“Emily?”
“Don’t come in,” she said.
Her voice was close. She was alive. Relief struck so hard that I had to catch the wall, and in that instant I missed the fear in what she had said.
“Are you hurt?”
The door opened another inch. I saw one of her eyes, the hem of her yellow school cardigan, and a hand gripping the door so tightly her knuckles had gone pale.
“Go back outside,” she whispered. “Please.”
From somewhere behind me, the floorboard at the foot of the stairs creaked.
Emily’s eye moved past my shoulder. She let go of the door and slammed it.
I turned. Grant was standing halfway down the stairs with a folded sheet of paper in one hand. His other hand held my phone.
He was my wife Clara’s older brother. He had a spare key for emergencies, and until that afternoon I had never thought to ask for it back. His coat was unbuttoned. A dark mark ran from his cuff to the heel of his palm.
“Let’s not frighten her any more than she already is,” he said.
I could hear Emily breathing through the kitchen door. Grant saw me glance at it.
“She found some old papers. Lena tried to take them from her, and things got out of hand.”
Lena had picked Emily up from school twice a week for nearly two years. She was supposed to be there until I got home.
“Where is Lena?”
“In the sitting room. She slipped.”
Grant descended one more step. I moved sideways, placing myself between him and the kitchen. His gaze dropped to the box in my hand. Its corner had buckled beneath my thumb.
“Give me my phone,” I said.
“You left it on the hall table. I heard it ringing.”
It was a plausible answer. Grant always had one ready.
He came down the last steps and set the phone on the stair rail, just beyond my reach. Its screen was black. Upstairs, a door stood open that I knew had been closed when I left that morning: the door to Clara’s old workroom.
“Go and see to Lena,” he said. “I’ll talk to Emily.”
“No.”
For a moment, the pleasant expression he wore at birthdays and school concerts disappeared. Then he looked toward the kitchen and lowered his voice.
“She’s confused. She’s been through enough.”
I had heard that sentence from him before. He had said it when Emily refused to enter Clara’s workroom, and when she asked why we never went to the little house by the sea where her mother had grown up. He had said it to me, too, whenever I questioned the accounts Clara had left behind. Grief made numbers hard to read, he would tell me. He would handle them.
A faint knock came from the sitting room. Once, then twice.
I took a step toward it. Grant shifted to block the doorway.
“It’s nothing serious,” he said.
“Then move.”
Emily pulled the kitchen door open. She was holding the heavy wooden rolling pin, though its end rested against the floor. She looked at me, not at Grant.
“He took Lena’s phone. It’s in his pocket.”
Grant’s face changed again. This time he made no effort to hide it.
“She doesn’t understand what she heard.”
“I heard you say you’d lock her in the shed,” Emily said. Her voice shook. “Lena wouldn’t give you the envelope. You pushed her.”
The knock came again. Grant looked toward the sitting room, then at Emily. He had to decide which of us to stop first.
I set the chocolates on the hall table and reached for my phone. He caught my wrist. We struck the stair rail together, and the phone slid off it and hit the floor. Emily screamed my name. Grant let go of me to lunge for the phone, and I shoved him back with both hands.
“Outside, Emily. Now.”
She hesitated, her eyes fixed on the sitting room.
“Lena,” she said.
