The Bellandi house stood at the top of Cypress Hill, and by the time the car reached the second gate, Sienna had stopped pretending she was not looking.

She had seen it once before. In the other life, it had come at her in pieces, a blur of white stone and lit windows glimpsed from the back of a car on the day she married, too numb and too frightened to take any of it in. Now, on a still Friday evening with the sky going violet over the bay, she watched the villa come up out of the dusk like a ship rising from fog. Three floors of pale limestone, with long terraces and tall shuttered windows, and a gravel drive lined with potted lemon trees whose fruit hung heavy and gold in the lamplight. Cypresses stood along the lawn like a row of dark candles. Somewhere beyond them, the sea breathed against the cliffs.

It was the most beautiful house she had ever seen. At the very top, on the third floor, a balcony ran the length of the east wing, and she knew without being told which room opened onto it.

She looked away.

"Nearly there, Miss Hale," said Marco from the front seat. He had driven her himself, in a black car so quiet that she could hear her own pulse. "Mr. Bellandi asked me to say the family is looking forward to meeting you."

"All of them?"

"Four, tonight. It's a small dinner." He glanced at her in the mirror, and his broad, patient face creased a little. "You'll be fine, Miss Hale. I've seen him nervous before a shipment of seven hundred tons. He was calmer then."

She did not answer. It would not have been wise to smile, and she was not sure she could have managed it.

Her father had been invited. He had declined, with such visible relief that she had not had the heart to argue. So she had come alone, in the best dress she owned, a plain dark green that did nothing to disguise the fact that she had bought it three years ago for a hospital fundraiser. In her small black clutch, folded flat inside the lining, lay a dozen paper test strips and a slim glass dropper no longer than her finger. She had practiced the motion twenty times in the lab washroom. Dab, dip, lift. Quiet as a sneeze.

The car drew up before the steps. A man in a dark jacket opened her door, and the warm evening air closed over her, smelling of cut grass and sea and the faint sweetness of the lemon trees. Through the open front doors she could see a hall of black and white marble, a staircase curving up into shadows, and a bowl of white roses the size of a child's head. She smoothed her skirt, drew a breath, and went up the steps.

Matteo was waiting at the top.

He wore a charcoal suit and a plain white shirt, no tie, with the collar open at the throat. He stood alone in the great doorway with his hands in his pockets, as though he had been standing there for some time. When he saw her, he took them out.

"Sienna."

"Matteo."

He seemed to be about to say something more. Then he only looked at her, taking in the green dress, the loosened braid, the dark smudges under her own eyes that she had failed to hide, and the corner of his mouth moved in what might have been the beginning of a smile.

"You came," he said again, as if it still surprised him.

"I keep my appointments."

"So I've learned." He offered her his arm. It was a formal, old-fashioned gesture, and she took it, because the house was watching and because a part of her wanted to. Through the sleeve of his jacket she felt the warmth of his arm and the faint hard tension in it, a man holding himself in check. "Come and meet the people who will want to look you over."

"Will they approve?"

"They'll be charmed." A pause. "I would very much like to see them try to be otherwise."

The dining room was a long, high chamber with a ceiling painted the pale blue of an early morning sky and a table that could have seated twenty. Tonight it was laid for four, at one end, with white linen and heavy silver and a cluster of low candles. Two people were already there, standing at the windows with glasses in their hands.

The man turned first.

"Ah!" he said warmly, and crossed the room with both hands outstretched. "Here she is at last. And all this time I was beginning to think my nephew had invented you."

He was not her nephew's age; he was perhaps sixty, a spare, elegant man with silver hair brushed back from a high forehead and the sort of bone structure that made photographs of him look kind. He wore a dove-gray suit and a silk pocket square, and his eyes behind thin gold-rimmed glasses were the pale blue of watered ink. A face made for sympathy. A voice like a good cello.

Sienna had last heard that voice in the ballroom of her wedding, saying something warm and witty about family while two hundred glasses rose to the ceiling.

"Dario Vance," he said, and took her hand in both of his. They were dry and light and exquisitely gentle. "I've been a friend of this household since before Matteo could walk, and I fear I've been quite insufferable about it ever since. I'm so glad to meet you, my dear. Truly. Anyone who can make this stubborn boy pick up a telephone is a woman I want to know."

"Dario," Matteo said mildly.

