I did not undress.

I stood in the middle of the room in the dark blue dress with my mother's pin still at the collar, and I looked at the wet gray wall where the portrait had hung, and I did not turn down the bed, and I did not sleep. A man could order a paint that smelled of the drug he used on his sister-in-law, and have it dry on the wall in the time it took him to walk out of a dinner, finish a cigarette, and tell his butler to make a hole disappear. I had not known that before tonight. I knew it now, the way you know the depth of water once you have already gone under.

I waited. The clock in the corridor struck the half hour, then ten, then half past, and the last footsteps crossed the hall below — Henrik, dousing the entry sconces, drawing the bolts, performing the small rituals by which the house went to sleep. After that the house went still.

Then I opened my door and went looking for him.

I told myself I was going down to walk, to find air that had no lavender in it. But my feet took me across the entry hall and into the west corridor, past sconces turned low, the runners drinking every step so that I moved through the house like something that had never been there at all. The wolf's-head carvings in the wainscoting did not bother to watch me; they had stopped watching around the third day, when I became, to them, a fixture, like the wallpaper, like the clock. My feet brought me to the only door that was open and lit at half past ten, and at the threshold I did not hesitate. Some part of me — a part that had spent four years narrating my own life from a safe distance, as though it were happening to a woman I knew slightly — stood aside, this once, and let me walk in.

The library was lit by one brass lamp turned low. Adrian sat in its circle in shirtsleeves, cuffs rolled, the gloved left hand half in shadow, a slim hardbound book open against his knee. He did not look up when I came in. He did not look up when I shut the door.

"Why are there cameras in my room." My voice came out steadier than I was.

He turned a page. "I did not install them."

"Then who did."

"Patience." Not be patient. Not have patience. Just the word, set down between us like a coin on a table — the name of a virtue a man had been made to learn the hard way, and had not forgiven for the lesson.

"That isn't an answer."

"It's the only one I can give you in this room."

"There's a camera in this room?"

"No." He raised his eyes to mine at last, and the lamp did to them what the candles had done at dinner — pulled the cold gray toward something warmer, greener, awake. "There are two in the room above us. One in the corridor outside that door. A microphone in the wainscoting opposite the lamp. The microphone is old. It does not always work. Tonight it does not work."

I crossed the room and sat in the chair that mirrored his, close enough that the lamp's small circle of light took in both our pairs of hands. His held the book shut on his thigh. Mine I folded in my lap to keep them from doing anything on their own.

"How long has there been a camera in my room."

"Five days."

"You knew."

"Yes."

"You watched."

"No."

It was the no that undid something in me — not because I believed it on its own, but because I wanted to, and wanting it told me more than I was ready to know. "Marcus watched," I said.

He did not nod. He did not need to. The two words sat side by side in the lamplight, no and yes, and told me more about this house than seven days had: that the man across from me had spent five days knowing exactly what the lens in my wall was collecting, and had chosen, every one of those nights, not to be the one who collected it. That was a decision. A string of decisions, made nightly, while the monitors next door cycled the rooms of the house and the brother who owned it watched.

"There's a note in my dresser," I said. "Don't drink the water. You knew about that too."

"I knew of it. I did not write it."

"Who did."

He said nothing.

"Will you ever tell me?"

He considered me a long moment, and the green came further up in his eyes, the look of a man weighing what he could afford to spend against what he had left. "Yes," he said. "When I'm sure of you."

"How do you get sure of someone."

"I watched you take the portrait down today." His voice dropped — not soft, exactly; closer to careful, the way you carry a thing that will break if your hand forgets it. "You sat with your back to it for three minutes. You did not panic. You did not weep. You hung it back at the exact angle it had been, and you went into the corridor for forty seconds to test the sound. I have lived in a house full of cameras for two years. I know where every one of them is. You are the first woman to find hers before I had to point it out."

"Why do you know where they all are."

He was quiet, and when he spoke it cost him something I could watch move across his jaw. "Because there is a woman in this house who, if I were not reading the monitors every night, would not have lived out her first three months in it. I have been doing it for eleven months. So that one room, out of all the rooms in this house, is watched by me — and not only by him."

The library was very quiet. He did not drink; there was no glass, no decanter, only the lamp and the book and his two hands, one bare, one gloved. I did not ask the name. I knew it was not mine; I had been here seven days, not three months. I held the question on my tongue and let it stay there, unspent.

He set the book down on the small round table between us. Marcus Aurelius — a prop, I understood now, brought down to give his hands a lawful reason to be in the room. And then he leaned forward, into the lamp, and so did I, and there was no deciding left in it for either of us. My knees were a hand's breadth from his. I could see the place at his throat where the pulse went, faster than his voice had ever let me hear. The gloved hand stayed where it lay. The other rose — slow, the way a man moves near something he has promised not to startle — and stopped just short of my face, near enough that the warmth came off his open palm against my cheek with no part of him yet touching me. I did not pull back. I tipped, the smallest amount, into the heat of his hand. His breath changed. I watched his eyes drop to my mouth and stay, and the whole charged length of the room narrowed to the two inches of air still between us, two inches I was certain would not survive the next moment —

He closed his hand. He drew it back. He sat away, and the cold rushed into the place where the warmth had been, and for one unguarded instant he looked like a man who had set down something he wanted very badly to be holding, and now had to watch it sit there on the table, his.

"No," he said, low — to himself, I thought, more than to me. Then: "If he sees on those monitors what I just let you see, he does not wait. He starts on you tonight."

The word starts went through me colder than the wall. I understood it without being told: the lavender, the dose, the leash drawn slowly in. Whatever had been done to the woman he watched would begin, that quickly, on me.

He stood. He picked up the book. At the door he stopped, and turned, and looked at me one more time, the way a man looks at a window he is about to lock from the wrong side. "Whoever wrote that note in your drawer is being watched too," he said. "The microphone came back on three seconds ago. Good night, Mrs. Wolfe."

The door closed. His footsteps faded down the corridor.

I sat in the lamplight until my breath came back, then climbed to my room. The wall was still wet. The lavender had grown stronger, not weaker, and on my pillow, tucked into the seam, lay a single new sachet — set there in the few minutes I had been three rooms away, by a hand I had not seen and would not catch.

I went into the bathroom to put cold water on my face.

I had the tap running when I heard it: a small metallic turn at the bathroom door — not my hand, not the wind, the unmistakable working of a lock from the corridor side. The water ran on. The brass handle did not move. Under the door, breaking the thin line of corridor light, fell the shadow of a man standing very still and very close, listening to the tap the way Marcus listened to everything in this house. I did not move. I did not turn off the water. After a long moment the shadow drew back, unhurried, and the line of light came back whole under the door.

My own phone had been dead since the gate — no signal, no charger they would give me — but I dug it from the bottom of my case anyway, some animal need to reach my mother in that one minute, and held the button until the screen woke gray and starving. One bar of borrowed life. I dialed the hospice from memory, the number I had called every Tuesday and Friday of the life before this one.

It did not ring.

A recorded voice, flat and bright and final, said: The number you have dialed is no longer in service.

I stood with the dead phone against my ear and the tap still running and the fresh sachet sweetening the air, and I understood, all at once and from three directions, the exact shape of the thing closing around me. My mother, somewhere at the far end of a line that no longer existed. The contract, drawn a notch tighter tonight. And down the corridor, the one man in this house who had nearly put his hand to my face — and who had just told me, plainly, that if his brother had seen it, the cost would not be paid by him.

It would be paid by me.