The morning after the kiss, Mrs. Venn hummed.

It was a thin, tuneless, cheerful sound, scarcely louder than the kettle, and Sienna heard it from the foot of the back stairs before she had even reached the kitchen arch. She stopped on the last step with her hand on the rail. In forty years of service Mrs. Venn had not been known to hum. Marco had said so himself. It was one of the things, he had remarked, with grave irony, that made the house a place of unusual dignity.

She went in.

The long white kitchen was full of cold winter light and the smell of baking. Tomas stood at the far counter with flour to his elbows, assiduously not looking at the door. Mrs. Venn was at the range with her back turned, stirring a pot that did not need stirring. At the pine table, behind the bowl of pears, in his usual chair, sat Matteo, with a cup of tea, and a newspaper he was holding upside down.

He saw her. He rose, and sat, and rose again, and she watched the color climb from his collar to his hairline in a single dark wave.

"Good morning," he said.

"Good morning."

There was a pause. It stretched. Tomas dropped a tray of rolls. Mrs. Venn did not turn her head, but the hum rose half a tone.

"You slept?" said Matteo.

"No," said Sienna. "You?"

"Not a minute." He cleared his throat. "I would like to say that I had a speech prepared."

"Had you?"

"I had several. I composed them on the study sofa between three and five." He folded the newspaper with great care, the right way up. "They have all gone. I find I'd like to ask a very simple question, and I would like you to answer it only if you wish."

"Go on."

"It is daylight," said Matteo.

She looked at him. She had meant to say something dignified. She had planned it on the stairs. But the sun lay in a long gold bar across the red tiles, and his dark eyes were fixed on her with such unguarded, anxious hope that every careful sentence went out of her head like smoke up a chimney. She crossed the kitchen. She did it deliberately, past Tomas and the flour and the copper pans. She stopped at the corner of the table, and put one hand on the back of the chair beside his, and sat down.

"Yes," she said. "Still."

The breath went out of him in a rush. He did not smile. He did a stranger and more affecting thing. He put his good hand flat on the cloth between them, palm up, and left it there.

"May I?" he said.

She laid her own in it. Their fingers closed. And at the range, Mrs. Venn, who had not turned her head, said to the pot in a voice of the most perfect and untroubled neutrality, "Eggs in five minutes. I shall want everyone seated."

They were extremely polite to each other for the rest of the day.

It was the most absurd thing she had ever experienced. They worked in the library from nine until five, side by side at the long table, with the blackboard and the ledgers and the green leather notebook that still sat in the safe, and they behaved, for the most part, with the elaborate courtesy of two ambassadors from countries that have just signed a treaty and cannot yet agree on its wording. He said, "If you would care to look at the third column." She said, "Thank you, I will." He passed her the pen. Their fingers touched. They both paused, visibly, for a quarter of a second, as if the pen had been hot.

"I am sorry," said Matteo.

"For what?"

"I do not know. It seemed to be called for."

She laughed. It escaped her, and she put her hand over her mouth, and he looked at her laughing with an expression she could not meet, and turned very quickly to the ledger. The color was in his face again. It was, she thought, a remarkable thing: a man who had stared down a roomful of hardened dockmen without a flicker could be undone in front of a bookcase by a single laugh.

The work went on. It was real work, and it was good to have it. Marco came at ten with the report from Carrow, and delivered it in his usual level voice. A man of his, a thin quiet watcher named Gavin's cousin, had been in the town since dawn. Vern Rusk had not been seen. His old boarding house on Sandpiper Row had been let to a family from the north. The landlady had a forwarding address for his post, a poste restante in the next county, and she had given it, for a consideration, without the slightest hesitation. Marco looked at the ceiling as he delivered this. He looked at the ceiling a great deal that day.

"Send a man to the next county," said Matteo.

"Already gone, sir."

"And the trustee on the Welfare Fund?"

"I have a note of his movements for three weeks, sir. They are very dull." Marco paused. "Dull in the way of a man who has taken pains."

Sienna wrote it down. She did not write the name. They both knew it, and neither said it, and it sat on the blackboard in the shape of a gap, between a box marked Rusk and a box marked Tinplate. It seemed to her that they were circling something very large in the dark, and that if they once said aloud what it was, it would be real, and they would no longer be able to sit side by side at a long table pretending to be diplomats.

They went on pretending. It was the first time in her life that pretending had felt like joy.

