I knew it was lavender by the second day. By the third I wanted to know where it lived.

So I did not get up. I lay flat under the champagne silk with my eyes shut and let the room talk to me without my help. The smell came stronger from the right side of the bed than the left. It came from above, faintly, as though the ceiling were a layer of it and not just a surface. It came through the open inner door of the dressing room. It did not come from the window — the window had only its own smell, salt and old wood, sealed in behind the wing-nut.

Then I got up and tracked it like a current to its springs.

The first was the dresser — the top drawer, where the pencil note had waited the first night and the new schedule had appeared. Behind the spot where the note had lain, tucked into the back corner of the paper liner, a linen sachet the size of a postage stamp, full of dried lavender. New. The seam machine-stitched, the lavender inside not the brittle gray of a thing kept a year but dried within the last two weeks.

The second was the ceramic diffuser on the dresser top that I had taken for an ornament. I lifted the lid. Oil — light, fragrant, half full. Yesterday it had been a quarter full. Someone had topped it up while I slept.

The third was the bathroom, which I had used without ever looking at. I looked now. Above the sink, a single bar of lavender soap in a porcelain dish; on the next shelf a bottle of lavender shampoo, then conditioner, then a jar of bath salts, also lavender. None of it had been there when I washed my face the night before — or it had, arranged differently, or arranged exactly the same and I had simply not seen, and I did not yet know which of those three was the truth. I made a note to inventory the bathroom that night and again in the morning, until the house told me whether the lavender was being added or had only always been there.

The fourth I would never have thought to check. The radiator under the window. The smell rose harder there, on a slow current, and when I knelt I found it — taped to the underside with a length of black electrical tape, a flat foam disc the size of a coaster, soaked through with oil. The tape was clean, no dust along its edges. Recently set. The radiator cycled on a dozen times a day, and each time it cycled it carried the oil up through the heat and into the air I breathed. It was not a scent. It was a delivery system, fitted to a schedule, the way you fit a drip to a vein.

I sat back on my heels and did not touch the disc. I did not pull the tape. I did not yet want anyone to know that I had found any of it. I let it stay. I let the smell keep rising into the lungs of a woman who was, very deliberately, going to keep breathing shallow.

I dressed in my own clothes — the gray cardigan, my own wool coat over it, the coat I had worn in the rain the first night, which still held the smell of the storm and the back seat of the taxi and not one thread of lavender. I tested my own wrist against it. My wrist smelled, faintly, of lavender now. So did my hair. So did the cotton of the undershirt that had been folded yesterday by a hand that was not mine and returned to my drawer smelling of the thing the rest of the house smelled of. They were not only scenting the room. They were scenting me, a little more each night, until the smell would stop being something done to me and start being something I was. That was the part that frightened me most — not the dose, whatever the dose was, but the patience of it. No one in this house was in any hurry. They were not trying to break me. They were trying to season me, slowly, the way you cure a thing so that by the time it is finished it no longer remembers having been anything else. The woman in the wedding photograph had not been broken either. She had been finished. There is a difference, and the difference is the whole horror, and the difference takes months, and I had agreed to eleven of them.

I left, and closed the door deliberately, and did not check the lock. I wanted to know whether the room would be opened while I was gone.

The west hallway smelled of nothing — old wood, distant beeswax, the well-managed smell of a corridor with nothing to hide. The library smelled of old paper and brass and leather; I shut my eyes and tested the air and found no lavender at all, a different country. The music room smelled of dust and rosin. The sunroom of cold glass and dead geraniums no one had watered in a long time. None of them lavendered. Only the rooms where I slept and bathed and was kept.

In the library there was a window that looked out over the south garden — the back, the side away from the sea. I had not yet been in it. Marcus had never named it among my permitted spaces, which put it in the other category, the one that held all the things I had not yet been told not to do.

I stood at the window. Two men were walking in the south garden.

One was Adrian.

