Chapter 3: The Name That Worked for Me
I told Marcus to stay with Delia.
He didn't ask why.
In eight years he had never once asked why, which was the reason he was still standing.
I handed him the phone with the photo still on the screen and walked out of the hospital into the snow without my coat.
The drive back to the estate took eleven minutes.
I counted them.
The front door was unlocked.
The hallway was dark except for the thin line of light coming from under the cellar door at the far end of the corridor.
I stood at the top of the cellar stairs and listened.
A drawer closing.
The soft drag of something across concrete.
I went down.
Celeste was at the old filing cabinet in the corner — the one that had been my father's, the one I had not opened in four years because there was nothing in it worth opening for.
She had pulled the bottom drawer all the way out and set it on the floor.
Her fur coat was draped over the back of a chair.
She was working in her evening dress, both hands in the drawer, and she did not hear me on the stairs.
"Find what you were looking for?" I said.
She straightened slowly.
She did not spin around.
She took one breath, set something down in the drawer, and then turned to face me with the same expression she had worn in the conservatory — composed, faintly inconvenienced, as though I had interrupted something reasonable.
"You came back quickly," she said.
"What's in the drawer, Celeste."
"Old papers.
Your father's correspondence.
I was looking for the property deed your mother mentioned last month.
For the Lakeshore parcel." She tilted her head slightly.
"I told you about this."
"You didn't."
"I'm certain I did." A small pause.
"You've been under a great deal of stress."
I crossed the floor and looked into the drawer.
Folders.
Envelopes.
A rubber-banded stack of letters.
And underneath them, face-down, a photograph.
I picked it up.
Two men standing outside a building I didn't recognize.
One of them was my brother Ewan.
The timestamp in the corner read fourteen months ago.
My hand didn't shake.
I had trained it not to.
"Fourteen months," I said.
"I don't know what that is."
"You're looking at it."
"I've never seen that photograph."
I set it on top of the filing cabinet and looked at her.
"The man standing next to him.
I want his name."
For the first time that night, something moved behind her eyes.
Not fear — Celeste didn't do fear the way ordinary people did.
It was closer to recalculation.
The look of someone deciding which version of the truth costs the least.
"I don't know that man," she said.
"Then I'll find out another way.
And when I do, whatever arrangement you had with him ends on my terms, not yours."
She picked up her fur coat from the chair.
She was putting it on — slowly, deliberately, one sleeve at a time — and I understood that she had decided the conversation was finished.
"Celeste."
She stopped with the coat half on.
"The wedding is in nineteen days," I said.
"I want to know what you know about my brother.
I want to know the name of the man in that photograph.
And I want to know what you came down here to remove before I got back." I waited.
"You have until morning."
She looked at me for a long moment.
Then she smiled — the same smile from the conservatory, the one that had stopped me cold at one in the morning.
"You won't find him," she said.
"And even if you do — he won't want to be found by you."
She walked up the stairs.
Her heels were steady on every step.
I stood in the cellar alone with the photograph and the open drawer and the thing she had set down before she turned around.
I looked at it now.
A small key.
Old brass.
The kind that opened a safe-deposit box, not a door.
There was a number stamped on the side.
And below it, the name of a bank I had never done business with.
May you like
She had come down here to get that key.
And she had left without it.
