Julian Mercer's studio was in a converted net-mending warehouse at the edge of the old port, and it did not want to be found.

Mara walked past it twice. The address Hugo's email had given her led to a blue door with peeling paint, no name, no bell, and a brass number so small she mistook it for a screw. Fishermen's boats knocked softly against each other in the harbor behind her. The air smelled of diesel, salt and something frying. She checked the address on her phone a third time, felt faintly ridiculous, and knocked.

It was Thursday, half past ten in the morning, and she had not slept well.

She had spent the last two nights reading the terms Hugo sent, eleven pages of tidy French legal prose with a cover note that said, in English, Please take your time. She had read them at the kitchen table, on the terrace, and once, humiliatingly, in the bath. She had underlined the phrase ninety consecutive days. She had underlined thirty thousand euros twice. Somewhere near the bottom of page nine she had found a paragraph she could not stop rereading, about a clip of sixty seconds to be filmed at each place, and had written a single word in the margin: how?

She had also, at three in the morning, written another word beside it. Julian.

She had crossed that out.

The door opened.

He stood there in a faded black T-shirt and jeans, barefoot, holding a mug in one hand. He looked as though he had been awake for a while and had decided not to discuss it. Without the shadow of the lawyer's office, in the light of the harbor, she noticed things she had missed. A thin scar through his left eyebrow. A smear of something gray on his forearm. The dark hair was damp, as though he had recently put his head under a tap.

"You found it," Julian said.

"Second try. Third, technically. There's no sign."

"I don't like signs."

"I noticed. You also don't seem to like doorbells, or windows, or the general principle of being visited."

"Correct."

He stepped back to let her in. It was not a warm gesture, but it was not a cold one either. It was the gesture of a man who was unused to hosting and was making an honest effort.

Inside, the warehouse opened into a single tall room with whitewashed brick walls and windows set high under the rafters, so that light fell in long slanting bars across the floor. A long table ran down the middle, covered with hard drives, lenses, cables and a scatter of paper. At the far end stood a bank of editing screens, dark now, and beneath them a sagging leather couch with a folded gray blanket. On the walls, pinned with black tape, were photographs. Not people. Places. A road in the mountains. A fishing village in fog. A doorway in a wall, with a blue shadow across it.

There were no photographs of him. There were no photographs of anyone he loved.

Mara lingered before the photograph of the doorway a moment longer than she meant to. The shadow was so precisely placed that it seemed almost an act of will.

"That's Sicily," Julian said behind her. "Nineteen months ago."

"It's good."

"It's a door."

"It's a very good door."

He made a small sound that was not quite a laugh. Then he crossed the room, set his mug down, and pulled a wooden crate from under the table. It was lined with foam. He held it out.

"Phone," he said.

Mara stared at him. "Sorry?"

"Your phone. In the box."

"Are you confiscating my phone?"

"I'm asking you to put it in the box. It's a courtesy, not a seizure. You can have it back when you leave."

"Julian," she said, and heard how strange his first name felt in her mouth, like a coin from a foreign country. "I'm a content producer. My phone is my hand. It is where I keep my whole nervous system."

"I know," he said. "That's why."

She should have refused. Every sensible instinct she owned lined up like a row of tiny soldiers and told her to refuse. But he was looking at her with that flat, patient expression, and she understood, quite suddenly, that this was a test. Not a cruel one. A test the way a man tests ice before he steps on it.

She took the phone out of her pocket. She held it for one second longer than she needed to. Then she laid it in the foam, face down, and heard it settle with a small, sad click.

"Happy?"

"No," said Julian. "But thank you."

He put the crate back under the table, and something in the room seemed to loosen, as if the air had been holding its breath.

"Sit," he said, and pointed to a stool. He did not sit himself. He picked up a folder from the table and turned it over in his hands, not opening it. "You read the terms."

"Eleven pages. I'm now qualified to practice law in three departments."

"Then you know most of it."

"I know the money, the ninety days, the twelve places, the sixty-second clips, and the fact that Hugo is not allowed to tell me why any of it exists." She folded her arms. "I know the part about the partner. I don't know the rest."

"There isn't much rest."

"Then tell me the little there is."

For a while he said nothing. She thought he might refuse. His thumb moved against the edge of the folder, a slow, back and forth stroke, like a man rubbing a worry stone.

Then he opened it, and took out a single sheet of paper, and read aloud in a voice so level it might have been a weather report.

