The cursor blinked on Helena Cross's laptop screen, a patient, relentless pulse against the white of her unfinished email. Forty-seven minutes. That was how long the message from her agent had been sitting in her inbox, its subject line a small red flag she could not bring herself to click.
Outside her Brooklyn apartment window, the November light was the color of tarnished silver, falling across the disordered landscape of her dining table like a reluctant witness. Page proofs fanned out in careless arcs, their margins dense with red-ink edits from a copy editor who had, Helena suspected, developed a personal vendetta against the semicolon. Beneath the proofs: three coffee mugs, two of them empty, one still holding a cold inch of liquid that had begun to separate into something unrecognizable. A legal pad lay open to a page of handwriting that had started as notes and ended as a diagram of her own indecision.
Her phone buzzed against the scarred wood.
She did not look at it.
The cursor continued its blink.
The phone buzzed again, longer this time, the stuttering vibration of a call rather than a message. Helena set her jaw. She knew who it was without looking. There were only three people in the world who would call her at this hour on a weekday, and one of them was her agent, one of them was her estranged brother James, and one of them was her cousin Priya. The agent would email. James would not call. That left Priya, who had lately developed the inconvenient habit of treating Helena's silence as a challenge rather than a preference.
She picked up the phone.
"Hell of a time to start a war," Priya said, her voice arriving before any greeting, warm and precise in the way that only Priya's voice could be, each consonant placed like a teacup on a saucer. "I've been staring at your inbox. Your agent's inbox, rather. Don't ask me how I got the address."
"Priya."
"Helena."
"It's seven in the morning."
"It's seven-twelve, and you're already at your desk, which means you've been awake since at least five, which means you're either working or you're doing that thing where you sit in the dark and pretend the cursor blinking is a kind of meditation. Which is it?"
Helena closed her eyes. Outside, a garbage truck ground its way down the avenue, its hydraulic whine climbing through the brick. She could smell, faintly, the garlic and burnt coffee that always seemed to drift up from the Cuban place on the ground floor of her building, a scent she had once found comforting and now recognized only as evidence that other people had mornings.
"You're making that noise," Priya said. "The one where you breathe out through your nose like I'm asking you to donate a kidney."
"You're not asking me to donate a kidney."
"No. Worse. I've signed you up to teach."
Helena opened her eyes.
"There's a writers' retreat on the coast of Maine," Priya continued, in the tone of someone delivering a eulogy for a dearly missed loved one. "Saltwood Bay Inn. They run a two-week program in the spring, workshops, one-on-one mentoring, the whole tortured-artist package. The director is a friend of mine from a conference I went to in Edinburgh six years ago. Her name is Margaret. She's terrifying. You'll love her. Anyway, one of their co-instructors dropped out, and I've told her you can step in."
"You've told her."
"Yes."
"Without asking me."
"Yes."
"Priya."
"You need to get out of your own head," Priya said, and her voice softened on the last word, the British precision giving way to something gentler, something that had the texture of a hand on a shoulder. "You've been in that apartment for four months. You've finished your first book, Helena. You've actually finished it. But the second one isn't going to come if you sit in the same chair staring at the same wall."
Helena's gaze drifted to the legal pad. The diagram of her indecision looked, in the thin morning light, like the floor plan of a house she had not yet decided to build. The page proofs of her novel sat beneath her elbow, the weight of them familiar, almost warm, the paper soft from handling. She had read the final galley three times. She had corrected the errors. She had signed off on the cover, a melancholy wash of gray and bone-white that the publisher had described as evocative and she had described, to Priya, as the exact color of her childhood.
"The second book doesn't need Maine," Helena said. "The second book needs me to figure out what the second book is."
"Yes," Priya said. "And you will not figure that out in Brooklyn. You will figure it out on a cliff, in the rain, with a thermos of bad coffee and a view of something that isn't a brick wall. I'm not asking. I've already said yes."
"You had no right."
"I had every right. I'm your cousin. It's in the bylaws."
Helena almost smiled. Almost. The corner of her mouth twitched and then settled. Outside, the garbage truck had moved on, leaving behind a silence that felt heavier than the noise had been. She could hear, distantly, the sound of her neighbor's dog barking three floors up, a high, repetitive yap that she had come to associate, unfairly, with the sound of her own thoughts.