By the afternoon, they had stopped noticing. His arm lay along the table beside hers. When she reached for a ledger he reached with her, and their wrists brushed, and neither of them remarked it. Once, at about three, bending over a column of figures, she realized that she had been leaning against his shoulder for several minutes and had not once thought of the count. Once, at four, he laid his hand over hers on the blotter, without a word, and she turned her palm up beneath it, and they sat like that for the length of a page.

He asked her before every touch. It was a small thing. It was the smallest thing in the world, and every time, it undid her a little more. May I. And she would say yes, or nothing, or sometimes simply turn her hand, and he would let out his breath, and she would feel it down to the soles of her shoes.

She went up at ten.

He walked her to the foot of the stairs, a pace behind, with his hands clasped at his back. He did not say goodnight. He only looked at her, in the lamplit hall, with all of it in his face, and she looked back, and they stood for a long moment with a yard of black and white marble between them. Then she went up. She did not turn at the landing. She knew that he was standing where she had left him, with his hand on the newel post, and that he would stand there until he heard the bolt.

She shot it, and heard, below, the faint small sound of a man letting out a breath.

She went to sleep with a smile on her face. It was a thing she had not done in a very long time.

She was in the bridal suite.

She knew it at once, the way one knows the shape of a room in the dark. The lamps burned low and amber. The balcony doors stood open on a warm black night, and the great curtains moved in the air, and far below she could hear the sea. There was a silver bucket on the sideboard, sweating in the heat, with a white ribbon tied about the neck of the bottle. Two crystal flutes stood beside it, tall and slender, with a spiral of tiny facets climbing each stem.

She was wearing the dress. It was the heavy ivory one, forty feet of silk, and it dragged at her like water. She could not lift her arms. She looked down, and a glass was in her hand, and she thought, very clearly: I must not drink this. I must not. Someone put it there.

But her hand lifted by itself. The glass touched her mouth. The champagne was cold and dry and sweet, and under it, thin and bright and wrong, lay a taste like licking a coin.

She tried to scream.

Nothing came. She stood in the amber light with her mouth open and her throat clamped shut as if a hand had closed around it, and the cold began at her fingertips and climbed her wrists. She felt her knees go. The rug rose up beneath her, thick and Persian and patterned in gold and rust. And a man was there, kneeling, a man in shirtsleeves with dark hair falling over his forehead and his face gone gray with fear, who caught her as she fell and said, in a voice that cracked down the middle, Look at me. Look at me.

She looked. She saw his eyes, and she knew them, and she loved them, and she could not tell him so.

She tried to take his hand. It was lying in hers, warm and strong, with a gold ring on the finger, and she closed her own fingers around it with all the force she had. They would not close. She pressed and pressed and her hand would not obey, and she felt his slip, slowly, a quarter of an inch at a time, out of her grip, like a rope sliding through wet palms. She could feel him letting go. She could feel it. She tried to cry out, to tell him that she was holding on, that she was holding on with everything, that he must not think she wanted to let go. And in the dream his hand grew cold, and cold, and she heard him say, from a very long way off, as if from the other side of a door, Stay. Stay. Stay.

She woke.

She was upright in the bed before she knew she had moved, with her hands clutching at her throat and her mouth open in a silent scream. There was no sound. That was the worst of it. She was straining with all her might, and not a breath came out of her. She clawed at her own neck. The room was black and spinning. Her fingertips were cold, so cold, and she thought in a blind clear terror: it's happening. It's happening again. I've been poisoned. It's in the water, it's in the glass on the table, I didn't test it...

Then, with a rasp like tearing cloth, the air came back.

She dragged it in. It hurt. It went down her throat in a long raw shudder, and she coughed, and doubled over, and gasped it in again. She was drenched in sweat. Her nightshirt clung to her ribs. In the dark her hands came up in front of her face, pale and shaking, and she looked at them and they were warm. They were only warm. She pressed them together against her mouth and rocked, and a small ragged sound escaped her, and then another.

Someone knocked at the door.

"Sienna?"

It was a low voice, very close, just beyond the wood. It was not loud. It was the careful, level, unhurried voice of a man who has stood in a passage for a hundred nights and has learned precisely how much noise a door can bear.

"Sienna. It's Matteo. I heard you. You made a sound." A pause. She heard him draw a breath. "I am not going to open this door. I wanted you to know that first. It's bolted, and it will stay bolted until you tell me otherwise. I am only standing here."

She could not answer. She had her hands over her mouth, and her whole body was shaking.

"May I come in?" said Matteo.

He had asked. He had asked, outside a locked door at three in the morning, with a woman screaming silently on the other side of it, and he had waited. She felt something in her chest give way. It was not courage. It was something older and plainer, the thing a child feels when the light goes on in the corridor.

