Chapter 3 Who Is in My Grave

"No," I said.

Lucian's brows drew together, just slightly. It was the only sign I had surprised him. "No?"

"I'm not agreeing to be a ghost on your terms. Not until you tell me who is in that grave."

"I said not tonight."

"And I'm telling you I won't sleep until I know." I folded my arms over my aching ribs. "You can lock the windows and take my phone and stand Idris at the door. But I'll tell you what I'll do while I'm sitting here. I'll do the sum."

"The sum."

"Someone died in that car. You buried a body under my name. That means a body existed, and it wasn't mine. So someone outside this room is missing. Someone whose absence you've had to explain. Or hide."

Lucian said nothing.

"And there was a driver." The flash from the clinic came back to me, rain on the windscreen, a woman's hands white on a wheel. "I wasn't driving. I remember that much. Someone else was."

Across the room, Idris shifted by the door. Lucian did not look at him.

"You're quicker than the police," he said at last.

"I'm quicker than most people. It's a flaw, apparently."

For a long moment he held my gaze, and I watched him weigh it, the way I had seen him weigh a hostile bid. Then he spoke without turning his head.

"Idris. Give us the room."

Idris looked at me, then at him. He went out into the corridor and closed the door behind him, and I heard the creak of leather as a heavy man sat down on the other side of it.

When Lucian spoke again, it was with the flat care of a man handing over something that might go off.

"Her name was Corinne Marsh."

I did not move.

"She was twenty-five. My uncle's executive assistant, two years in the role. She was driving your car." He paused. "Idris reached you first. By the time anyone got to her, there was nothing to be done."

The room tilted.

I was aware of Lucian taking a step toward me. But the words had stopped meaning anything, and the only thing left was a high, thin ringing in my head.

Corinne.

Corinne Marsh, who had Edmund Hale's green eyes and Edmund Hale's habit of tapping a pen against her teeth when she was nervous. Corinne, who had walked into a coffee shop three months ago with a folded letter and a shaking voice and said, "You don't know me, but I think we have the same father." Four meetings since. Four coffees in four different cafés across town, always her choice, always somewhere with no one from the Group in it.

My sister. My sister, whom I had known for three months, and whom I had now lost twice, once to a secret and once to a fire.

My knees gave out.

I do not remember sitting. One moment I was standing on the cold concrete floor, and the next I was on it, my back against the sofa, my hands pressed over my mouth. The sobs came up without permission, harsh and ugly, and my ribs punished every one of them.

"Delphine."

I heard him cross the room. I heard him stop. For a moment he stood there as though he had walked up to a cliff edge and could not decide whether to go on.

Then he lowered himself onto the floor beside me, close enough that I could smell rain and cedar and, underneath, the smoke that had clung to his hands for nineteen days. He did not touch me. He set a glass of water on the concrete by my knee and said nothing at all.

It was the kindest thing he had done in two years of marriage, and it undid me completely.

When the worst had passed, I wiped my face with the heel of my hand. My throat felt scraped raw.

"I'm sorry," I said hoarsely. "I don't know why I'm..."

"You knew her."

It was not a question.

The cold came back all at once, a clean, sharp clarity that cut through the grief. I knew that voice. It was the voice he used on witnesses.

"No," I said.

"You said nothing when I told you she was dead. You didn't ask who she was, or what she did, or why she was in your car. You only broke."

"I'm in shock. I've just learned that someone died in my place."

"And you grieved for her before I'd told you a single thing about her."

"Because she was a person." I drew a breath and made my eyes meet his. "She brought me files once, at the office. A year ago, maybe more. She was kind to me. She remembered that I took no sugar in my tea. That is all I knew of her."

It was a good lie. It had the right weight and the right small, forgettable details. I would have believed it myself if someone else had said it.

Lucian watched me for a long moment.

"Corinne Marsh worked at my uncle's elbow for two years," he said slowly. "In that time she told almost no one at the Group a single personal thing. I know, because after the crash I read every message on her work phone. There was no tea. No files. No one would have said she had a friend."

"Perhaps she liked me."

"Perhaps." His voice stayed even. "Then I'll ask the question I couldn't ask with anyone listening. Why was Corinne driving your car, with you in the passenger seat, on a road that leads nowhere but the coast?"

The ringing came back.

I looked at the husband I had married for a signature, kneeling on the floor of a house with locked windows, his hands raw, his eyes steady, asking me the one question I could not answer.

"I don't remember," I said.

That one, at least, was true. The road, the rain and the hour before the fire were still a black hole, and I hated how well it served me. The lie I had told a minute earlier was the one that frightened me, and I did not yet understand why my instincts had made me tell it.

Lucian studied my face. Then he nodded slowly, as if I had given him something he did not like.

"Then we have one thing in common," he said quietly. "Neither of us is telling the other the truth."