The Stranger in My Bed

Chapter 3

I turn with my hand still on the brass handle. Mrs. Harding stands at the end of the hallway, folded linens against her chest, her mouth a thin gray line.

"Was there something you needed, Mrs. Cross?"

"Just looking."

"At a door."

"It's a door," I say. "I live here now."

"You live in the east wing. That's the west."

"And what's in the west?"

"Mr.Cross's business." She comes closer.She's shorter than me by a head and somehow takes up the whole corridor."Breakfast is in the sun room.He asked me to tell you he'll be back by two."

"Back from where?"

"He didn't say."

"Did you ask?"

"I don't ask."

"He's my husband."

"He's my employer." She says it without cruelty, which makes it worse. "Eggs or fruit?"

"Both, apparently, since nobody's answering me."

"Fruit, then."

I follow her down. The staircase is marble and the ceiling is thirty feet up and the whole house smells like cold flowers, and yesterday at eleven in the morning I signed my name in a registry office beside a man I've spoken to nine times.

---

The sun room has one place setting.

"He doesn't eat breakfast?" I ask.

"He eats at four in the morning."

"That's not a real time."

Mrs. Harding pours coffee. "Nevertheless."

"How long have you worked for him?"

"Twelve years."

"That's a long time to learn nothing about a man."

"It's a long time to learn what's worth knowing."

"So you knew his first wife."

The pour doesn't wobble.Not a drop."Fruit's local.The strawberries are worth your time."

"That's not a no."

"It isn't a yes either."

"Mrs. Harding."

"Mrs.Cross." She sets the pot down."You'll find this house runs smoothest when you take what's offered and don't reach past it."

"And if I reach anyway?"

"Then you'll find out what's past it."

"Is that advice or a warning?"

"It's breakfast."

She leaves. I sit alone at a table built for fourteen, and I eat one strawberry, and it's the best thing I've ever tasted, which I resent.

---

The gardener won't look at me.

"Morning," I say.

"Ma'am."

"I'm Sienna."

"Ma'am."

"Do you know when Mr. Cross bought this house?"

He clips a hedge that doesn't need clipping. "Before my time."

"You've worked here eight years. The girl in the laundry told me."

"Then it's before my time."

"Does anyone here answer a question straight?"

"Not the ones who stay, ma'am."

The driver's worse. He's polishing a car in a garage with six of them, and when I ask him where he drove Adrian this morning, he smiles like I've asked him for money.

"Airfield," he says.

"Which airfield?"

"The one with planes."

"Private or commercial?"

"Yes."

"You're all very funny here."

"We're all very employed here." He straightens up. "Ma'am, can I say something?"

"Please."

"Everybody in this house has signed something.Most of us signed two things." He goes back to the hood."You should read what you signed."

"What was the second thing you signed?"

"That's the one I can't tell you about."

---

I don't read what I signed. I go to the west wing instead.

The door isn't locked. That's the part that unsettles me. A man with fourteen cameras on his driveway leaves his study open, which means either there's nothing inside or he doesn't believe I'd dare.

The study is dark wood and green glass. Books nobody's read. A desk the size of a bed.

And along the far wall, filing drawers. Actual paper. In a house where the doorbells have screens.

I start at the bottom.

Contracts.Land surveys.Something in German.A folder labeled HARDING, M. that I don't open because I'm not a monster, and then a drawer that sticks, and then a drawer that doesn't.

The tab reads HARTLEY.

My hands go cold before my brain catches up.

Inside there's a photograph. Black and white, printed on heavy stock, taken from far away with a long lens.

My father, on the steps of the Wexford building, laughing at something over his shoulder.He's wearing the tie I bought him for his forty-fifth birthday.He's alive in it.He's so alive in it that I have to put it face down on the carpet.

Under the photo, a newspaper clipping, cut clean and pressed flat.

**WEXFORD CFO DEAD AT 51 — POLICE RULE SUICIDE**

Someone's gone over the word *suicide* in blue ink.Once.Not angry.A small careful circle, the way you'd mark a spelling error.

And in the margin, in handwriting I've seen twice on a marriage certificate:

*Not him.*

Under that, a page of dates.Fourteen of them.The last is three days before my father died, and beside it: *S.H. — Wexford lobby, 4:15pm.She was there.*

I was there.I brought him lunch because he'd forgotten it.I was nineteen.I stayed eleven minutes.

Nobody in the world knows that. I never told the police. Nobody asked.

Behind the dates, a second photograph.

Me. Nineteen. Coming through the revolving door with a paper bag in my hand, and my father in the background, and a third man in the frame with his back turned, and someone has drawn a small blue circle around that man's shoulder too.

I sit down on the floor of my husband's study.

"Okay," I say to nobody. "Okay."

Because there's one page left. A single sheet, typed, no letterhead.

*SUBJECT: HARTLEY, SIENNA MARGARET.**STATUS: LOCATED.**ACQUISITION: IN PROGRESS.*

*Acquisition.*

The date on it is March. We met in June.

I read it four times. The house is so quiet I can hear the clock in the hall two rooms away, and then I can hear something else, and the something else is a car door.

Then the front door.

Then footsteps that don't hurry, and I have never wanted anything as badly as I want those footsteps to hurry, because a man who hurries doesn't know.

"Sienna."

He's in the doorway.Suit, no tie, keys in his hand.He doesn't look at the open drawer.He looks at the papers spread across the carpet like a hand of cards.

"You're back early," I say.

"I'm back on time. It's two."

"You said—"

"I said two." He sets the keys down on the desk.Soft."Stand up."

"No."

"Sienna."

"Did you leave this door unlocked on purpose?"

"Does it matter?"

"It matters to me."

"Then yes."

"Tell me what *acquisition* means."

He crosses the room. Kneels. Not near me — near the photograph of my father, and he turns it face up with two fingers and looks at it for a long moment, and something moves in his jaw that I don't have a name for.

"It means," he says, "that I found you before they did."

"Before *who* did?"

"Do you want the true answer or the safe one?"

"Don't do that. Don't be clever. That's my *father* on your floor—"

"I know whose father he is." His voice stays level and that's the frightening part. "Sienna, your father didn't kill himself."

The clock ticks in the hall.

"I know," I say.

"Say it again."

"I know. I've known for six years and nobody would listen."

"Yes." He looks up at me for the first time. "That's why I married you."

My throat closes. "What?"

"You're the only other person who saw him that day." He picks up the second photograph — the nineteen-year-old me, the man with his back turned."You walked past him at four fifteen.You had eleven minutes and a sandwich and you looked directly at this man's face."

"I don't remember his face."

"You will."

"You can't just decide that."

"I didn't." He turns the photo toward me."Because he's downstairs.He's been in my dining room for the last ninety seconds, and he thinks he's here to meet my new wife."

Outside, in the hall, a second set of footsteps stops at the door.