"Quite right. I'm being a bore." But Dario's eyes twinkled, and he did not let go of her hand. "Forgive an old man. He's practically a son to me, and he's never once brought home anyone. I've been fretting for years that he'd die alone in that office with a model ship."

Something tightened in Sienna's chest at the word die. She smiled and said the right things, and felt the dry hands release her, and thought: Look at him. Look at what he is. A man who held her hand with such care. A man who raised a glass at her wedding, and whose eyes she had never once thought to examine.

She examined them now. They were warm, and bright, and perfectly kind. She could find nothing in them at all.

"And this," said Dario, turning, "is our own Dr. Roux, who keeps us all alive, and whom I strongly suspect of keeping us quiet."

The woman at the window came forward.

She was somewhere in her late thirties, tall and slim, in a black dress cut very plain and very expensive. Her dark hair was cut in a sleek bob that stopped at her jaw, and her face was composed in the neutral, attentive way Sienna recognized instantly, because she saw it every day in the faces of senior doctors at Marenna General. Gray eyes. Steady hands. A small, correct smile.

"Helena Roux," she said, and shook Sienna's hand once, firmly, in a cool, dry grip. "I'm the family physician. It's a pleasure, Miss Hale."

"Sienna, please."

"Sienna." Helena held her hand a moment longer than courtesy required, and her eyes did not leave Sienna's face. It was a look Sienna knew. It was the look a clinician gives a new patient, quick and thorough, cataloguing, weighing. Only it went on a little too long. It lingered on Sienna's hands, and then on her face again, and something moved behind the gray, very deep, like a fish turning under ice.

"Marenna General, I understand," Helena said. "Toxicology."

"Yes."

"I held a post there myself for six years before the family asked me to come in-house. I can't say I miss it." The small smile did not change. "I imagine you'll find our dinners rather tame, after the lab. We've nothing so exciting here as a poisoning."

It was said lightly. It fell into the room like a stone into a pond.

Beside her, Sienna felt Matteo go still. It was a very small stillness, the quiet of a man who has stopped breathing for a second, and she understood that no one else in the room had noticed it but her.

"I try to keep the work at work," Sienna said, and was proud of how pleasant it came out. "It's a small mercy of the job."

"A wise policy." Helena released her hand at last. "I do hope we'll be friends."

"I hope so too," said Sienna, and meant, with a clarity that surprised her, absolutely none of it.

They took their seats. Matteo sat at the head of the table, with Sienna on his right and Dario beside her; Helena faced them across the linen. Marco stood at the doorway like a pillar of the house. Candles guttered in the draft from the open windows. A woman in a gray uniform and a young man in a white jacket began to bring the food, and the evening, with a great soft rustle of silk and silver, began.

Sienna had a plan.

She had worked it out in the car, on the long climb up the hill, with her hands folded in her lap and her eyes on the black sea. Everything that crossed her plate, she would test. Nothing would touch her lips until it had passed. She could not make a show of it. She could not insult the household on her very first night, with the family doctor watching and Dario Vance smiling at her with his dry, kind hands. It had to be invisible.

The first course was a cold plate of figs and prosciutto and thin pale cheese. She laid her napkin across her lap, slid a strip from the lining of her clutch with two fingers, and held it under the table. When the talk turned to the weather, she let her hand drift up to dab the corner of her mouth, and the strip touched the oil on the edge of her plate. A second's pause. Dab. Dip. Lift. Under the napkin again.

It stayed yellow. She picked up her fork.

The soup was a clear, golden broth with small stuffed pasta floating in it, and as she bent over the spoon, she let a drop fall from the dropper and watched it vanish. Clean. The fish came next, a white fillet in a lemon sauce so delicate that she felt a stab of guilt at the thought of poisoning it with a chemical strip. She did it anyway. Clean.

She was very careful. She was, she thought, extremely good at it. Dario was telling a story about the old port, and the way the Bellandi trucks used to carry fish and silk on the same flatbed, and Helena was laughing in the right places, and the candlelight shone on the silver and nobody was looking at her hands.

Except one person.

She did not notice it at first. It was only when she lifted her eyes, after the fish, to reach for her water, that she found Matteo watching her. He sat at the head of the table with his glass untouched, apparently listening to Dario. But his eyes were on her fingers. He watched the strip go under the napkin and come out again. He watched her tuck it away. He watched with a quiet, steady, absorbed expression, like a man watching someone cross a river on stepping stones, one foot at a time, and praying with every step that none of them would shift.

