Chapter 26
TESSA
Ethan wants Peggy to come out after dark.
His name lights up her phone while she's holding a length of black net against my hair. In the dressing-table mirror, I watch her read the message. The pins stop clicking between her teeth. Then she takes them out, one by one, and sets them in the little dish beside her lip balm.
“He's asking me to meet him.”
I lift the net off my head. We've brought a few small repairs upstairs after work, things we can finish without the workshop machines.
The veil was supposed to take ten minutes.
On the bed behind us, an open tin of shortbread sits among ribbon reels and the replacement lace we bought with Bogdan's money.
Peggy's room has plum curtains, a narrow writing desk and a wardrobe deep enough to swallow her suitcase. Through the window, I can see the hotel courtyard's hanging lanterns. Someone has lit the candles beneath them, and their flames flicker through the little orange faces cut into the glass.
She turns the phone toward me.
I need to see you. Eight tonight at the studio. Just us. Please. You owe me a chance to explain.
For six days, he hasn't answered the question that ended their relationship. Now he wants her to leave a guarded hotel and sit with him in the place where he made her feel beautiful. My shoulders tighten beneath the cardigan I threw on after our last fitting.
“You don't owe him that.”
“I know.” Peggy sits on the edge of the bed, the phone balanced on her knee. “I just wanted him to say he didn't do it.”
I put the veil on the dressing table. Beneath my feet, the carpet is so thick that a dropped pin could vanish in it. I check the dish before I move away, needing to keep at least these small sharp things where we can see them.
She reads the message again. I hate him for the last sentence, for making refusal sound like something she should be ashamed of. On Sunday she'd stood beside me looking at a dead woman's costume tied onto a mannequin. He doesn't ask whether she's frightened or how she's sleeping.
Peggy starts to type. Her thumbnail knocks against the screen harder than it needs to.
No. We're finished. Don't contact me again.
She shows me before sending it. I nod, and she presses the arrow herself.
For a moment nothing happens. A ribbon reel rolls off the quilt and knocks against the bedside table. Peggy flinches, then glares at the place where it fell. She tucks a loose strand of hair behind her ear, misses it and tries again.
“I hate this,” she says.
“Come here.”
I sit beside her, shifting a spool out of the way.
She leans against me without putting down the phone.
Her shampoo smells of peach, the same bottle she's bought since long before either of us knew Ethan.
I breathe it in while she watches the screen, grateful for something about her that he hasn't touched.
The reply arrives as a photograph.
At first I see the red dress and think he's sent her one of the portraits. Then the image sharpens, and my stomach seems to drop beneath the bed.
Her eyes are shut. Someone has changed the skin to a gray so pale that the red of the dress looks wet beside it. Her mouth has been erased into a narrow dark line. Over her throat, where the original picture must have shown bare skin, he's added a black ribbon tied in a neat bow.
She looks laid out for people to view.
Underneath, another message appears.
You don't get to decide when I'm finished with you.
Peggy pushes the phone away so violently that it bounces against the mattress. I catch it before it falls between the bed and the wall. My fingertips press its edges. I don't want to touch her face on that screen.
“That's the one I loved,” she says.
Her voice is so small that I almost ask her to repeat it. Then I understand, and something hot and sick rises behind my tongue. He hasn't chosen a picture where she was uncomfortable. He's taken the one she wanted to keep.
I turn the phone facedown on the bed and reach for mine.
“I'm calling Alison.”
Peggy nods. She has both feet flat on the carpet now, as though she's about to stand, but she stays exactly where she is.
While the call rings, I go to the door. Matvei is in the corridor between our rooms. I open it only far enough to tell him Ethan has sent Peggy a threat, that she refused a meeting and we're calling the detective.
His attention shifts past me to Peggy on the bed.
He takes out his phone before I close the door again.
Alison answers as I sit down. The mattress dips, and Peggy catches my sleeve.
“He's sent an altered picture of her,” I say. “And a threat. We're at the hotel.”
