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“Review every camera,” I had said. “Lobby. Entrances. Parking. Find her.”

He hadn’t asked why. When I returned to the kitchen, Emilia was laughing with Margaret over something one of the children had said. I picked up the knife and finished slicing the tomatoes. I said nothing.

The incidents no longer felt accidental. The phishing attempt. The requests for unpublished data. Even the fire had become increasingly difficult to dismiss as an accident. Together, they formed a pattern I could no longer ignore.

Victoria.

The name settled heavily in the quiet room. I looked back again at Emilia. She knew a stranger had asked after her. She believed that same woman might have approached her at Otello. She did not know I thought I knew who she was, or what her name had done to me.

I told Emilia none of this.

She had told me about what it cost her to be married to a man who decided the shape of her life without asking. This was different. I had no evidence against Victoria. No proof that she had been inside Blackwood Hall or that she had anything to do with Aurora. Giving Emilia a name now would give her fear without giving her anything she could act upon.

When I knew more, I would tell her.

Carefully, I slipped from the bed and crossed to the window. Blackwood Hall stood quietly beneath the fading night, its stone façade already beginning to catch the first suggestion of morning.

For years, I had believed I understood what it meant to build a home.

Only now was I beginning to understand what it meant to share one. There were still doors I wasn’t ready to open. Not until I knew what stood behind them.

Chapter 21

Emilia

I woke up in a bed that wasn’t my own.

It took me a moment to realize the adorable snoring on the floor was coming from Winston. Alexander wasn’t in bed, but I could hear him moving around somewhere beyond the bedroom.

The Monday following the Trustees’ Dinner had long been observed as a Blackwood Day. Laboratories closed, rehearsals paused, and the administrative offices operated with only a skeleton staff. In other words, I had a day off.

Morning light filtered through the penthouse windows, casting long bands of gold across the bedroom floor. Manhattan had already begun another week, but at this height, the city seemed distant. I got out of bed and noticed that Alexander had left a t-shirt out for me to wear. I put it on and made my way out of the bedroom.

Winston beat me there. He was resting in the window seat and looked at me briefly as I walked into the kitchen. The scent of coffee filled the room. Alexander had his back to me at the stove in gray sweats and a white t-shirt, one hand holding a skillet. There was something unexpectedly comforting about seeing him like this, first thing in the morning.

When I reached him, he put one arm around my shoulders and pulled me to him, hip to hip.

“Good morning,” he said as he kissed the top of my head.

“Good morning. It smells amazing.”

“Thank you. I have to tempt you back here somehow.”

I laughed. “And you’re going to do it with coffee and pancakes?”

“That depends. Is it working?”

“Unequivocally, yes.”

We ate breakfast at the table, Winston stationed hopefully between our chairs, waiting for something to fall from our forks. We lingered there, conversation wandering wherever it pleased. The resident composer’s newest commission. An Aurora paper one of my postdoctoral fellows thought deserved a closer look. Alexander’s increasingly entertaining account of the preparation for the annual croquet tournament.

I laughed often enough that my coffee grew cold. Alexander reached across the table and exchanged my untouched cup for the fresh one he’d poured a few minutes earlier.

“Thank you.”

“It was getting cold.”

Alexander glanced toward a few shopping bags resting on the couch behind us. “I picked these up for you,” he said, sounding faintly uncertain. “I told myself it was so you wouldn’t have to go back to your apartment and get ready and return. That you could simply…stay.”