Her cheeks went hot. He knew. Of course he knew. He had known since the pier.

He gave no sign. He only turned his head a little, so that he was looking at Dario again, and laid his hand flat on the cloth between them, not a gesture of reproach, but something stranger, almost protective, as though he were guarding her from the rest of the table with the width of his palm.

The wine came with the lamb.

It was a deep ruby red, poured by the young man in the white jacket into tall crystal glasses, and it caught the candlelight like a jewel. He filled Dario's, and Helena's, and Matteo's, and then he came to Sienna's and tipped the bottle, and the thick dark liquid slid into her glass with a soft, rich, innocent sound.

Sienna's hand closed tight in her lap.

She could not test it. She had run through every method on the car ride, and every one of them demanded a moment she could not steal, a glass she could not lift, a strip she could not dip into a full goblet without the whole table seeing. She had a dozen strips and not one of them was any use against a glass of wine at a dinner party. She looked at the red surface, trembling, and the old cold animal in her spine looked back at her and said, very clearly: no.

So she did not drink. She set her hand on the stem and left the glass where it was, and she smiled at something Dario was saying, and she waited for the courses to pass and the glass to be forgotten.

She felt Matteo move before she saw him.

He did not look at her. He did not break his sentence to Dario. He simply reached across the corner of the table, one long hand closing around the stem of her glass, and drew it toward himself. At the same moment, with the other hand, he slid his own glass, untouched, to the place where hers had been. It was so smooth, so unhurried, that for an instant she did not understand what she had seen.

Then he lifted her glass, her glass, the one the young man had poured for her, and drank deeply from it. He set it down, empty by a third, beside his plate.

"That was mine," Sienna said, very low.

He did not turn his head. "Then it's mine now."

Her heart did something impossible.

It was such a small thing. Anyone watching would have seen only a man absently exchanging glasses, a quirk of the host. But she had been poisoned in his arms. She had watched him lie down beside her on the floor of a ruined room, and she knew, with every cell of her body, that a man did not lift a stranger's glass to his lips for no reason. If the wine had been poisoned, he had just taken the poison for her. In front of the doctor, in front of Dario, in front of the staff, without a flicker, without the least change in his easy voice.

She was looking at him. She could not stop looking at him. The candlelight caught the side of his face, the strong dark brows, the line of his jaw, the pulse beating at the base of his throat, steady, steady, steady. He was listening to Dario with every appearance of interest. His left hand lay on the tablecloth beside hers, close enough that the backs of their fingers nearly touched.

I would like to see you try, she thought, to be an ordinary man.

"Well, now!" Dario's laugh rang warm and amused across the table. "I've heard of a man stealing his bride's affections. I've never seen one steal her wine. Matteo, my boy, that's either a very bad omen or a very good one."

"I haven't decided," said Matteo.

"He's always been possessive of his burgundy," said Dario to Sienna, with a conspiratorial wink. "It's his only vice. Well, his only harmless one."

Helena said nothing. She was watching Matteo's hand. Her gray eyes followed the glass from the cloth to his mouth and back, and her face was perfectly composed, perfectly pleasant, perfectly closed.

Sienna drank from the glass of wine that was now in front of her, because it had come out of his hand and because, God help her, she trusted it. It was dark and smooth and tasted of cherries and cedar. Her fingers had stopped shaking.

In her head, in the quiet part, she wrote a line in the Divergence Log. Last time, he never touched my glass. Last time, no one stood between me and the table.

And below it, smaller, in a hand she hardly recognized as her own: Last time, I didn't know he would.

The lamb was perfect. The dessert was a lemon tart so sharp and bright that it made her eyes water, and she tested it in her napkin with a hand that no longer felt quite her own. Dario told a long, absurd story about a ship that had sailed into the harbor with a cargo of live peacocks, and Helena corrected him on the date, and Matteo laughed, a real laugh, low and unexpected, so that the whole table paused for a moment to look at him. He seemed startled by the attention. He looked at Sienna, and then away, and a faint color rose at the edge of his collar.

When the coffee came, Dario lifted his glass.

