It was raining when I got to the front door of Thorne House.
I hadn't brought an umbrella.
I was three steps down the slate walk when I heard him behind me.
His hand came up halfway and stalled in the air.
"I'll drive you home."
— Her heels are too high for this gravel. Where the hell is the car. Where the hell is the driver. —
I turned and looked at him.
The rain had soaked through the shoulders of his shirt. His face was darker than the sky behind him.
This had happened before.
The morning I was released from Danbury, it had also been raining. I had taken a cab to Thorne House because I had nowhere else to go. I had knelt on those same slate stones and told him I had never taken those contracts.
He had been standing on the step under the portico with an umbrella over himself.
The umbrella had not moved an inch in my direction.
He had said, in the voice you use to teach a child, "Wren. You should learn to take responsibility for your own choices."
Now he was holding the umbrella out to me.
I didn't take it.
"Silas. Whatever you're doing right now, it only makes me sick."
His pupils tightened.
— She said sick. She used to say I was the one thing she loved. —
I smiled.
"That Wren is dead. The one who used to say that."
His throat moved.
"I didn't know —"
"Didn't know what." I cut him. "Didn't know Cassie had me framed. Didn't know your mother walked me to a clinic. Didn't know you signed the renewal papers at Hartwell. Twelve times."
Every sentence took color out of his face.
I started walking. The rain went straight through my coat.
Silas followed.
"Wren."
His voice was low and stripped.
"I'll find out everything."
I stopped.
"Whether you find anything out is no longer my problem."
He stood still on the wet stones.
— It isn't no longer anything. She's my wife. —
I turned to face him.
"As of tonight, I'm not."
My phone went off in my pocket.
It was my lawyer, Xavier Beaumont. I had been very specific about pickup times.
"Ms. Marlowe-Thorne. I'm at the gate. The petition is ready for filing in the morning."
Silas heard the man's voice through the phone.
— Beaumont. Why is he meeting her at this hour. By what right. —
I walked to the black Audi at the curb.
The driver's door opened. Xavier stepped out under his own umbrella — tall, deliberate, the rims of his horn-rims catching the gate light.
"Ms. Marlowe-Thorne. Get in."
Silas closed the distance fast and caught my wrist.
"Who is he."
I pulled my wrist back.
"My attorney."
Xavier looked Silas over with the unbothered patience of a man who has read this person's file. "Mr. Thorne. You can expect the filing by nine tomorrow morning."
Silas's mouth pulled to one side. "Counselor must be very free."
Xavier turned his umbrella so that it covered me.
"For Ms. Marlowe-Thorne's case, I'm always free."
Silas's interior was almost a hiss.
— He's standing too close to her. —
I got into the back of the Audi.
The door swung shut. Through the window I saw Silas in the rain, not under any shelter, holding an umbrella he had nothing to do with. He looked, for the first time in two lifetimes, like a statue someone had stopped attending to.
I didn't look back.
The buzzer woke me at six.
I had moved back into my own apartment that night — the Beacon Hill walk-up my grandmother had left me. In the first two lives, I had handed the keys to the Thornes within a month of the wedding because Silas had said it would be safer. Eleanor had decided the place had "good light" and installed Cassie in it. Cassie had streamed her shopping hauls from my bed and fed a cat in my grandmother's study and dumped my grandmother's letters into the basement storage cage.
This time I had changed the locks at three in the morning.
The buzzer was still going.
I opened the camera feed on my phone.
There were five of them on the landing.
Silas. Eleanor. Silas's father, Charles. Sylvie, his younger sister. Mr. Henderson, the estate manager.
The unhinged thing was that Eleanor was on her knees.
Eleanor Cabot Thorne. On her knees on Beacon Hill slate. Her hair had loosened and her mascara was on her jaw.
"Wren. I was wrong. Open the door. I'll bow my head to the floor."
I checked twice that I had actually woken up.
Sylvie was holding a slim leather box, her face wrecked.
"Wren. I brought back the pearls. The ones I — that I took in the second life. I'm a piece of garbage. Hit me. I'll let you hit me."
Charles stood a little behind them, slightly bowed at the shoulders. The chairman emeritus of Thorne Capital, dressed at six in the morning to apologize on the landing of a walk-up flat.
"Wren. The Thornes owe you a life."
Silas looked up at the camera. The skin under his eyes was bruised.
"Wren. Please open the door."
