
It sounded rational at two o'clock this morning.
It sounds like cruelty now.
Because I can hear her.
Nothing, at first. Then a sound that I can't describe, a low, broken noise like something being torn out of a hull. I've heard it only once before. On the eighth anniversary of her father's death, in the dark, in our bathroom at Windward, with the tap running so I wouldn't hear.
I put my forehead against the cold concrete.
Go to her.
I've got my hand on the door. The metal is cold under my fingers, and I can feel my own pulse in it.
Open it. Say her name.
Say: I know. I've always known. I never stopped looking.
And then?
She turns around. She has a face I don't know and a voice I don't recognise, and what does she do?
She runs.
Or she does something worse. She looks at me, with those green eyes, and says: Where were you?
Eight minutes.
I let go of the door.
Down the corridor, the white door doesn't open.
After a while the noise stops.
I stay where I am for another five minutes, in case it starts again. When it doesn't, I take my hand off the cold steel and walk back up the stairs to my office, and I sit down at my desk and force myself to read a quarterly report.
I read the same line eleven times.
Margins in the Lisbon terminal improved by 4.2 per cent.
***
"You look terrible," says Augustus Brandt.
He's seated on my sofa at four o'clock with a cup of tea, as though it were his own office. Which, in a sense, it is. He has had the key to it since I was born.
Edmund Vance sits beside him, narrow and silver-haired, in a three-piece suit and the faint, permanent air of a man billing for his time. Sixty-one. He has been the Hale family lawyer for thirty years. He drew up my parents' wills. He drew up mine. He drew up the prenup I tried to tear in half and Serena laughed at me until I stopped.
"I'm tired," I say.
"It's the Lisbon thing," says Vance. "Nobody sleeps through an acceleration notice."
"It's handled."
"For now," says Brandt.
"For now."
"Who's Lowell Ridge?"
"I don't know."
"You must have your people on it."
"I have."
"And?"
"And so far there's an address in Georgetown, Grand Cayman, a registered agent, and a bank account in Luxembourg." I take a seat opposite them. "Nobody's talking."
"Cayman," says Vance, as if it were a stomach complaint.
"A man named Harbour."
"A very expensive man named Harbour," says Brandt. He sips the tea and sets it down. "Dominic, I want to talk to you as your friend. I knew your father for forty years, and I've known you for thirty-eight. You've had a hard three years."
"I've managed."
"You've done more than manage. You've kept this company afloat in the worst year of its history. But there's a hunger in you that I don't like."
I look at him.
Warm brown eyes. A lined, patient face. The face I saw at my own christening, according to the photographs. The face that sat beside my hospital bed when I broke my collarbone at nine.
The face that told me, two days before the Halcyon, Let me look at it for you, Dom. Let me see the pages. Give me a day.
I gave him a day.
I gave him the day.
"What kind of hunger?" I say.
"For answers. You've wanted them so badly that you'll take anything that looks like one." He leans forward. "I don't want to see you hurt again."
"By whom?"
"By anyone." He waves a hand. "Lowell Ridge. Some hedge fund. Some very clever woman with a very clever plan."
I keep my voice quite steady.
"Why a woman?"
"Isn't it always?" says Brandt, and smiles, and the room is warm again. "I'm teasing. Forgive me. Tell me about your Ms Lowell."
"She's good at her job."
"I met her last week. Impressive. She knew Fraser's bakery."
"Did she?"
"Quinpool Road. She told me the cinnamon buns were something else." He chuckles. "I haven't thought about those buns in forty years. It was like being given a letter from my wife."
"She's thorough."
"Is she?" Vance says, mildly. "Because she's been in this building eight days and she's already read the Ironbridge files."
I don't move.
"Which files?"
"The pension archive. In the basement. She signed them out Tuesday. I had my clerk check."
I let my eyebrows lift. It costs me nothing, now. I've had three years of practice.
"I asked her to get me up to speed on the old litigation," I say. "For the Lisbon defence."
"The Ironbridge theft has nothing to do with Lisbon."
"A lawyer might see a pattern."
"It was twelve years ago."
"Then it won't be a long file."
Vance's mouth tightens a fraction.
Brandt puts a gentle hand on his sleeve. "Edmund. Let the boy work."
"It's the boy's work that worries me," says Vance, and then, because he's too good a lawyer to push, he adds: "Never mind. I'm sure it's innocent."
I'm sure it isn't.
I'm sure of something else, too.
The chief of staff I hired nine days ago has already moved on two of my four names. She has walked into the basement and put her hands on a twelve-year-old crime.
She isn't waiting.
She is doing precisely what I would do.
"One more thing, Dom," says Brandt. He's standing, brushing a thread off his sleeve. "The memorial. October fourteenth. Windward. We'll all go up on the thirteenth, as we always do."
"Of course."
"The Foundation's laid on a service at the church. Tessa's been planning it for months. Caleb's reading. I thought I'd say a few words."
"You always do."
"I always do." He smooths the lapel. "I'd like Ms Lowell to come."
The room is very still.
"Why?" I say.
"Because she's your right hand, now. She'll be at your side. And because, dear boy, if she's to be your friend, she ought to see what you've lost."
"I don't think..."
"She should see where we lost her," says Brandt gently. "The water. The house. All of it."
He puts a hand on my shoulder.
It's the kind of touch I have had all my life. Warm. Heavy. Fatherly.
"Bring her," he says. "I'd very much like to watch her face."