Chapter 5
1235 Words
"Your father's file was closed six hours after he died."
Mrs. Harding doesn't look up from the silver she's polishing. The clock in the east hall strikes midnight, and every chime lands in my ribs.
"Sienna. Put that away."
"Six hours." I set the photocopied report on the counter between us. "A man drowns in his own car and the police shut the case before the sun comes up."
"That isn't my business."
"It's mine." I slide the page closer."There's a signature at the bottom.Look at it."
She keeps polishing. The cloth moves in tight, careful circles.
"I already have," she says.
The room tilts. "You've seen this before."
"I've been in this house eleven years." She finally sets the fork down."Go to bed, girl.Some doors stay shut because what's behind them will eat you."
"Whose name is it?"
"Sienna—"
"Whose name?"
She takes the report. Folds it once. Presses it back into my palm like she's handing me a lit match.
"Ask your husband," she says. "And ask him downstairs, not up. The rooms up there carry sound."
---
The study door is open two inches, gold light bleeding into the hall.
Adrian sits with his back to me, sleeves rolled, a crystal glass sweating on the desk. He hasn't touched it.
"You should be asleep," he says without turning.
"You should be surprised I'm not."
"I stopped being surprised by you in week two." He turns the chair.His tie hangs loose around his throat, and there are shadows under his eyes deep enough to drown in."Whatever it is, ask it.It's late and I'm tired of the ceremony."
I put the report on the desk.
He doesn't reach for it. He reads it upside down, and his jaw moves once.
"Where did you get this?"
"A clerk in the county archive who liked my grandmother." I lean on the desk."Bottom of the page.The internal review that closed the case.Signed by a man named Victor Cross."
Silence.
"Your father," I say.
"My father." He says it like a stone dropping into water.
"You knew."
"I know a great many things I wish I didn't." He stands.Crosses to the window, hands in his pockets, and the city glitters behind him like something under glass."Sit down, Sienna."
"No."
"Please."
The word lands wrong. He never says please.
I sit.
"Your father worked for Cross Holdings," he says. "You know that part."
"Twelve years. Structural engineer."
"Nine of them in compliance." He turns."He was auditing the Redwater development.Do you know what that is?"
"A resort. It never opened."
"It never opened because your father wrote a forty-page report explaining that the foundation would fail in six years." Adrian's voice stays level.That's the frightening part."He sent it to my father on a Thursday.My father buried it Friday."
My hands go cold in my lap.
"And then?"
"Then your father did the honorable thing and threatened to go to the state board." He picks up the glass.Sets it down again untouched."Eleven days later his car went into Redwater Reservoir."
"Say the rest."
"There isn't a rest that I can prove."
"I didn't ask for proof."
"I know what you asked for." His eyes come up and hold mine, and there's something in them that hasn't been there before.Something raw at the edges."You asked me to say my father killed yours.And I won't say a thing I can't put a document behind, because if I say it out loud to you, and I'm wrong, I've handed you a grief you'll carry for the rest of your life."
"And if you're right?"
"Then I've handed you something worse."
The clock ticks. My pulse is louder.
"Why did you marry me?" I ask.
He goes still.
"Answer it."
"Because I read the forty pages," he says. "Six months before I met you. My father died, I opened his private safe, and the first thing in it was your father's report with a photograph of you clipped to the back."
The air leaves the room.
"A photograph of me."
"Sixteen years old.School portrait." His voice roughens."There was a note on it in my father's handwriting.Two words."
"What words?"
"Sienna. Don't."
I stand up so fast the chair scrapes.
"Don't what?"
"I don't know." For the first time, something cracks open in his face."I have spent three years not knowing.I have paid nine investigators.I have read that note ten thousand times, and I do not know if it means don't hurt her or don't trust her or don't let her find out, and every version of it keeps me awake."
"So you married me to watch me."
"I married you to keep you where I could see the door." He steps closer."You think that's cold.It's the least cold thing I've ever done."
"It's a cage."
"It's a wall." His hand comes up like he'll touch my face, and stops an inch short. "There's a difference, and someday you'll hate me for knowing it."
We're close enough now that I can smell whiskey he never drank and the faint clean edge of his shirt. His breathing isn't steady. Mine isn't either.
"Adrian." My voice comes out thin. "What's in the east room?"
His hand drops.
"Don't."
"There's a lock on it that costs more than my car.There's a light under the door at three in the morning.Mrs.Harding won't walk past it." I don't step back."You've given me a piece tonight.Give me that."
"No."
"Why?"
"Because the moment you see what's in that room, you stop being a woman who suspects and become a woman who knows." His jaw works."And people who know don't get to live quietly.Ask your father."
The last three words break something in him. He turns away, one hand braced against the window frame, shoulders rigid.
I put my palm flat against his back.
He goes rigid, then not. His head drops forward.
"I'm not the villain in this," he says quietly. "I need you to at least allow for the possibility."
"Then let me in."
"Sienna."
"Let me in, or I'll find another archive clerk. And another. And I won't stop, and you know I won't stop."
He turns. Takes my face in both hands, and his thumbs are trembling.
"I know," he says. "That's what terrifies me."
Then he kisses my forehead. It's not romance. It's the way you touch something you've already begun to lose.
"Two days," he says. "Give me two days and I'll open the door myself."
"Two days."
"Swear it."
"I swear it."
He believes me. That's the part I'll think about later.
---
I don't sleep.
At two-forty in the morning I take my phone to the window and open the photo I stole from the archive folder — the one I didn't show him. The reservoir. My father's car on the flatbed, water still pouring from the door seams.
And behind it, in the background, out of focus but there: a woman standing at the treeline in a pale coat.
I zoom in. Zoom again.
The face resolves.
It's mine.
Not similar. Mine — same mouth, same widow's peak, the small scar through my left eyebrow from the summer I was nine. A woman with my face, standing at the water where my father died, ten years before I ever heard the name Adrian Cross.
Behind me, the bedroom door clicks open.
"You weren't supposed to see that," Mrs. Harding says. "Not yet."
- Writer
