After breakfast I went looking for the east wing, and told myself I was only walking.

Walks were permitted. Marcus had said so. The lower lawn was open; the cliff path was closed for safety; the east wing had not been mentioned at all, which I had decided to read as neither permitted nor forbidden, which is the reading a person reaches for when she has already made up her mind to do the thing.

The east-wing corridor began at the same crossing where my own branched off — a long carpeted hall, the twin of mine, except for the door at the end of it. The door at the end of my hall was my bedroom. The door at the end of this one had two locks. A brass bolt, the kind you'd find on a Victorian back door, and above it a small chrome cylinder that had been set into the wood in the last few years. The two did not match. They had been installed by different hands, in different decades, for different reasons — and the newer one, the chrome one, had been added by someone who no longer trusted the old one to hold.

The brass bolt was thrown. The cylinder wanted a key. I had no key.

I turned and walked back the way I had come. The runners swallowed my footsteps. The wolves in the wainscoting watched me go.

My own door stood an inch open.

I had closed it. I remembered closing it, because I had stood half a second on the threshold thinking the wing-nut won't turn, but maybe somewhere in this house there is a screwdriver, before giving it up and going down to breakfast. I had closed the door. Someone had opened it.

I pushed it wide with one finger. Nothing inside had been taken. The bed unmade, my suitcase where I had left it, the carafe untouched. The pencil note still folded in the dresser where I had put it back, because removing it had felt like declaring a thing I was not ready to declare.

Nothing taken. Only one thing changed.

The closet door stood open.

I had not seen the closet door the night before. It was set flush into the wood paneling of the inner wall, unmarked, no handle on the outside — only the faintest seam, the kind you would never find unless someone meant you to. Last night I had been looking at the carafe and the lock and the three thousand wolves on the wallpaper. The closet had been there the whole time, the way a tooth is there in a closed mouth.

This morning it stood open six inches. Opened by the same hand, I supposed, that had opened my bedroom door in the minutes I was downstairs eating jam.

I crossed the room and pushed it with my knuckle. The hinges made no sound. Behind it was not a closet but a dressing room — cedar-lined, cool, twelve feet deep, a recessed bulb coming on of its own as the door swung. And under the cedar, faint but unmistakable, the lavender again.

On the rods and the shelves: clothes.

Eighteen dresses — six for evening, twelve for day. Eight skirts. Six blouses. Three pairs of trousers. Two coats. Three pairs of low-heeled shoes. A drawer of silk slips and stockings still in their wrappers and undergarments folded by hand. New tags on all of it, from boutiques I had never heard of, in cities I had never been — Bond Street, Faubourg, Madison Avenue. No receipts.

I put my hand on one dress. Pale gray-green silk, sleeveless, cut for a woman with a waist perhaps two inches fuller than mine. I checked the tag out of some instinct I could not name. The size on the tag was my size.

Every size on every tag, when I went down the rail, was my size.

I let the dress go and stepped back, and saw, on the inside of the door, embossed small in dark inlay, no larger than a quarter:

R. W.

No date. Nothing before the letters and nothing after. Two letters, on the inside of a door that opened onto a room of unworn clothes cut to a body that was not yet mine when they were ordered.

I shut the door. The light went out. I sat on the edge of the bed, and my feet did not reach the floor, and I thought, slowly, about who buys forty things in a woman's exact measurements for a woman who has not yet arrived. About who takes a body's measure before the body has been chosen. About what a closet means when it is finished before its occupant is.

There was a kind of arithmetic to it that turned my stomach. They had not bought clothes for me. They had bought clothes for the role, and the role had a size, and the size had outlived at least one woman already, and would, the math said plainly, outlive me too. The dresses were not a gift. They were a uniform left hanging between tenants. I had spent my whole life in borrowed things — my mother's coat, my mother's superstition about reading the right books, a name signed in crooked initials the night before — and I knew the difference between a thing lent to you in kindness and a thing you are expected to grow into whether it fits the woman or not. This was the second kind. This was the only kind this house had.

A knock at the door. I did not stand. "Yes."