"Wait," she said. It came out a croak.

"I'll wait."

She got out of bed. Her legs would barely hold her. She crossed the rag of moonlight on the carpet and put her hand on the bolt, and drew it, and it went back with a soft solid sound, and she opened the door.

He was standing in the passage in his shirtsleeves.

His feet were bare. His hair stood up on one side, and his shirt was open at the throat, and there was a crease down one cheek from the pillow, or from the arm of a chair. In the dim light of the single lamp at the end of the corridor he looked young, and frightened, and steady. He did not step forward. He stood with his hands open at his sides and his eyes on her face, and she saw him take her in, quickly and completely, as he had on a pier at sunset: the wet hair, the shaking hands, the white lips. Something went across his face that she would remember. It was a pain so deep that he did not try to hide it.

"May I?" he said again, very quietly.

"Yes," said Sienna. "Please."

He came in. He did not touch her. He crossed the carpet to the armchair by the desk, the old green one that Mrs. Venn had put there in October, and turned it a little toward the bed, and sat on the edge of it with his elbows on his knees, a yard from where she stood. He waited until she had climbed back into bed, and drawn the quilt up to her chin, and pressed herself against the headboard like a child. Then he spoke.

"You are safe," he said. "I want to say that first, and I want you to hear it as plainly as I can say it. You are in your room. The door has been bolted since ten. There is one key and it is yours. Marco is in the hall and has been since midnight. It is the second of December, and it is a quarter past three in the morning, and nothing has happened." He paused. "Look at your hands."

She looked.

"What color are they?"

"Pink," said Sienna. Her voice shook. "They're pink."

"Are they cold?"

"No."

"Then the glass was in a dream." His voice was low and even and very slow, the voice of a man reading a passage he knows by heart. "I know. I have had it too. It is a very good one. It has the rug in it, and the ribbon, and a spiral on the stem. It lasts until the morning and it is always the same."

She stared at him through the dark. "You have it too?"

"Every night," said Matteo, "for two years."

She made a small sound. She put her hand over her mouth again. He did not rise. He did not move toward her. He only sat, with his bare feet on the rag rug and his long hands loosely linked between his knees, and let her look at him.

He began to talk.

It was a curious thing. He did not tell her anything important. He told her about the ship in the glass case in the long room above the quay, the Maria Luisa, a coastal freighter built in a yard in Carrow in the year of his birth. He said she had been a bad ship, ugly and top-heavy, with a screw that fouled every spring, and that his father had bought her for next to nothing because the owner had been ashamed of her. He said she had carried salt and cement and once, memorably, eleven hundred tins of sardines that went off in a heat wave and perfumed the quay for a month. He said that every dockman in the harbor had hated her, and that when she was scrapped, forty years afterwards, three of them wept. He did not look at her while he spoke. He looked at his hands. His voice went on and on, slow and low and a little dry, with a thread of rueful humor running through it, and gradually, without her noticing, her breathing began to match it.

In, and out. In, and out. She felt the cold go out of her fingers.

"I made the model when I was sixteen," Matteo said. "The whole thing. Three months of nights in my room. The rigging is wrong, you know. I put the stays on the wrong side of the mast. My father walked past it once and said, you have made her too beautiful. She was never beautiful." A faint smile. "I have not been able to take her down since."

She was crying. She had not noticed it begin. It was quiet and steady, running down her face into the collar of her nightshirt, and she did not wipe it away.

"I dreamed that I couldn't hold your hand," she said.

He stopped.

"That's what it was." She heard her own voice, very small. "It wasn't the glass. It wasn't the dying, even. I have always known I was going to die. I think I was ready for it. But in the dream I had your hand in mine, and I tried to hold on, and my fingers wouldn't close. I couldn't make them. I could feel you slipping, and I couldn't make you stay." Her breath hitched. "I wanted to tell you I was holding on. I wanted you to know that I hadn't let go on purpose."

The lamp in the passage threw a thin gold stripe across the carpet. A very long way off, the sea moved against the cliff.

"Sienna," said Matteo.

His voice had changed. It was low and rough and steady, and something in it made her look up.

"You did hold on."

"I couldn't..."

"You did. I was there." He had lifted his head, and his eyes in the dark were enormous. "You had your hand in mine, and it was warm, and it closed. It closed on mine as hard as it could. I felt it. I have felt it every night for two years, in my own palm, like a brand. You did not let go." His voice cracked. "I was the one who lost the feeling in my fingers. I could not tell any longer whether I was holding you or you were holding me. And then I could not tell at all." He drew a long unsteady breath. "If anyone let go, it was not you."

