Chapter 2

I had. Once.

Three years ago, on the drive up out of Atlantic City, Camilla told us the part she'd left out in our kitchen.

"You'll settle it before either of you lays eyes on him."

Genevieve asked why.

"Because I was nineteen when my father put me in that house and nobody asked me one question about it." No heat in it at all. "I'm not having either of you tell me in ten years that a face talked you into it. Pick the job. Don't pick the man."

My sister picked that night in a hotel outside Toms River, before I had my coat off. By the next morning she wanted it back.

Camilla didn't put her pen down. "If I unmake it for you today, by Sunday every man on this property knows my word comes apart when a girl cries at me."

Then she told me to go slow with him. Let him get used to me.

"And don't say anything to him about the arrangement," she said. "He'll hear it from me when he's ready to hear it."

It took me about a week to work out that the two of them could go three days in the same house without speaking.

He was polite in front of her. The rest of the time he worked on getting us out.

The cook made an almond cake on Sundays. I had two pieces the first week and told her it was the best thing I'd ever eaten. The next Sunday there was fruit, and she wouldn't look at me when she set it down. It took a month to get out of her that Mr. Rafe had asked her to stop.

There was a pool behind the house. I swam every morning before anyone was up, forty lengths, and it was the only part of that place that ever felt like mine. One morning in June I came down with my towel and it was empty. Drained to the bottom in the night. It stayed that way.

Then he told the staff not to speak to us. Three weeks of it. If I asked where something was they'd point.

"I thought I'd got it wrong," Genevieve said, watching me carry my own laundry down the back stairs. "Turns out I dodged it. He's a spoiled kid with a temper." She put her chin on her hand. "Rough luck, Nor."

Camilla had told me my first week to come to her if I ever saw the same car twice.

I had driving lessons in the village on Tuesdays and Thursdays. The third week a gray sedan sat across from the school both days and was behind me on the road home both days.

I wanted to be sure before I said anything. Being sure took three nights of lying there listening to the house.

On Sunday a door blew shut down the hall and I knocked my glass over and had my hand on the carving knife before I knew I'd moved.

Fourteen people at that table. Camilla set her fork down very slowly.

Rafe was the only one who laughed.

Two days later I mentioned to the housekeeper that everything my mother left me was locked in the cold room off the old wine cellar, and that I went down and sat with it some evenings.

There is nothing of my mother. I put an empty shoebox on the shelf down there anyway.

He came down at one in the morning. I let him get all the way in and reach the shelf, then dropped a length of pipe through the outside handle.

"Open it." Calm, the first time.

"Say you're sorry about the pool."

Nothing.

"And the cake. And telling them not to talk to us."

"Open the door, Nora."

I told him through it that I wasn't after a win. It was his house, and his mother had pulled me out of a place that would have finished me. I'd take a truce over a war. One sentence and he could have it.

He didn't answer.

He never called out. Not once in four hours. Somebody would have come inside a minute, and by morning every man on that property would have known the heir got shut in a cooler by a girl from the back bay, and he'd sit in the cold until Christmas before he let that happen.

Around five I started doing math about how long a person lasts at thirty-eight degrees in shirtsleeves. I pulled the pipe out.

He came through the door fast and his legs weren't under him. He made two steps, caught my shoulder, and we both went down on the tile.

His mouth caught the side of my jaw on the way down.

He got up without saying anything. His ears had gone red to the tips. He left me sitting there.