"Tell me about the inn," she said, and hated herself for the fact that her voice had lost its edge.
Priya did not pretend not to notice.
"It was built in 1894," Priya said, and there was the unmistakable sound of a woman who had done her research, of pages turning, of an architect's monograph being consulted at an unreasonable hour. "A sea captain's widow had it constructed after her husband was lost off the Grand Banks. She ran it as a boarding house for widows and orphans, which is the kind of cheerful backstory you should expect from a place that costs four thousand dollars a week. The current owner is Margaret Beauchamp. Retired Oxford don. She bought it in the seventies, restored it room by room, and now she lets writers come and stare at the sea and try to feel something. There's a cliff. There's a library. There's a bell that rings at six every evening whether you want it to or not. It's the most pretentious place I've ever read about, and I went to boarding school."
Helena looked at the legal pad. She looked at the laptop. The cursor continued its patient, indifferent blink.
"I'm not a workshop teacher, Priya."
"You've taught before. At the journalism school. You were good at it."
"I was adequate at it."
"You were better than adequate. You were the kind of teacher students emailed three years later to tell you that you'd changed their lives. Don't argue. I have the emails."
"You do not have the emails."
"I have paraphrases of the emails. Close enough."
Helena stood. The chair rolled back and bumped softly against the radiator. She walked to the window, the phone pressed to her ear, and looked down at the street.
The drive north ate the afternoon in long, salt-colored strips. Helena had left Boston before dawn, when the highway still belonged to trucks and the particular loneliness of people who could not sleep. By ten she had crossed into New Hampshire. By one the GPS was promising her a turnoff onto a road that did not appear to exist, and by three she was threading a lane so narrow that the birches pressed against both side mirrors and made the car hiss.
She did not turn on the radio. She rarely did. Sound felt like company she had not agreed to.
The Atlantic announced itself before she saw it, a cold mineral smell threading through the pine, then the road climbing, then the first glimpse of pewter water between the trees. She eased off the accelerator. Her hands, still brown from the California sun even though that had been months ago, rested lightly on the wheel. She had a habit of driving with her wrists, not her palms. A driving instructor in Sacramento had once told her she drove like someone expecting to be shot at. She had not corrected him.
The inn appeared around a final curve, the way certain buildings do, as though the landscape had been holding its breath and had at last been allowed to exhale. It sat above the water on a granite shelf, three stories of weathered gray shingles, a widow's walk running the length of the roof like a ribbon of unpainted wood. The windows caught the late light and threw it back in pale, uneven squares. A cupola crowned the central peak. A bell hung inside it, visible through the louvers, bronze gone green with salt. Behind the house the lawn sloped down to a cliff, and below the cliff the sea moved in slow, glacial rolls, the color of old pewter, of unpolished silver, of a thing that had stopped trying to impress anyone.
Helena parked beside a Volvo that had seen better decades and killed the engine. For a moment she did not move. She sat with her hands still on the wheel and looked at the building as if it were a witness she had come to interview, and then she exhaled, a single controlled breath, and got out.
The door opened before she could knock.
"You must be Miss Cross."
The woman standing in the doorway was five foot two in her sensible shoes and looked as though she had been carved from the same granite as the cliff. Her hair was silver, immaculately set, parted low on the left and pinned with a small tortoiseshell comb that had clearly been in the family since the war. Her face was a topography of fine lines, each one earned. She wore a navy cardigan over a white blouse buttoned to the throat and a string of real, ugly, perfect pearls. Her eyes were the pale watery blue of a January sky, and they missed nothing.
"Margaret Beauchamp," she said. "You may call me Mags. Everyone does, even those who have no business doing so. Come in before you let the midges in. They are fond of newcomers."
Helena crossed the threshold. The hall smelled of wood polish, old books, and something faintly floral, perhaps lavender pressed between sachets, perhaps the ghost of a woman long dead who had believed that grief could be dressed up and put away in a drawer. A staircase with a worn mahogany banister climbed to the upper floors. A wooden case displayed first editions behind glass, their spines cracked in the particular way that suggested genuine use rather than mere display. A grandfather clock ticked with the patience of a man waiting for a train that was never going to arrive.
