Chapter 7

They married on the twenty-first day, on the terrace where the auction had been.

The sale of Harrowgate was scheduled to close at three, and the ceremony at four, and one hundred and sixty guests were invited to both, which told you everything about how Grant Harrow saw the difference between business and love. White tents, wet grass, string lights, a string quartet from the city. The bidders came back with their lawyers. The contracts sat on a linen-covered table with gold pens beside them.

Tessa got us in. She had quit as a kitchen maid three days earlier, which was the best thing she could have done for our purposes, because the caterer hired her on the spot to carry trays.

The recorder went into the sound equipment. I sat in the last row of folding chairs in a borrowed navy dress and my mother's pearls, which Tessa had taken out of the safe in the butler's pantry where Grant had stashed them, and I held my hands in my lap.

At 3:50, Celia found me.

She was in the bridal suite with the door open, in ivory, her hair up, and she saw me in the tall mirror before she saw me.

"You," she said.

"Me."

"You cannot stop the closing. The contracts are signed. Warren signed as executor. Everything Grant touched, the estate can't touch back."

I stood in the doorway and let her look at me in the dress I should have been married in the first time.

"Your father's will is in a photocopy and a copier log," I said. "The DNA is a fact. The fuel line is in an evidence bag in my pocket. And your voice is in the speakers on that terrace. You have until four. Walk out, get in a car, and I will let the police find you somewhere else."

She laughed. She actually laughed, and picked up her bouquet, and walked past me close enough that I smelled my mother's perfume on her skin.

"You should have stayed invisible," she said. "You were so much better at it."

Behind me, Grant's hand closed on the doorframe of the bridal suite.

He stood there in his tuxedo, gold watch, mourning pin gone, and looked at the two of us - his wife and his bride - and for one second I saw the actual man, the one who had sat at the end of my bed and put a needle in my arm.

"You won't make it to the microphone," he said quietly.

Then he shut the door and turned the key, and I heard him tell the caterer's girl at the end of the hall that the bride's sister was feeling faint and was not to be disturbed.

The window was painted shut. Tessa opened the door in ninety seconds with a master key and both hands shaking.

The quartet began the processional.