Chapter 5: The Woman in the Photograph
Gerald stepped into the hall to make calls.
I stayed.
Vivienne and I sat on opposite sides of the desk in the east wing study, the rain still going outside, the overhead light casting everything in a flat, honest yellow.
No chandelier.
No sapphire gown doing its work in candlelight.
Just a room and two people and the space between them filling up with things that couldn't be unsaid.
"How long have you been planning this?" I asked.
"Planning what?"
"Whatever this is.
The documents.
The journal.
Coming here tonight with Sofia's ring on your finger like it meant nothing."
"I wasn't planning anything." She looked at the window.
"I was protecting myself."
"From what?"
"From ending up like Sofia."
I let that land.
"Explain that."
She turned back to me.
Some of the performance had left her face.
What was underneath it was harder to read — not softer, exactly, but more real.
"Sofia called me," Vivienne said.
"Six weeks before she d*ed.
I didn't know her well.
We had met twice, at functions here.
But she called my personal number and asked if we could meet."
"You never told me that."
"No."
"Why?"
"Because of what she told me when we met." Vivienne looked down at the ring on her finger.
"She said she had found something.
In the household records.
A pattern of payments — small amounts, irregular intervals, going back four years — made to a private medical firm.
She didn't recognize the firm's name.
She had tried to look it up and couldn't find a registered address."
I was very still.
"She thought the payments were connected to her," Vivienne said.
"She thought someone was monitoring her health.
Her prescriptions.
Her doctor visits." She paused.
"She was frightened, Damian.
Genuinely frightened.
And three weeks later she was de@d."
"Sofia had a stroke."
"Sofia was forty-one years old, in good health, with no family history of stroke." Vivienne's voice was even.
"I know what the doctors said.
I also know what she told me.
And I know that after she d*ed, I went to her room and I found her journal and I read every word of it.
And then I understood why she had called me."
"What did the journal say?"
Vivienne reached into the small clutch bag she had set on the corner of the desk.
She removed a photograph — printed on plain paper, slightly creased — and placed it face-up between us.
It showed two men outside a building I didn't recognize.
One of them was Reeves.
The other one I had never seen before.
"Sofia took that photograph eight months ago," Vivienne said.
"She wrote the date and location in the journal.
The building is a private clinic in New Jersey.
The man with Reeves is its director." She tapped the photograph.
"The same clinic that received those payments."
I picked up the photograph.
Reeves.
A clinic in New Jersey.
Payments I had never authorized and apparently never noticed.
"Who made those payments?" I asked.
"I don't know."
"Where are the payment records now?"
"In the folders I took." She met my eyes.
"I took them because I didn't know if you were behind it or if someone close to you was.
I needed to know before tonight.
Before I was legally bound to you." Her voice dropped slightly.
"I needed to know if I was safe."
I set the photograph down.
The rain had eased.
The house was very quiet.
"You should have come to me," I said.
"Would you have believed me?"
I didn't answer.
Because the honest answer was: I didn't know.
Gerald appeared in the doorway.
His face was careful in the way it got when something had shifted.
"Damian," he said.
"Reeves isn't in Connecticut."
"Where is he?"
May you like
Gerald looked at me steadily.
"No one seems to know."
