Chapter 11

The other students liked her. She had an ease with people that she hadn't expected — a warmth and an unselfconsciousness that drew them in. She had no idea where it came from. Julian, who came to collect her most evenings and sat in the café across the street reading while he waited, watched this with an expression he was generally careful to keep neutral.

He was becoming less careful.

He appeared at the school more often than was strictly necessary. He found reasons to bring her to his office events, to introduce her to his colleagues' wives, to sit with her at the restaurant he took her to every Friday without it having been discussed. "This is Lily," he would say, and sometimes he would add, with a deliberateness that wasn't quite casual: "She's with me."

At home, he managed the practical concerns — the Parisian lease in a name that kept her off public records, the arrangement with the GP who handled her care through a private channel that left no visible trail, the careful consideration of the rumour that occasionally surfaced in the British press about the Blackwood heir's dead wife.

One evening, in his study, he called his assistant and asked: "The arrangements around the cliff. Is there anything—"

"Completely clean," the assistant confirmed. "The DNA sample we submitted was from the reference bank you approved. There is no record of Mrs. Blackwood being found in Cornwall. The fisherman's family took the compensation. Everything holds."

Julian ended the call. He sat with his unlit cigarette and looked at the garden, where Lily was sitting in the evening light with a sketchbook, entirely absorbed, entirely at peace.

He knew, with a clarity he'd been refusing to look at directly for months, that this was borrowed time. That at some point she would remember. That the version of Lily he lived with now — trusting, unguarded, quietly discovering herself — was built on a lie he'd told in a fishing village on the Cornwall coast.

He had thought, when he told it, that he was protecting her.

He understood now that he had also been protecting himself.

The autumn gala was a firm obligation — Hartley Holdings had a table, and Julian needed to be seen. Lily wore a midnight-blue dress and complained about her shoes for the entire car journey, and he told her she could take them off the moment they left, and she said that wasn't the point.

He had just opened the car door when he saw, across the entrance hall of the hotel, a man he recognized.

Don't let her see him, was his first thought. His second was that it was already too late.

Damian Blackwood was forty metres away, on the phone, looking exhausted and absent, scanning the room without focus. The kind of scan a man did when he was looking for something he no longer expected to find.

Julian put his hand at the small of Lily's back and moved them toward the far side of the room.

Lily heard it.

Not the name — he hadn't said her name yet, she was almost certain of that — but something else. A quality of voice from somewhere behind her that produced, for no reason she could identify, a sudden pressure behind her sternum.

She started to turn.

Julian's arm tightened around her, just slightly. "Don't. There's nothing there." He steered her gently toward the exit.

She let him, because the sensation was already fading, replaced by the usual faint static she'd stopped trying to interpret.

The car was waiting. Julian had already pressed the door button when the footsteps came fast from behind them.

"Lily."

The voice hit her wrong side of a door — muffled and distant and then suddenly not. She froze.

"Lily, please. Please look at me."

She turned, because her body turned before she'd made a decision about it.

The man standing ten feet away was looking at her with an expression that made something in her chest do something complicated and uncomfortable. He was tall, well-dressed, badly in need of sleep, and he was looking at her like he was trying to physically reconstruct her from memory.

"I know you," he said. It came out unsteady. "You're my wife."

Julian stepped between them. His voice was very level. "Mr. Blackwood. Step back."

"You're my wife," Damian said again, and this time he was looking past Julian, directly at her. "You hated the cold. You planted vegetables in the rose garden to annoy me. You found stray cats and brought them home and I made you take them to the shelter and you left the shelter's number on my pillow for six months." Something was breaking in his voice even as he kept it controlled. "Your perfume is lily of the valley. Your grandfather had a greenhouse. You—"

"Julian," Lily said.

Something hit her, and the hitting of it was physical — not memory exactly, not images, but a kind of pressure, dense and enormous, coming from somewhere in her skull that she'd learned not to push on. She pressed one hand to the side of her head without thinking.

Julian turned and saw her face. "Lily—" He was moving toward her, stepping between her and Damian, and she was distantly aware of his hand on her shoulder, guiding her gently, and the car door, and warmth.

"That man knows me," she said, when they were inside.