I put the call on speaker. Peggy picks up her phone, keeping it tipped away from her until Alison asks her to read the exchange. She does it without looking at me. When she reaches the words beneath the photograph, she stops to swallow, then finishes.
Alison asks her to send the messages and image, keeping the original conversation. Peggy takes the screenshots herself. I can hear each little tap while I pull the shortbread tin away from her elbow and clear space for her laptop on the bed.
“Is this from the portrait sitting you told me about?” Alison asks.
“Yes. October tenth.” Peggy checks her notifications. “There's a gallery email from him too. Just now. I haven't opened it.”
“Send that too, including the link. Don't answer him again. Has he said anything about knowing where you are?”
“No.” Peggy glances toward the curtains. “Not the hotel.”
Alison stays on the line while Peggy opens her inbox.
Wednesday, October twenty-first. The gallery invitation arrived a minute before his demand to meet.
He finally sent the finished pictures tonight, and I wonder whether he'd expected her to open them first, to be missing him when his message appeared.
Peggy forwards the email, then rests her fingers on the laptop keys. The screen has changed the color of her cheeks. On the bedspread beside it, a fallen shortbread crumb breaks beneath her wrist.
“I want you to see the real one,” she tells me.
She opens her gallery through the invitation. A row of portraits fills the screen, all Peggy in red. In one she's looking over her shoulder. In another she's laughing, her chin lowered, a fold of the skirt gathered in her lap. Nothing in her expression warns her about the man holding the camera.
The picture he changed is near the end. She opens it, and there she is with her head tipped back a little, eyes half closed from laughing. Her mouth is open. Her skin is warm and alive, with the little crease beside her nose that appears when something really amuses her.
“He said something about the dress,” she says. “I can't even remember what.”
I do remember her voice the morning after that sitting. The shy pleasure when she'd told me he hadn't made her feel stupid for caring how she looked. I'd been wrapped in a blanket with Bogdan, happy for her and so happy for myself that I'd wanted us both to stay exactly as we were.
The laptop fan starts, a thin whir beneath Alison asking whether the original is in the gallery. Peggy tells her yes and gives her the picture number. Then she goes back to the thumbnails.
“There are wider ones too. He said I could choose what to crop.”
She opens the frame beside it. More of the skirt appears, a red fall of fabric over her knees. Her right hand rests on a chair arm, and behind her shoulder pale wood curves upward before sweeping down again.
Peggy draws the laptop closer.
I think she's trying to find another version of her face, something he hasn't spoiled, until she moves the pointer away from herself and leaves it beside the chair.
“Tessa. Get the picture Alison sent us.”
My phone is still carrying the call. I bring the screen back up and open Monday's message, my thumb catching the wrong edge before I get Flora's portrait large enough to see. The gold leaves lie along her shoulder. Beyond the dark dress, there's that little strip of pale wood.
I hold my phone beside the laptop.
The curve rises in the same direction. Almost all of Flora's chair is missing beyond the crop, but the part we can see has the same broad, rounded edge. Looking between them makes the room feel too warm. I pull the cardigan away from my throat.
“It's that chair,” Peggy says. “The one I sat in.”
Alison asks what we're looking at. Peggy turns toward my phone, though the detective can't see her through it.
“Behind Flora's shoulder. I didn't notice it on Monday. My arm was covering most of it in the ones he showed me on his camera.”
She swallows, then opens another wide frame. Her whole upper body is angled away from the chair back in this one. The pale crescent stands clear, both ends rising around the space behind her shoulders. She's smiling at someone to the left of the lens.
Ethan. She was smiling at Ethan.
My first impulse is to close the laptop. I want his view of her gone from the room. But Peggy bends closer, squinting through the tears gathering along her lashes, and gives Alison the second picture number.
“This one's clearer. It was at Afterglint. I sat in it there.”
“I've received the invitation,” Alison says. “I'll have the gallery preserved. I need to compare it properly with what we have. This helps, Peggy.”