"Lovely car," Mags said, already walking, her heels clicking a brisk metronome on the wide pine boards. "Japanese?"
"Korean."
"Mm. Sensible. Bring your case. I will not have you traipsing back and forth through my hall at all hours. I have had enough of writers traipsing."
"How many writers have you had, exactly?"
"Enough to recognize the symptoms." She glanced back over her shoulder, and for an instant the corner of her mouth twitched, the kind of almost-expression that on a warmer face would have been a smile. "You do not look like a workshop person."
"What does a workshop person look like?"
"Unwashed. Hopeful. Carrying a leather journal they bought at a train station. You look like a barrister on holiday."
"Journalist."
"Worse." She mounted the stairs with the sure-footed ease of a woman who had been climbing them for forty years. "Second floor. You are at the end of the hall. The window faces the sea, as requested, though I cannot imagine why anyone requests it. The sea is the same in every direction and considerably less friendly than people suppose. There. That one."
She produced a key from her cardigan pocket, unlocked the door, and stood aside.
Helena stepped in. The room was small and exact and beautiful in the particular way that unembellished things can be when they have been thought about. A brass bed with a thin wool coverlet, a writing desk set beneath the window, a straight-backed chair, a washstand with a blue and white pitcher. A rag rug, faded to the color of weak tea, lay beside the bed. On the desk a single white envelope had been placed at a careful angle. She did not pick it up.
"Well," Mags said from the doorway. "It is not the Ritz. But the bed is firm and the sheets are clean and I have never had a complaint about the sheets, which is more than I can say for my guests."
"About your guests."
"Yes."
"How many are there, this week?"
"Five, including yourself. Two are already arrived. A young man named Theo Pratt, who writes the kind of sentences I find exhausting but technically impeccable. A young woman named Jen Park, who has not yet emerged from her room and has sent down twice for coffee, which I take as a positive sign. You are the third. The fourth and fifth arrive tomorrow."
"And the fourth and fifth are?"
"A married couple. Olivia Chen and Lily Cohen. They met in my advanced seminar three years ago and have been coming back every summer since. They are very much in love and very much in everyone's way." Mags said this without malice, the way one might describe the weather. "Lily is the better writer. Olivia knows it and is gracious about it, which I find suspicious but admire."
"And the fifth?"
"You have not asked about the fifth, Miss Cross. You have asked about the fourth."
"I asked about both."
"You asked about the fourth in the tone of a person who is stalling." Mags regarded her with the dispassionate interest of a woman who had been reading people for sixty years and had concluded that most of them were not worth the effort. "The fifth is a man. A Mr. Adrian Wolfe."
Helena's hand, which had been lifting her suitcase onto the stand, stopped. She set the case down. She straightened. Her face did not move. Anyone less observant than Mags might have thought she had not heard.
"Adrian Wolfe," Helena said.
"Yes. Is there a problem?"
"No. Why would there be a problem?"
"You have gone quite pale. You do not strike me as a woman who goes pale easily."
"It's the drive. I skipped lunch."
"It is four o'clock."
"I skipped lunch and breakfast."
Mags studied her for a long moment. "Come down to the parlor when you have freshened up. I will make tea. I make it strong, and I do not apologize for it. We have much to discuss before the others arrive, and I should like to discuss it without an audience."
She turned and went, and her heels clicked their way down the long hallway, and the grandfather clock ticked, and outside the window the sea continued its slow, indifferent work.
Helena stood alone in the room. She did not sit. She did not unpack. She walked to the window and looked out at the water and at the sky, which had begun to bruise toward evening, and at the first pale suggestion of the lighthouse on the far point, not yet lit.
Adrian Wolfe. The Adrian Wolfe.
She had said his name aloud once, in a courtroom in Sacramento, eleven years ago. She had said it as part of a sentence, in the middle of a question, to a witness on the stand. The name had not then been famous. It had been only a name on a letterhead, a signature at the bottom of a memo, a man who had prosecuted a case that had ended her mother's life in every way that mattered and most of the ways that did not.
She had been twenty-six. She had worn a charcoal suit she could not afford and shoes that pinched. She had sat in the gallery and watched him question a handwriting expert and she had understood, with the sudden cold clarity of a woman who would later make a profession of understanding things, that he was not looking for the truth. He was looking for a particular shape of truth, a shape he had decided on before he entered the room. He had found it. He had built a career on the back of it.
