On the seventh day Saskia comes.
I am in the conservatory watering when I hear a car on the gravel. A pearl Bentley. It pulls up under the portico and idles.
The door opens and a woman gets out.
She is thinner than three years ago, the features more refined — work has been done. She is in a cream MaxMara coat. There is a strand of South Sea pearls at her throat.
That strand of pearls was Atlas's first-anniversary gift to me.
She is on the conservatory steps when she sees me. Her stride breaks.
So does mine.
Through half a glass house, we look at each other.
The blood goes out of her face fast.
I have seen many varieties of fear in my life. What is on her face is not fear. It's the white that comes when someone hears a coffin lid lifting in the next room.
She steps back without thinking. Her heel catches the lip of the step. She catches her balance on the railing.
Then she rights herself.
Mrs. Halloran has come out to the steps. "Miss Vandermeer-Pell. Mr. Hale is in the study."
Saskia looks away from me and smooths her hair. "Mrs. Halloran. The girl in the conservatory. Who is she."
Mrs. Halloran glances back at me. "Oh — the new personal assistant Mr. Hale has hired."
Saskia doesn't say anything else. She follows Mrs. Halloran into the house.
But on the stairs she turns and looks at me a second time.
That look has weight in it. Estimation. Calculation.
And one thing more I know too well — the cool arithmetic of a woman working out a problem.
Half an hour later Sutton comes to find me in the conservatory.
"Ms. Ashby. Mr. Hale would like you in the upstairs sitting room."
I set down the watering can.
The sitting room door is open. Atlas is at the small table. There's a tea service in front of him. Saskia is seated across from him, holding the cup with practiced grace, taking a measured sip.
When I come in her thumb tightens slightly on the porcelain.
Atlas's eyes move to me.
"Come here. Stand in the light."
I cross the room and stop by the window. The afternoon sun is full on my face.
Saskia stares at me. One second. Two. Three.
"Atlas," she says, setting the cup down and tapping the edge of the saucer with one nail. "Where did you find this person."
"She came to the audition."
"The eyes are similar, I'll give you that. But the rest is — really, Wren had a presence." She picks her word with care. "This girl is common."
I don't move.
Atlas raises his cup. "I didn't bring you in to authenticate her."
The smile on Saskia's mouth freezes for a beat.
She stands up and picks up her bag. As she passes me she lowers her voice to the pitch that does not carry beyond me.
"It doesn't matter how much you look like her. She's already dead."
After Saskia is gone, Atlas asks me to stay.
He pours me a cup of tea and pushes it across to me. It is the first cup of tea he has ever poured me — three years ago or three years later.
"What did she say to you."
"That I'm common."
"The other line."
I don't answer.
He looks at me.
"There are cameras in this room. No blind angles. But the lipreading needs a frontal angle. She turned away."
I lift the cup. The leaf is good. A first-flush oolong.
"She said Wren is already dead."
His eyelid twitches.
There is a few-second silence. Then he says something I haven't predicted.
"Are you afraid of her."
"No."
"Why not."
"There's nothing to be afraid of. I'm just a stand-in who happens to look like her."
He looks at me for a long time. His eyes move from my brow to my eyes, from my eyes to the bridge of my nose, from there to my mouth.
The way someone reads each road on an old map, inch by inch, the second time.
"Your eyes don't resemble hers," he says. "They are hers."
I don't answer that.
He leans back into the chair. His fingers are unconsciously turning the wooden mala on his wrist.
"The night Wren left us, I did something."
My heart kicks once. Hard.
"I closed her ventilator line."
He says it level. The way a man might describe a transaction he was not party to.
But the fingers on the mala stop.
"I stood in the corridor for an hour after. Then I went home. I got the call from the hospital. They said she was gone."
He closes his eyes.
"I — I felt relief."
The air solidifies.
"It turned out to be too soon for relief."
He opens his eyes. He is looking at me.
"Saskia's paternity report was forged. She is not a Vandermeer. She isn't anything she said she was."
"When did you find that out," I say.
"Three months after the funeral."
Three months.
It only took him three months to find out the truth.
By that time I was a thousand miles up the coast, in a community clinic in Maine, on a delivery bed, with a doctor whose hands were shaking.
"What did you do when you found out."
He doesn't answer.
He stands up and walks to the door.
"From tomorrow, you don't need to avoid Saskia. When she comes, you stay. I want to watch her face."
The door closes.
I sit in the sitting room. The tea in my cup has gone cold.
He is using me.
He is using a face that matches his dead wife's to test the reactions of the woman who helped kill her.
The irony is that the dead wife is sitting across from him, and he doesn't know.
Or he does know. And he is waiting for me to say it myself.
He doesn't come to the master suite that night.
I sit in the museum of a room until eleven.