"If I may." He rose, an elegant silver figure in the candlelight, and the table fell quiet. "I'm an old man, and a sentimental one, and I mean to say a few words, whether they're wanted or not." He smiled round at them, warm and rueful. "I have known this young man his whole life. I watched him lose his father. I watched him take up a weight no one his age should be asked to carry. I watched him shut every door in this house, one by one, until I thought none would ever open again."

He turned to Sienna, and the full warmth of his regard fell on her like sunlight.

"And then he rang me, one Monday afternoon, and said, Dario, I'm going to be married. I confess I nearly dropped the telephone." A soft ripple of laughter. "So here is to Matteo, who has finally learned to choose for himself. And to the woman brave enough to be chosen."

Glasses lifted. The candles trembled. Sienna raised hers, and as she did, she looked at Dario's face.

It was a very small thing. A flicker, no more. On the word chosen, the smile did not change, and the voice did not change, and the pale blue eyes behind the gold rims did not narrow. But something passed through them, quick as the shadow of a bird across a window, and was gone. It was not warmth. It was not malice. It was only a kind of attention, sharp and bright and cold, there and then folded away so neatly that she could not have sworn she had seen it.

She drank to the toast. She smiled. She said, "Thank you, Dario," in a voice that was almost steady.

And in the careful, cold ledger of her mind, beneath the line about the glasses, she wrote a name. She did not give it a percentage. She did not give it anything. She only wrote it, once, and underlined it lightly, and told herself that it meant nothing at all.

The evening wound down in a murmur of cups and chairs. Dario kissed her hand again and told her to come and see his study, which held, he said, the finest collection of maritime maps in the country, and she thanked him and did not quite flinch at the word maps, because it was only a figure of speech. Helena rose, shook her hand, and said it had been a pleasure, and walked out through the arch into the corridor with her heels tapping on the marble.

Matteo walked Sienna out.

They went slowly down the long passage that led to the front hall, with the portraits of dead Bellandis looking down on them from gilded frames. The house had gone quiet around them. Somewhere a clock struck eleven. A warm wind came through an open window and stirred the heavy curtains. He walked half a pace behind her, not touching, with his hands clasped at his back.

"Are you all right?" he asked at last, very low.

"I'm fine."

"You didn't eat the tart."

"I did. I ate all of it."

"You ate perhaps three bites and tested the rest." There was no reproach in it. There was something almost like wonder. "I can have Marco drive you home. Or there is a room made up here, if you'd rather not travel. You'd have the key. I'd sleep in the study."

She stopped, in front of a tall window that looked down over the dark garden, and turned to face him.

"You drank from my glass," she said.

He did not pretend not to understand. He stood in the shadows beside the curtain with the moonlight on one side of his face, and for a moment she thought he would deny it, or smile it off.

"I told you I'd do better," he said quietly.

"That isn't an answer."

"It's the only one I can give you tonight." His gaze was steady, and in it she saw a kind of terrible patience. "Will you let me, for now?"

She should have said no. She should have asked him what he meant, and why, and how a man who barely knew her could look at her the way he did. She should have pressed him against the cold window until he told her everything, down to the last degree.

Instead she heard herself say, "Yes."

His breath went out of him in a long, shaky exhale, as though he had been holding it for years.

He lifted his hand, slowly, giving her every chance to step back, and drew her shawl up over her shoulder where it had slipped. His knuckle brushed the bare skin of her collarbone. It was barely a touch. It lasted less than a second. But his hand lingered, a breath too long, and she felt the whole warm weight of it, and she did not move away.

"Good night, Sienna," he said.

"Good night."

She turned toward the hall, and the bright door, and the car waiting beyond it. She had taken three steps when something made her glance back. It was not a sound. It was only the sort of prickle at the back of the neck that comes when somebody is watching, and she turned her head, quite casually, and looked through the arch behind them.

The corridor beyond was dim, lit by a single lamp. And in the pool of its light, close together, with their heads bent, stood two people who had said their good nights a quarter of an hour before.

Dario's hand rested on Helena's arm. His face was turned down toward hers, grave and intent, and he was speaking in a voice too low to carry. Helena listened with her arms folded and her chin lifted, and in her composed gray eyes there was something Sienna had not seen all evening. It was not warmth. It was not friendship. It looked, in that dim light, almost like fear.

Then Helena lifted her head, and her eyes met Sienna's across the length of the shadowed hall.

Dario's hand fell from her arm. Both of them stopped speaking at once, and for a long moment no one moved at all.