Iris. She did not come in; she held the frame with one light hand. She had changed her dress since breakfast, into another the same color, and changed the pin she wore — gold now, oval, a garnet at its center. I would learn, in time, that she changed the pin every time she changed her mind about a thing, and that the pins were a language, and that she had been speaking it in plain sight of this house for thirty years without anyone bothering to learn it.

"Mrs. Wolfe. I should have walked with you this morning. I was unwell. I'll walk with you now — the lower lawn. The brother thought you might like it."

I stood. I crossed to the closet and laid my hand flat against the seam without opening it — the way you put your hand on a thing you have only just learned how to touch. Iris's eyes went once to my hand on the wood. They did not come back to it.

"That closet wasn't there last night," I said.

She said nothing.

"It was. I just didn't see it. Was it open when you came up?"

"No, ma'am."

"Did you open it?"

"No, ma'am."

"Did anyone?"

"I wouldn't know, ma'am."

"Iris."

She looked at me then — fully, the first time she had let herself. Faded blue eyes, almost colorless, the lines around them cut deep by thirty years and not about to soften for me. She looked at me the way a person looks at someone she has been very carefully not-looking-at on purpose, and finds she can no longer manage it.

"I have walked four women across the lower lawn in fifteen years," she said. "I will walk you across it now."

"Four?"

"Including Rebecca." A pause, and then, lower, as though the number itself were the dangerous part: "You are the fifth. I have walked all of them down that same lawn, around that same dead bed of lavender, and back up. I have not walked all of them back out the gate." She said it without weight, which was how I understood she meant me to keep it.

The name dropped into the room like a coin into deep water, and the rings of it kept going out long after the sound was gone.

I followed her down through the house, out a side corridor I had not yet been in, onto a stone terrace above a sloping lawn. The balustrade had a wolf carved into each of its eight posts. The grass was wet from yesterday and already going yellow at the tips. Past the lawn the cliffs began and dropped into a sea that this morning was the exact gray of his eyes the night before, flat and cold and clear all the way down.

Iris did not speak for the length of the walk. We went down past a circular bed of dead lavender, around a stone bench, and back up — eleven minutes, at the pace of a woman who knew to the second how long it took. The wind off the water cut through my cardigan, and I thought of the camel coat I had glimpsed in the closet, hanging by itself on its own hook, apart from the dresses, as though it were being kept for something. The coat in the closet was for later. The coat was for whatever the house had meant by the line about the first dress.

At the top of the lawn, before we went back inside, Iris stopped. She did not look at me; she looked at a hedgerow on the far side of the grass. She said it very quietly, and very fast, the way you say a thing you have decided to say in the one window where no one can hear.

"The closet was finished three months ago. I do not know who took your measurements. The brother does not buy clothes. The brother has not bought a single dress in this house in eleven years."

"Then who?"

"That is not a question I am permitted to answer." A breath. "I'm sorry."

She turned, and walked, and I followed her in.

Back in my room, alone, I opened the closet again. The light came on. The dresses hung. The cedar rose, and the lavender under it, and I stood a long time looking at R. W. on the inside of the door and thinking about four women walked across one lawn in fifteen years, and which of the four had stood in this exact spot first, with her hand flat on this exact seam, learning the same lesson I was learning now — that in this house a thing was prepared for you before you were asked whether you wanted it, and that the preparing was the message.

I closed the door.

When I sat down at the writing desk, the schedule had been changed.

It was identical to yesterday's — 6:45, wake; 7:00, breakfast; 10:00, library — except for one line added at the bottom, in a hand that was not Whitford's and not Marcus's and not, I was now certain, Iris's. Small. Careful. Sloped. Pencil sharpened to a fine point.

The first dress will be the easiest. Don't start with it.

I read it three times. I folded the schedule into the cover of the unfinished du Maurier in my suitcase, beside the woman who was writing to me from somewhere in this house — who knew my size, and the closet, and the dresses, and which of them would be the one to take me, and in what order they meant to do it. I sat on the edge of the bed in my own clothes, my own undrugged clothes, and I understood that the warning and the wardrobe had come from the same place, and that the same hand was both the trap and the only thing trying to keep me out of it.