Chapter 3

Mara’s suitcases are standing in my front hall when Julian brings me home.

Three cases, a child’s backpack, and a wrapped photograph wait beneath the staircase as neatly as if the house expected them before me.

I stop with one hand on the doorframe. “Why are they here?”

Julian’s mother rises before he can answer. Evelyn Harrow is perfectly upright and dressed as though my marriage scheduled an audience for its collapse.

“Leo has had a frightening accident,” she says. “He needs his mother and father nearby.”

Julian turns toward Mara without correcting Evelyn.

Mara enters behind us with Leo asleep against her shoulder. She is still wearing Julian’s jacket, although someone has dried her hair and found time to repair her lipstick.

“Only until he feels safe,” she says.

A brass key hangs from her fingers.

I recognize the blue ribbon I tied around it. The key opens the side door Julian and I use when we return late.

“You gave her a key.”

Julian looks at Mara, then at his mother. “She’s been using the sea house. She needed access when Leo visited.”

The brass key swings from Mara’s hand. She has entered my home often enough to need her own door.

Leo stirs, and a folded drawing slips from his backpack. I bend before anyone else can reach it.

There are two square houses beneath a yellow sun. In front of one stands a dark-haired woman with a round stomach. In front of the other stands Mara. Julian is drawn between them, one arm long enough to touch each roof.

Across the bottom, in careful block letters, Leo has written THURSDAY WITH DAD.

No one needs to explain the missing dinners now.

Mara reaches for the paper. “That’s private.”

I fold it along its existing crease and return it to Leo’s bag. “So was my marriage.”

Julian’s expression hardens. “Claire, enough.”

I look toward the staircase, wanting only a locked door and ten minutes without being asked to protect a child already protected from knowing his father has a wife.

Halfway up, I hear a drawer close inside my bedroom.

A maid steps into the hall carrying my nightgowns.

Behind her, the doors to the adjoining sitting room stand open. Leo’s clothes have been placed in the cabinet where I keep the blankets for our daughter. Mara’s toiletries line my bathroom counter beside Julian’s razor.

For a moment, the hallway narrows around me.

“Put those back,” I tell the maid.

She looks past me toward Julian.

Her eyes leaving me hurt more than her hands on my clothes. For six years she asked me where things belonged; now she waits for Julian to decide whether I still belong here.

Julian reaches the landing. “The east suite is quieter. You need rest, and Leo wakes during the night.”

“Then Mara and Leo can sleep in the east suite.”

“He needs to be near me.”

The answer comes without hesitation.

I wait for him to hear what he has said. His face does not change.

Mara appears below us, still holding the brass key. “I don’t want to cause trouble.”

My nightgowns remain folded over the maid’s arms.

“You’re not causing it,” Julian tells her.

He is looking at me when he says it.

I enter the bedroom, take my father’s brass compass from the bedside drawer, and slip it into my pocket. Then I lift the small case containing my documents before anyone can move that too.

At the east wing, the maid opens a room that smells of dust and unused linen. My clothes arrive behind me in another woman’s arms.

Julian leaves me in the east suite and closes the door behind him.

Only then do I see that the lock on my side has been removed.

I wedge a chair beneath the handle. Before dawn, scraping wood wakes me, but the hallway is empty.