Then the case had been overturned. Then her mother had been gone. Then the file had been closed and re-opened and closed again, and somewhere in the long, patient machinery of her grief, Helena had become the kind of journalist who went looking for files that had been closed.
She had not expected to find his name on a teaching roster at a literary inn on the Maine coast.
She had not expected to find him anywhere.
She turned from the window. She unpacked slowly, methodically, the way her mother had taught her, rolling each garment rather than folding, tucking shoes into the hotel bags they had come in. She laid out two blazers and a third she had not worn in months. She put the laptop on the desk beside the envelope she still had not opened. She washed her face in the blue and white basin. The water was cold and smelled faintly of iron. She looked at herself in the small mirror above the washstand and practiced the face she would wear at tea, which was the face she wore everywhere, which was the face she had been wearing since she was twenty-six and a man in a charcoal suit had asked a witness a question she would never forgive.
Then she went downstairs.
The parlor was at the front of the house, two rooms knocked into one and lined on three sides with bookshelves that climbed to the ceiling. A fire had been laid in the grate but not yet lit. A silver tray waited on a low table, with a brown porcelain teapot, two cups, a small jug of milk, a bowl of sugar, and a plate of shortbread that someone had baked with the kind of unapologetic buttery excess that suggested a personal grudge against moderation.
Mags stood at the window with her back to the room, watching the same view Helena had watched from above.
"Sit," she said, without turning. "The tea is a minute off. I have a kettle that whistles like a kettle ought to, not like the wretched little devices they sell now that merely burp."
Helena sat. The settee was older than she was and remembered things.
The kettle, in fact, whistled. Mags poured with the practiced ease of a woman who had been pouring tea since before the second war. She handed Helena a cup, sat in the chair opposite, and took a sip of her own without waiting for it to cool.
"Now then," she said. "Tell me about your brother."
"Tell me about your brother."
The question landed between them like a card laid face-up. Helena's cup stopped an inch from her mouth. She set it back on its saucer with the care of a woman setting down something that could detonate.
"You know about James," she said. It was not a question. Mags knew everything that mattered and most things that did not.
"I know there is a James. I know there was a mother. I know there is a silence where there used to be a family." Mags took another sip, unbothered. "I am asking about the rest."
Helena looked into her tea. A small leaf had uncurled against the side of the cup, brown and skeletal, looking like something retrieved from a drain.
"He is alive," she said. "He lives in Portland. He teaches economics at a small college that shall remain nameless because he would not thank me for naming it. He has a cat called Keynes, which he thinks is clever. He does not speak to me, and I do not speak to him, and neither of us has spoken to the other about our mother in eleven years."
"Eleven years is a long time to share a silence."
"Yes." Helena picked up her cup again. "It is."
The fire had caught by itself while they were talking, a log collapsing in a small avalanche of sparks. Mags watched her with the patience of a woman who had spent sixty years in rooms full of people who did not want to say what they had come to say.
"And yet," Mags said, "you are here. In my house. For a stipend you could not afford to refuse."
The stipend. The ten thousand dollars, wired in two installments, one at acceptance and one at delivery, from the Beauchamp Foundation for Investigative Journalism, an organization Helena had assumed was a tax shelter until Mags had invited her, in writing, with a hand as firm as a signature on a warrant.
"I am here," Helena said, "because the money is real and my rent is also real and the two have not yet agreed to meet."
"And the project?"
"Is a project." Helena set her cup down. "Cold cases. Unfinished business. The architecture of things that were never resolved. I will write a long piece. I will file it. I will be paid. Everyone will be satisfied."
Mags said nothing.
"What," Helena said.
"I did not speak."
"You are speaking with your face. You have always spoken with your face. It is the only thing about you that is not a fortress."
Helena almost smiled. She stopped herself in time.
"You knew I would ask," Mags said, "about Adrian."
The name sat in the room like a third person at the table.
"I suspected you might."
"He is one of mine. In a manner of speaking. He was a colleague of my late husband's, in a season when my late husband was not yet late. He is also a man whose work you have not been kind to."
"That," Helena said carefully, "is one way of putting it."
