Serena's POV
Four people at this table knew where I was sitting when the boat blew up.
Five, if you count the man who taught them all to carve the goose.
I'm the sixth, in a borrowed black dress and a silk scarf, asking Augustus Brandt's housekeeper if there's any more bread.
"Of course, miss," she says, and I smile at her like a woman with nothing on her mind.
The dining room in Brandt's Fifth Avenue townhouse has not changed in thirty years. Oak panelling. A chandelier like a frozen waterfall. Portraits of men with the faces of people who have never had to apologise. A fire burns in the grate, though it's only October's first week, and the whole room smells of beeswax and old money.
I've eaten at this table nineteen times.
I sat in the chair to Dominic's left, the one with the carved acorns. I watched Augustus carve the Christmas goose. I thanked him, with tears in my eyes, the night he said I was the daughter he'd never had.
Tonight I'm at the far end, between Edmund Vance and a very empty chair.
Dominic sits opposite, at Brandt's right hand.
He doesn't look at me.
That's how I know he's aware of every inch of me.
"So tell us, Ms Lowell," says Augustus, cheerful, lifting his glass, "what is it that makes a woman give up Toronto for the madhouse of the Hale Meridian chief of staff's office?"
"The madhouse," I say.
A ripple of laughter.
"Dominic's reputation for tidiness," I say. "I wanted to see it for myself."
"And?"
"I'm told it's a myth."
Caleb whoops. "I love her. Dom, can I have her?"
"No."
"She'd be wasted at the Foundation anyway," says Caleb, and slings an arm across the chair of the woman next to him.
I look at her.
I've been avoiding it for twenty minutes.
Tessa is thinner than I remember. Thirty-one now. Her dark hair is cut in a short blunt bob, and she's wearing a black velvet dress with a tiny gold bird at the throat. She has our mother's hands. They're gripping the stem of her wineglass.
Three years ago, she was twenty-eight and wore a pair of ridiculous paint-spattered dungarees and sang the wrong words to every song on the radio. She called me Rena. She was the last person I told about the engagement. She cried at the wedding like a faulty tap.
She has not once looked at me directly since she sat down.
Which is strange.
Everyone looks at me. I'm a stranger with a scarf and a scar-pale throat and a very odd voice. People look.
Tessa looks at the soup.
"Tessa's the heart of the Foundation," says Augustus warmly. "The Quinn Scholarship alone has put eleven dockworkers' children through college."
"It was Serena's idea," Tessa says, and her voice cracks on the name.
"We all miss her, darling."
"Do you?"
It slips out. She goes red and looks at her plate.
The silence is razor-thin.
"Of course we do," says Edmund Vance, mild as milk. He's at my elbow, and when he speaks I feel it in the table. He's a narrow man with a surgeon's hands and a voice that never rises. "Ms Lowell, I understand you've been spending time in the archive."
"I have."
"The Ironbridge files."
"Mr Hale asked me for background."
"I did," says Dominic, evenly.
"The litigation is closed," says Vance.
"Then it won't take long."
"It's a very sad business." He turns a little in his chair. "A man named Quinn. Hanged himself, more or less, in a manner of speaking. Drove into the water. Took two hundred million dollars of other people's retirement with him. You wouldn't believe the damage to the families."
His eyes rest on my face with the polite, flat interest of a man reading a contract.
I think: I would like to put this fork through your hand.
I say: "Poor man."
"Poor families."
"Of course."
"Do you know," says Vance, "a curious thing. His daughter married into this very family. Rather unfortunate, really. It was Dominic who insisted. Wouldn't be told."
"Edmund," says Brandt softly.
"I'm making conversation."
"Make a different kind."
Dominic puts his glass down. It makes a very small sound.
I'm very aware of my own pulse in my throat.
"I think the soup is going cold," I say. "Shall we?"
Tessa's head comes up.
She looks straight at me.
It's only a second.
But her eyes are red-rimmed and bright, and she stares at my face like a woman who has heard a name in a language she hasn't spoken for years.
***
The powder room is on the first floor, past the portrait of Brandt's grandfather. Black and white tile. A mirror that's older than I am. A sink shaped like a shell.
I run the water cold.
I look at my reflection and I think: You can do this.
I have been looking at that woman in the mirror for two years and she still looks like a stranger who borrowed my eyes.
The door opens.
I don't turn.
In the glass, behind my shoulder, my sister closes the door and locks it.
"Hi," says Tessa.
"Hello."
"Sorry. I needed a minute."
"Of course."
"It's the soup. It's just... you know. We had the same soup at her last dinner here."
"I'm sorry."
"Don't be."
I turn off the tap and reach for a towel, because my hands are shaking, and it's better to be drying them than to be seen.
Tessa leans against the door.
She looks very small.
"Can I ask you something weird?"
"Of course."
"Do I know you?"
My heart stops.
"I don't think so."
"You remind me of someone."
"People say that."
"No, I mean..." She presses her fingers against her eyelids. "It's not the face. You look nothing like her. I swear. I've been looking at you for an hour and you look nothing like her."
"Like whom?"
She laughs a little, wet and helpless.
"Nobody," she says. "God, I'm sorry. I'm not drunk. I think I'm just tired. Ignore me."
"It's all right."
"It's October. It does things to me."
"Mm."
I fold the towel carefully. I put it on the rail. My back is to her.
I realise too late what I'm doing.
I'm humming.
Very softly. A tune with no words, three bars and a falling fourth. I have hummed it to myself whenever I'm frightened since I was six years old. My father taught it to me in the front seat of a Buick. It's an old Scottish song, mournful as a gull, and I've never once been able to stop.
The water is wide, I cannot get o'er.
The sound stops in my throat.
The bathroom is utterly silent.
I turn around.
Tessa has gone white. Her mouth is a little open. One hand is pressed flat to her sternum, and her eyes are enormous and filled with a terrible, hopeless light.
"My sister hummed that," she says.
I don't breathe.
"Every time she washed her hands. Every time she was scared." Her voice is barely a thread. "Nobody else in the world knows it. It was our father's. He made it up."
"I'm sorry," I say, in Vera Lowell's smoky, foreign rasp. "I don't know what you mean."
Tessa looks at me.
A long moment passes.
Then she steps aside, and unlocks the door, and I walk out with my knees locked and my spine straight, and I do not look back.
I get as far as the staircase.
"Vera."
It's not Tessa.
Dominic stands at the foot of the stairs with one hand on the newel post, looking up at me.
He's very pale.
"You've been gone ten minutes," he says.
"I'm fine."
"Are you?"
"Dominic."
"I wanted to ask..." He stops. His gaze goes over my shoulder to the corridor behind me, where my sister stands in the powder-room doorway, one hand over her mouth.
He looks at Tessa.
Then he looks at me.
And in the instant before his face closes, I see something I have no name for.
Not suspicion.
Not recognition.
Fear.
He's afraid for me.
"Come back to the table," he says quietly, and holds out his hand.