Mask Of The Rebirth

Chapter Four: A Folder With My Name On It

Nora's Pov

Five days in and I had the schedule down cold.

Dara left for the market at nine. The two groundskeepers worked the east side until noon. Gideon's assistant Reyes came and went on a pattern so regular I could set a watch to it, and Gideon himself had a standing call with the Singapore office every Thursday that pulled him off the property for two hours, sometimes three.

Today was Thursday.

I stood outside his study at 10:14am with my hand flat against the wood, not pushing yet, just feeling the door the way you check ice before you put your full weight on it.

The drawer was still bothering me. Three days now and I had not stopped turning it over. Empty corners, fresh polish, someone who knew exactly where to look. Either Celeste lied to her own diary about what she kept in that desk, or somebody else had already taken everything before I ever got here.

I needed to know which.

The door was unlocked. Of course it was unlocked. Why would he lock anything in his own house from a wife he had no reason yet to suspect.

I went in.

The room smelled like cedar and old paper, and the desk sat exactly where I expected from the layout in the diary, papers stacked at an angle too precise to be accidental. I went through the obvious drawers first. Bank statements. A letter from an architect about renovations that never happened. Nothing with teeth.

The bottom drawer stuck a little when I pulled it.

Inside, a single folder. Plain manila, no label on the tab, sitting by itself like it had been placed there and not filed there.

I should have left it.

I opened it anyway.

A photograph sat on top. Me, three years younger, in a navy dress at the back of a reception hall I recognized after a second too long. The wedding. Celeste's wedding. I remembered standing near the bar that night doing math in my head about how fast I could leave without anyone noticing I had come at all.

Beneath the photograph, one line of typed text.

‘Forensic accountant. Attended the wedding alone. Did not drink.’

That was it. No threat. No accusation. Just a fact, stated plain, the kind of detail you would only write down if you had actually been watching.

My hands went still on the edge of the folder.

I had stood in that room three years ago certain that nobody there knew my name, let alone what was in my glass. I built a whole identity around being the forgettable twin standing at the edges of Celeste's life.

Somebody had been watching the edges too.

That fact landed somewhere under my ribs and stayed there, heavier than the photograph itself, heavier than the name on the folder. “Nora Vane.” Not Celeste's. Mine. He did not have a file on the wife he thought he had.

He had a file on me.

I closed it slow. I set it back exactly where I found it, angled the same three degrees off center, because if he had noticed I did not drink at a wedding three years ago, he would notice a folder out of line.

I left the study with my pulse doing something I did not have a name for, somewhere between my throat and the base of my neck, and I made it exactly to the second floor landing before I heard his voice behind me.

"Good evening."

I stopped breathing for what felt like an hour and was probably two seconds.

He was not supposed to be back. The call ran two hours minimum, sometimes three, and it was barely eleven. I turned and there he was at the bottom of the stairs, jacket over one arm, looking at me like I was exactly where I was supposed to be and nowhere else.

"You're back early," I said.

"Call ran short."

He did not look at the study door. He did not look anywhere near it. He walked past me toward the stairs like the entire conversation had already finished somewhere I had not been invited to.

I stood there with my hand on the railing and understood something I did not want to understand.

He knew.

Not suspected. Not wondered. Knew, the way you know a thing you have already decided what to do about. He left that folder exactly where I would find it on exactly the day I would be looking, and he walked back into his own house early enough to watch me come down those stairs and said nothing at all.

I went to my room and sat on the edge of the bed for longer than I meant to, the photograph from the folder stuck behind my eyes, that line of typed text running on repeat.

‘Did not drink.’

Three years and nobody noticed me in that room except the one person I had built an entire plan around destroying.

That night, after the house went quiet, I locked the bathroom door and pulled the burner phone free from behind the mirror where I had taped it the first night, fingers a little clumsy with how careful I was being.

Petra picked up on the second ring.

"Tell me you're calling because you're bored," she said.

"I found a folder. With my name on it."

"Define folder."

"My name. A photo from Celeste's wedding. One line about me not drinking that night."

Something on Petra's end went quiet in a way that was worse than if she had said anything at all.

"How long has he had this," she said finally.

"I don't know. It looked old. The paper had that yellow at the edges."

"Nora."

"What."

"If he's had a file on you since before you walked through that gate." Petra stopped. I could hear her breathing on the other end, working through it the way she worked through everything, piece by piece. "Who told him you were coming?"

I did not answer.

I could not answer.

The bathroom tile was cold under my bare feet and somewhere down the hall a door opened and closed, soft, and I sat there gripping a phone that was not supposed to exist in this house, staring at nothing, while the question sat between Petra and me with no good place to land.

Because the only people who knew I was coming were Petra, myself, and a dead woman's diary.

And dead women do not make phone calls.