"You reviewed his novel for the New York Review of Books. Five years ago. I have the clipping. I have read it twice. You called it emotionally hollow and structurally manipulative." Mags's voice did not change inflection. "You also, if I recall, used the phrase 'the prose of a man who has mistaken his own paranoia for a worldview.' I thought that was unfair to paranoia."
Helena's mouth thinned. "It was a fair review."
"It was a review by a woman who had a private history with the subject. You did not disclose."
"I had no private history with Adrian Wolfe at the time of that review. I had a professional opinion. The opinion stood on its own."
"Helena."
"Margaret."
"You wrote to me once, some years ago, and told me that you had been retained by a woman in Connecticut who believed her sister had been wrongly convicted in 1998 of the murder of her husband. You took the case. You lost the case. You lost it badly, because the prosecutor who tried it was a man named Adrian Wolfe, and he had the jury in his pocket by the second day."
Helena's hand, which had been reaching for the shortbread, stopped.
"You did not know," Mags said, watching her. "Until now. That he was the prosecutor."
"I knew," Helena said, "before I wrote the review."
The fire popped. Neither of them looked at it.
"I knew," Helena said again, "when I wrote the review. I knew who he was. I knew what he had done. I knew that the woman in Connecticut had been sentenced to twenty-five years on the strength of a confession she had signed because she had been awake for forty-one hours and a man in a charcoal suit had asked her a question she would never forgive. I knew all of it. I wrote the review anyway."
"Why?"
"Because the book was bad. Because the book deserved the review it got. Because I am a journalist and I do not adjust my standard for the man, I adjust the man for the standard." Helena picked up a piece of shortbread and broke it precisely in half. "You may not approve. You may think it improper. You may think it unkind. I think it is the only honest thing I have ever done about Adrian Wolfe."
Mags was quiet for a long moment.
"Then," she said, "you will be pleased to know he is here."
Helena stopped chewing.
"He arrived this afternoon. He is staying in the west wing. He will be at dinner, because I have asked him to be at dinner, and Adrian Wolfe has not refused me a request in twenty-three years." Mags lifted her cup. "I thought you should know before you saw him. Rather than across the table, with the soup already cold."
Helena set the shortbread down. She did not speak for what felt like a very long time.
"You invited him," she said, "to the same weekend."
"Yes."
"You invited him," Helena said, "knowing what I wrote about him. Knowing what he did to my client. Knowing that I have spent five years being publicly rude about a man who is now going to be sitting across from me eating whatever it is you have decided we are having for dinner."
"I have decided we are having lamb," Mags said. "With something green. I have not yet determined what."
"Margaret."
"Helena."
"Why."
Mags set her cup down. The click of porcelain on wood was the only sound in the room for a moment.
"Because," Mags said, "the case that made Adrian Wolfe famous, the case that made him a prosecutor worth fearing, the case that broke him when it broke him, was a case that touched my family. And I am old, Helena. I am old and I am tired of carrying it. I have invited two people to my house this weekend who between them know what happened in 1994, and I am asking them, in my own house, at my own table, to sit down and tell me."
Helena stared at her.
"You could have written," Helena said.
"I did write. Three times. You did not answer. Twice with charm, once without."
"I did not answer because I did not believe you."
"I know." Mags rose, with the careful precision of a woman who refused to acknowledge her own joints. "You will find your room ready. Dinner is at eight. We dress. Adrian dresses. You will have three hours to decide what kind of face you wish to wear."
"Margaret."
"Yes."
Helena stood up too. Her knees made a small sound she ignored.
"If he speaks to me about the review," she said, "I will not be civil."
"Then do not be civil." Mags paused at the door. "But be accurate. Adrian Wolfe is many things. He is not the thing you have been calling him in print for five years. He is something worse. And I think, by the end of this weekend, you will know what that is."
She left the room. The door closed behind her with the softness of a thing that had been closed softly many times before.
Helena stood alone in the parlor with the shortbread and the fire and the cold tea. She looked at the bookshelves. She looked at the window. She looked at her own face in the glass, which was the face she had practiced in the small mirror upstairs, the face she wore everywhere, the face she had been wearing since she was twenty-six.
She sat back down on the settee that was older than she was and remembered things.