Then I take the old phone out of the lining of my duffel bag.
There are three messages from June.
Cami's holding ok. Ate half a bowl of soup.
Faraday wants to push for the transplant. He says we need a donor inside two months.
Your typing came back. You're not a match. Half-match too risky from the mother. Best donor — the father.
I look at the last word for a long time.
The father.
Cami's father.
Atlas Hale.
The screen darkens. My face is in the black glass. I don't want to see what my expression looks like.
I cannot tell Atlas Hale he has a daughter.
Three years ago he closed his wife's ventilator line. If he learns the wife is alive, that she carried a child to term, that the child is here —
What does he do.
Does he close that line too.
Or does he turn the child into the same kind of carefully-maintained specimen as the master suite.
I push the phone back into the lining and close the bag.
The next morning Sutton knocks on the door.
"Ms. Ashby. Mr. Hale would like you in the drawing room at ten. He has a guest."
At ten there is a stranger in the drawing room. A man around fifty, gray-haired, gold rims on the glasses, an open and intelligent face with shrewd eyes underneath.
Atlas is across from him.
"This is Gideon Korn." Atlas says it to me. "He handled the investigation into Wren's death."
Korn turns toward me. His glasses nearly slide off the bridge of his nose.
"This is the —"
"Personal assistant." Atlas says it. "She bears a resemblance."
Korn looks at me a long moment. Then he turns back, slowly, and opens the file in his hand.
"Mr. Hale. The supplemental you asked for came in. The person on Floor 8 at twenty-two seventeen was indeed Saskia."
"What did she do."
Korn pushes his glasses up. "We pulled an additional camera angle on the corridor. She entered the patient's room with a small medication vial in her hand. She left without it."
"What was in it."
"Still confirming. But to put the night together — once the line was off, the rescue window before catastrophic damage was eight to ten minutes. Standard ICU rounds would catch the alarm in five. That night, the round nurse was seven minutes late."
He turns to the next page.
"The reason she was late: someone had dosed the coffee in the staff break room."
The drawing room goes silent for several seconds.
Atlas's voice surfaces from somewhere underwater. "So even if I hadn't pulled the line —"
"Saskia had a backup." Korn closes the file. "Mr. Hale. This isn't a fraud case. This is a homicide."
I am standing in the corner of the drawing room. My fingernails dig into my palms again.
That night, it wasn't only Atlas Hale who wanted me dead.
Saskia had come to make sure I went all the way.
After Korn leaves Atlas sits in the drawing room a long time.
I watch his back from the corridor. He has his elbow on the chair arm and his head in one hand, and the other hand is moving the cold tea leaves in his cup with the rim.
Sutton comes up beside me and lowers his voice. "Mr. Hale may not come up the next few nights. Use your time as you like."
I nod and go back upstairs.
I sit at the vanity and try to think it through.
Saskia brought a vial into my room. If June hadn't gotten there in time —
No. June was already seven minutes late, because the round had been delayed seven minutes by the dosed coffee.
In those seven minutes, if the contents of Saskia's vial had taken effect —
I might actually have died.
Not because of Atlas's hand on the line.
Because of Saskia's vial.
Atlas had pulled the line and given me a window where I could be revived. Saskia had been there to make sure that window closed.
One of them was a betrayal. One of them was a homicide.
Is the difference very large.
I don't know.
But there is a question I have to answer — why had Saskia wanted me dead.
For the slot. To replace me. Because once the forged-heiress claim came apart, she couldn't survive in the open.
No.
Saskia never replaced me. Atlas didn't marry her. He didn't move her into Hale House. The South Sea pearls she had on her throat she had taken; he had never given them to her.
So what had she been after.
The next afternoon I am watering in the conservatory when I see something I should not be seeing.
There is a small structure at the back of the conservatory — a potting shed, in past summers used for storage. I had assumed nothing in it had changed. But up close I can see it has been altered.
The padlock is on but the catch is old. The metal hook of the watering wand pries it open in two motions.
What is inside is not gardening tools.
What is inside is a wall.
The whole wall is covered with photographs.
All of them are of me.
Not from three years ago in the wedding dress. Recent.
Me in a bodega apron behind the register. Me in line at an M&T Bank ATM in Astoria. Me carrying Cami at a follow-up at Elmhurst. Me in front of a coin-operated dryer.
The most recent one has a date stamp from two weeks ago — me pushing Cami's stroller down a sidewalk in Queens, with the streetlight behind us pulling our shadow long.
Each photograph is annotated in the lower right corner, in red Sharpie, with date and location.
Pinned at the top is a single index card.
The handwriting is Atlas's. I would know it anywhere — the heavy hand, every stroke pressed too hard.
One word.
Alive.
The cold goes up the back of my neck.
He knows.
He has known from the start.
He knows I didn't die.