The other I had not seen before. Younger — twenty-five, twenty-six — sandy-haired, in a plain dark overcoat, the brisk neatness of someone who has been sent rather than someone who has come. He carried a leather satchel he seemed to wish he were not carrying, holding it a little away from his body the way you hold a thing that is not yours. He kept his voice low and walked close, and Adrian listened with his gloved hand sunk in his coat pocket and his face composed in the same not-quite-not-smiling way it wore in the wedding photograph.

They argued. I could not hear a word of it, but the shape was unmistakable. The young man stopped twice, gestured with his free hand, said something that made Adrian step closer — not in threat, but tighter, the way you close the circle when you are trying to bring the volume of a thing down. Then the young man set the satchel on the stone bench, opened it, and took out an envelope, thick, and held it a moment as though deciding, and gave it to Adrian. Adrian did not open it. He slid it inside his own coat, against his chest, and the young man turned and went away across the lawn toward a gate in the southern wall I had not known was there.

Adrian stood a long time with his hand over the place the envelope now lay. Then he looked up — not at the library window, but past it, along the face of the house, the slow even sweep of a man checking which windows can see him. I stepped back before his eyes reached the glass. My heart was going hard. I had not done anything. I had only looked. But in this house looking was the whole of the crime, and I had learned that lesson kneeling at a radiator the morning before.

And I stood at the glass and let the worst reading have me, because the house had trained me to reach for it. A private man takes a sealed envelope from a stranger at the back gate and keeps it against his heart. Money, I thought. Or instructions. Or whatever a man passes hand to hand when he cannot afford for it to be seen, in a house where a wife had walked into a storm and not come back. I thought: I have been looking at his stillness and calling it grief. What if it is only patience. The thought went through me cold, and under the cold, traitorously, was the heat of the morning's twelve feet of table folding shut — and I hated that the two could live in me at once, the suspicion and the pull, sharing the same breath.

On the table by the chair I had not yet sat in stood a small bowl of old potpourri, gray and brittle and gone silent years ago, decoration now. Around its rim, half-buried, lay fresh linen sachets — new fabric, new seams — set into the dead potpourri within the last few days. The library was not lavendered. The library was being seeded. I took one of the sachets and put it in the inside pocket of my coat. I did not look at the window again. I left at a normal pace, crossed the entry hall, climbed the stairs. The grandfather clock chimed half past nine. I had been gone twenty-six minutes.

My door was closed when I reached it. I stood with my hand on the wolf's-head handle until my breath came even. I opened it.

The first thing I noticed was the smell.

There was none.

The radiator ticked. The fire had been lit. The bed was made — silk drawn flat, pillows squared, the duvet folded back at the precise angle of a hotel. I went to the diffuser. It was not low. It was empty, the topped-up oil gone. I knelt by the radiator. The foam disc was gone, the black tape gone, and where the tape had been there was a small clean rectangle in the dust — no residue, no torn edge. Removed by someone with spare tape and the time to wipe the spot.

I went into the bathroom. The soap was still in its dish. The shampoo, the conditioner, the salts — all still there. The bathroom had been left exactly as it was.

Only the two hidden sources had been stripped. Only the disc and the diffuser, the two things I had knelt and lifted and found. They had left the lavender I was meant to see, and taken away every part of it I had not been meant to find.

I sat down on the edge of the bed. In my coat pocket the library sachet was still there; I had not thrown it away; I was going to need it. The room around me smelled of nothing now — wood from the fire, salt from the sealed glass, and under those, nothing.

And nothing was worse than lavender. Lavender meant they were doing something to me and did not know that I knew. Nothing meant they knew. Nothing meant that somewhere in this house a screen had shown a woman kneeling at a radiator with her fingers under the lip of it, and that the watching had stopped being a thing I suspected and become a thing I had proof of. The room had been scrubbed clean as a message, and the message was the same one the closet had been, and the schedule, and the cliffs in the photograph: We see you looking. Keep looking, if you like. It only tells us where to put our hands.