— Don't be afraid. I won't come in. I just want to see you for one second. —
My hand was on the bolt. I let go of it.
"Address everything through my attorney."
Eleanor cried harder.
"No, please. Please don't put a lawyer between us. I remember now. I remember all of it."
I rested my forehead on the back of the door.
My heart was beating very slowly.
Of course.
It wasn't just Silas.
They had all come back.
Sylvie lifted the box up toward the camera. Inside it, on a fresh bed of cotton, were my grandmother's freshwater pearls, restrung on what looked like new silk thread. Each bead had been polished. In the second life, Sylvie had borrowed them to wear to the Foundation gala on my birthday, the clasp had broken at coat-check, and when I asked for them back she had told me I was small to make a fuss. The pearls had ended up in a hotel garbage can.
These were the same pearls, repaired down to the last one.
Sylvie's shoulders were heaving.
"Wren. I was a terrible person."
I spoke through the door, level.
"You don't know you were wrong."
"You just remember the part where it hurt."
The crying outside stopped, all at once.
Silas put his palm flat against the door.
"Wren. I don't have any right to ask you for anything."
— I'm going to ask anyway. —
I said, "Then don't."
He went silent.
Then Eleanor pressed her forehead to the slate. The thud came up through the wood.
"Wren. Please. Give August one chance. He went mad in the last life, after you —"
Silas said, sharp, "Mother."
I pressed my fingertips into my palms.
After I what.
Eleanor put a hand over her mouth and did not finish.
The buzzer stopped.
For a long time the hallway outside was so quiet it scared me.
Xavier arrived at nine on the dot.
He found the Thornes still arranged in a half-kneel along my landing and slowed half a step.
Sylvie was on her feet in a breath, eyes raw.
"What are you doing back."
Xavier's voice didn't move. "Ms. Thorne. Ms. Marlowe-Thorne has retained me to handle the dissolution."
Sylvie's voice climbed.
"Don't play decent. In the last life you were the one who got my sister-in-law out of Boston. You're the reason Cassie found her again."
I opened the door.
Five Thornes turned at once.
Silas's eyes settled on me and stalled.
— She's lost weight. She didn't sleep. —
I didn't look at him. I looked at Sylvie.
"Say that again."
Sylvie's face went white. She knew, the second the words were out, what she had given up.
Xavier did not change expression.
"Ms. Thorne, mind yourself."
Sylvie tried to come at me; Silas caught her by the upper arm.
"Tell her exactly what you mean."
His voice was very low.
Sylvie's tears spilled. "In the second life, after Wren came out of Danbury — Xavier helped her find evidence to reopen the case. He set her up in a rental in the South End. Within ten days Cassie's people found her. They took her back. They put her in Hartwell."
She lifted her chin at him.
"Nobody else knew where she was."
The air in the hallway stopped.
I looked at Xavier.
In the first two lifetimes he had been a footnote in my head. The kind man who showed up after I lost in court. He had rented me an apartment. He had said he'd find me a journalist. He had said we'd get the conviction vacated.
And then, very fast, Silas's people had found me.
I had assumed the Thorne name had eyes everywhere.
Xavier slid the horn-rims up his nose.
"Ms. Marlowe-Thorne. The Thornes will say anything right now to keep you. They will throw any kind of mud."
Sylvie shrieked. "That's a lie."
Eleanor was on her feet. Her finger trembled in front of her.
"It was you. I remembered. The commitment papers at Hartwell — there was a counter-signature. A Beaumont. You witnessed it."
The bottom of my head was buzzing.
Xavier looked at me. He had not stopped being polite.
"Ms. Marlowe-Thorne. I did not."
Silas suddenly stepped sideways, putting his shoulder between Xavier and me.
His head was ice.
— By the second life I'd worked out he wasn't a lawyer. He's been Cassie's man since law school. The Penhallows paid his tuition. —
I looked up at him.
"You already knew."
Silas didn't answer.
I smiled at him.
"So last night, when he came to the gate — you knew, and you said nothing. You wanted me to walk into it on my own so you could pull me out and look like the hero."
"That isn't what —"
— I was afraid she wouldn't believe me. —
I stared at him.
"Silas. You're right. I don't believe you."
Xavier laughed, very softly.
He took the horn-rims off. The polite cast of his face split along a seam.
"Ms. Marlowe-Thorne. You've finally caught up."