Chapter 3
The Camera Above the Crib
Daniel stood with Lily on his hip, the envelope in his free hand, and the foyer was filling with a sound from above — the murmur of guests beginning their descent, the clink of glasses being set down, the string quartet launching into something bright and irrelevant — and Victoria rose from the floor with the careful dignity of a woman rebuilding a facade in real time, smoothing her gown, lifting her chin, arranging her face into the expression she had practiced for the dinner guests, the one that said everything was warm and easy and that no one had been harmed in this house this evening.
She moved toward the staircase as if nothing had occurred, and Daniel did not stop her, because stopping her in front of the guests would have confirmed nothing except that he had been screaming at his fiancée in his own foyer, and there were questions that needed answers before they could be performed for an audience, and the answers were in the envelope, and the envelope was in his hand, and whatever condition Rachel had written — "Do not give this to him unless—" — was going to have to wait for silence, for distance, for a room where a five-year-old could not hear what a dead woman had decided was true.
Lily's fingers tightened in his shirt.
She said, very quietly, against the fabric at his neck, in the voice children use when they are trying to make sure the adults understand that they know more than they are being given credit for knowing — "Daddy, Grandma said you would be sad but you would need to hear it."
And Daniel carried his daughter into the kitchen, and he set the envelope on the counter beside the wine bottles that had not yet broken, and he did not open it, not yet, because Victoria was upstairs putting on her smile for the guests, and he understood that whatever was in the envelope was not going to change because he opened it three minutes from now or after dinner, and he needed to be the kind of father who stayed calm on the staircase, who answered the guests' questions about the glass sound, who told them his daughter had tripped.
But the envelope sat on the counter with its faded string and its half-visible threat, and the handwriting looped at the edges of his vision like a door left ajar.
The Pattern That Was Not a Pattern
He thought about the camera.
Not the one in the nursery — that had been removed months ago, Daniel had said the storage was too expensive, Victoria had agreed immediately and almost too quickly, and they had both smiled at the decision as if agreeing on small things was the foundation of something larger — but the other one, the one he had found last week in the bathroom vent above the bathtub, a black dot no bigger than a pencil eraser with a red LED that pulsed at the frequency of a slow heartbeat, and when he had confronted Victoria about it she had said it was a precaution, that she worried about the security of the house with Lily's swimming lessons at the community pool and the contractor who had been in the basement for three weeks, and he had believed her because believing her was easier than the alternative, and the camera was gone now, he had removed it himself that night, and he had not told her that he had removed it.
The envelope on the counter.
The camera in the vent.
Lily saying that Grandma had told her to keep the bag safe until Daddy was ready.
May you like
Daniel picked up the envelope and set it down and picked it up again, and the marble floor of the kitchen was cold through the soles of his shoes, and upstairs the guests were settling into their places around the long table he had rented specifically for this evening, and Victoria would come down in ten minutes in that white gown with her practiced smile and her rehearsed calm, and he would have to decide whether to open the envelope now or wait until after the dinner, and the string around the yellow paper seemed to pulse in time with his own heartbeat, and he thought — he thought about what Rachel would have said, how she would have wanted him to handle this, and then he remembered that Rachel was three years dead and this was not something Rachel had wanted him to handle gently, this was something Rachel had wanted him to handle with full attention, because she had hidden it inside a five-year-old's toy bag where the one person who would never look inside a child's handbag was the person he would eventually bring home.
He untied the string.