She doesn't tell us we've solved anything. I look again at the narrow bit of wood in Flora's picture and know how much I want it to become proof. At least there's something Alison can check now, beyond Peggy trying to remember a room where she hadn't expected to be afraid.
Peggy sends the two wider images as well. Alison confirms they arrived, checks that Matvei knows about the threat and tells us she'll be in touch. Before ending the call, she asks Peggy whether she can stay with me tonight.
“She's right here,” Peggy says.
I leave my phone on the bed and take the laptop when she holds it out. She lets me close it and put it on the writing desk. For several seconds she sits with her wrists turned upward on her knees, staring at the faint dent the computer has left in the quilt.
Then she starts crying.
I get my arms around her before she can apologize. Her face presses into my shoulder, and the first sob shakes both of us. I hold her as hard as I can, my cheek against her hair. Through the cardigan, I feel the heat of her tears spreading toward my collar.
“I thought he liked me,” she says. “I thought he actually liked me.”
“I know, honey.”
There isn't a clever thing to say. I can't make those pictures ugly enough that she won't remember loving them. She'd wanted a boyfriend who called when he said he would, who looked pleased when she walked into a room. I'd wanted that for her too. I still do, so fiercely that my throat hurts.
“Was I embarrassing?” she asks.
I ease back enough to see her face. “With him?”
She nods, pressing the heel of her hand beneath one eye. “All that stuff I said. About the pictures. About him being different.”
“You were happy. I loved seeing you happy.”
Her mouth twists, and I think I've made it worse.
Then she catches the front of my cardigan and holds on.
I'd told her to wear the red dress. At Bellquay, when he asked her to the sitting, I'd been right there offering advice.
I remember how she'd bent over his camera afterward, so pleased to see herself the way he saw her.
“I liked that dress,” she whispers.
“I know.” I press my cheek to hers. “You don't have to do anything with it tonight.”
She pulls back to wipe her nose, and I pass her tissues from the bedside table. A little silver dish holds the earrings she wore to work. She looks at them, then at the laptop, and starts crying again.
I stay until she can breathe without hitching. When she says she's thirsty, I pour water from the bottle beside the bed and have some myself. It washes away the sour taste in my mouth, though my stomach still aches with the effort of holding steady.
While she washes her face, I call Bogdan. I can see the bathroom door from the bed. Behind it, the tap runs, stops, then starts again.
“Ethan threatened Peggy,” I tell him. “Alison has the messages. We're in her room.”
“Matvei told Klim. Is she hurt?”
“Not physically.”
His silence makes me wish I could see his face. I want him here, big and certain in the doorway, with his men between us and the stairs. I want to lean into the chest where I used to fall asleep. The longing comes so suddenly that I have to press my lips together before speaking again.
“She's scared, Bogdan.”
“I'm coming.”
“She needs me tonight.”
“Then stay with her. I'll be downstairs.”
I close my eyes. He'd promised me the same thing for Saturday, when we're supposed to see our baby for the first time. Three days away. I try to imagine that small, ordinary waiting room instead of the face Ethan put on Peggy's phone.
“Thank you,” I say.
When Peggy comes back, I've moved the sewing things to the desk and turned down the bed. My phone rests on the closed laptop. Hers lies on the bedside table, screen hidden. She looks at it before climbing beneath the quilt, still in her leggings and the oversized shirt she changed into after work.
“Don't go next door yet.”
I take off my cardigan and lie beside her. “I'm staying.”
She shifts close enough to rest her forehead against my shoulder. Beyond the curtains, the courtyard candles are still burning. I can see a thin orange reflection along the window glass, but from here none of the smiling faces show.
My phone lights up beside the sewing things.
Peggy goes stiff against me. I ease away long enough to fetch it from the desk and read the screen.
Bogdan is downstairs.
I tell her who it is and leave my phone facedown beside hers before lying back. Slowly, her forehead settles against my shoulder. I lie awake beside her, waiting for her to stop listening for the next message.