Chapter 2

I carried plates into the kitchen at twenty past seven because it was the only thing left for me to do.

Cora Pike was at the sink with her sleeves pushed up. She had been at Briar Glen thirty-one years, longer than Verity had run it, longer than anyone would say out loud.

The caterers had taken over the big range. Cora stayed in her corner with the old steel sink and her own dish towel, and she kept her back to the room the way a woman does when she has decided something.

On the counter beside her, half-hidden behind a stack of trays, sat a tin.

It was dented at one corner and the label was from a shop in Charlottesville. Lapsang souchong. Loose leaf. Twenty-two dollars for a quarter pound.

"Who drinks this?" I said.

Cora kept washing. "It comes Thursdays."

"I know it comes Thursdays. I signed for it Thursday. The boy left it at the side door and I carried it to the east wing myself." I turned the tin in my hand. "I set it inside the service door. Somebody took it off the step."

"Yes," Cora said.

"For who?"

She dried her hands. She did not look at me. "East wing."

"Cora."

Behind us, in the hall, Verity's voice went past - laughing at something, that bright, careful laugh she uses on the board. Cora's hands stopped moving. When the voice was gone she started drying the same dish again.

I took the tin and went out the kitchen door.

The east wing runs off the back of Briar Glen like a limb the house forgot. Sealed since before I married in. Blinds down. Ivy up to the second floor. The gutters are clean, though. That's the thing nobody notices - the gutters on a sealed wing are always clean.

The gravel path was warm through my shoes. At the end of it: a service door, painted the same grey as the stone, with a milk crate beside it and a brass knob worn smooth as a river rock.

I knocked. Nothing.

I tried the knob.

It turned.

The door came open two inches, and warm air came out of that house like a breath. Tea. Kettle steam. Wool. A hot plate ticking somewhere in the dark.

I pushed it wider. A chair with a folded quilt on it. A coat on a hook. A pair of boots by the door, toes worn through, set side by side the way you set them when you plan to put them on again in the morning.

The deadbolt above the knob was thrown back. I know that bolt. There is no keyhole on the outside of it. It can only be turned from in here.

"Hello?" I said.

Somewhere deeper in the wing, a floorboard took a step. Then another, moving away, unhurried, the way a person walks in their own house.

I stood in the doorway with the tin in my hand, and above me, in the attic window of a wing that Verity says has been empty since the nineties, a lamp came on.