She did not know how long they sat there. The clock in the hall struck the half hour. She cried until there was nothing left to cry, and he sat still, a yard away, and did not move, and did not speak, and let her do it. It was the most generous thing she had ever seen. He gave her a whole quiet space in the dark, with no reproach in it and no demand. At last she wiped her face with the heel of her hand, and drew a long, shuddering, exhausted breath, and the room seemed to widen around her.

"Thank you," she whispered.

"You needn't."

"I know." She tried to smile. "I'm going to, anyway."

He made a sound that was half a laugh. He rose slowly, and she felt her stomach drop, because she knew what he was going to say.

"I'll go," said Matteo. "You should rest. I shall be across the passage. If you wake, you have only to knock on the wall. I'll hear."

"Stay."

It was out before she could think. It hung in the dark room like a note struck on a glass.

He stood very still. "Sienna."

"Not in the bed," she said, hurriedly. "I don't mean that. I mean in the chair. If you would. Only until it's light." She pulled the quilt up. "I don't think I can sleep unless I know someone is there. I know it's absurd. I know I have a bolt and a steel door and a man in the hall with a gun. But I'd like to hear you breathe."

He did not answer at once. She saw him struggle with it, not the wanting, which was in every line of him, but the old rule, the long trained habit of a man who had never in his life been asked to be anything but the one who watched the door. He lowered himself slowly back into the chair. He drew his knees up, as a boy does, and rested his elbows on them.

"I'll stay," he said, "for as long as you like."

"Until it's light."

"Until it's light," Matteo agreed. "And I shall not sleep. It is a rule of the house."

She laughed, a wet small helpless laugh, and turned on her side. She tucked her hand under her cheek and looked at him in the dark. She could see the shape of him against the pale square of the window, the long line of his shoulders, the bent head. He sat like a man at his own vigil. And she thought, with a drowsy, enormous, tender clarity: he is the safest thing I have ever known.

It was her last thought before she slept.

She woke to gold.

It lay in a long warm blade across the quilt, and the room smelled of frost and old pine. A thin morning wind stirred the curtains. She lay still for a moment, with the sheet pulled up, listening to the house. The sea was loud. A gull cried. From a great way below came the clatter of the kitchen, and a smell of coffee that she knew as she knew her own name.

The armchair was empty.

It had been turned back to face the desk, and a gray blanket lay folded on the seat, squared at the corners with military precision. On the little table beside the bed, where a glass of water had stood the night before, there was now a small tray. It held a white cup of coffee, still faintly steaming, and beside it a saucer with a single pinch of gray salt. Under the saucer, a square of paper had been tucked. The writing on it was slanted and neat, in a hand she knew better than her own.

Gone to see Marco. Back for breakfast. You were not frightened, in the end. I watched. M.

She read it three times. Then she folded it very small, and put it in the pocket of her nightshirt, over her heart, and lay there smiling at the ceiling like a fool.

She dressed quickly. She took the stairs down two at a time, in her blue cardigan with her braid half done, and came out into the great marble hall in a mood so light that she would have been ashamed to describe it. The front doors stood open on a bright cold morning. Mrs. Venn's voice was singing in the kitchen. And on the small round tea table by the foot of the stairs, where the post was always laid out on a silver tray, a pile of envelopes lay stacked in a neat fan, as they were every morning.

She was reaching for the top one, idly, to see if there was anything for her, when she stopped.

It was a thick cream envelope, heavy and square, with no stamp. There was no postmark. It had not come by the postman. It lay at the very center of the tray, set apart from the others as if by a careful hand, and across its face, in black ink, in a long, slanting, upright script, ran a single line.

Matteo Bellandi. By hand. To be opened alone.

Sienna did not breathe.

She knew that writing. She had seen it once, on a cream-colored card tucked under a white ribbon, in a room at the top of a hill, a year from now, in the half second before a man's face went blank. She had seen it again, in her mind, a thousand times, each time he said the words. It was his father's hand. The hand of a man who had been dead for nine years.

The tray did not move. The bright morning light lay across the marble. She stood very still, with one hand half outstretched and her heart going slowly and heavily in her chest, and behind her, in the doorway of the kitchen passage, she heard a footstep.

"Sienna?" said Matteo.

She did not turn. She could not take her eyes from the envelope. And she knew, with the cold certainty of a woman who has seen a result before, that she was looking at the second one.