"The residence at Villefranche-sur-Mer shall be retained by the family only upon the fulfillment of the following. That my son, Julian Mercer, visit the twelve places listed in the notebook, in the order given, within ninety days of receiving it. That he do so in the company of a partner. That is to say, of someone he trusts enough to show his real self." He paused. "That at each place a record be made, of a kind to be described. And that no place be visited for the purpose of appearances."

He set the paper down.

Mara sat very still.

"That last line," she said. "Say it again."

"No place be visited for the purpose of appearances."

"That's...actually contradictory with the fake girlfriend, isn't it?"

"Yes."

"Because the entire point of a fake girlfriend is appearances."

"Yes."

"So you're going to break the will's spirit in order to keep it."

"I'm going to interpret the will's letter in the only way that will keep the house," said Julian. "Hugo's advice was to be careful and be quick. Careful is easy. I'm very good at careful." He turned the paper face down with two fingers. "Someone he trusts enough to show his real self. I don't have that someone."

"Everyone has someone."

"I have a sister."

"Then take your sister."

"She's the executor. She can't be a party to the fulfilment. It's a conflict." His mouth thinned. "And she would ask questions."

Mara tilted her head. "What about friends? A colleague? An ex-girlfriend who owes you a favor?"

"No."

"Really? Nobody?"

"Friends ask questions," said Julian.

He said it flatly. It was not self-pity. It was a report, an entry in a ledger. But something in the way his eyes slid to the window as he said it made her stomach turn over.

"Right," said Mara, softly. "And I don't."

"You do." He looked at her again. "You ask constantly. But you ask the kind of questions that are meant to be answered with a joke. It's a very different thing. It leaves the person room to leave."

She did not answer at once. She was thinking, uneasily, that it was one of the most accurate things anyone had ever said about her, and that he had said it in nineteen words, standing barefoot in a warehouse.

"Okay," she said. "So, hypothetically, if I said yes. Why me? I don't mean the compliment. I mean the reason. Because I did something to you, Julian. Something that I'm..." She stopped, tried again. "Something I've thought about. And I can't imagine you want me anywhere near your mother's things."

"I don't."

"That's what I thought."

"I want you near the twelve places," he said. "It's not the same."

He crossed to the window and stood with his back to her. The light from the high panes lay across his shoulders in bars.

"You want me to say it plainly," he said. "Fine."

Mara waited.

"You turned me into a joke."

His voice did not rise. It did not tremble. It simply arrived, calm and heavy, like a stone set down on a table.

"I was at the worst point of my life. My mother was sick, though I hadn't said so to anyone. I was in a foyer full of people who wanted a piece of me, and you put a microphone in my face and a phone in your other hand, and you filmed my silence and made it a punchline. Four million people laughed at me. Some of them sent me the clip. One sent it with a heart."

"Julian..."

"I'm not finished." He turned, and his face was composed, and only his hands, hanging loose at his sides, betrayed him, the fingers curled slightly inward. "I hated you for a year. I'm not proud of it. I would think about your voice. That cheerful, ridiculous voice. And then I started to notice something. I watched other things you made. Your travel series. The one about the night trains."

Mara blinked. "You watched that?"

"Seven times. Because I wanted to find the trick."

"And?"

"There isn't one." He said it almost reluctantly. "You walk up to strangers and by the end of five minutes they're telling you about their divorces. Their dead husbands. The recipe their mother made. They forget the phone. They forget that they're being recorded. It's real. It isn't manipulation, or if it is, it's the kind that's indistinguishable from kindness. I've spent ten years trying to do what you do in five minutes, and I've never managed it."

He held her gaze.

"You turned me into a joke, Miss Bellamy. And I hired you because you're the best I've ever seen at making strangers trust you."

Nothing in the room moved. Somewhere beyond the wall a boat's engine coughed and caught.

Mara had spent two years rehearsing an apology. She had written it in her head in the shower, on trains, in the dark. It had eloquence and remorse and a pleasing self-deprecating turn at the end. Now, faced with the real man in the real room, she found she could not remember a word of it.

"I'm sorry," she said.

It came out small. It didn't sound like a line.

Julian's expression did not change. But his shoulders dropped, very slightly, as though he had put down something he'd been carrying for a long time, and hadn't realized until it was gone how heavy it was.

"I know," he said.

"No, I..." She pressed her fingers against her mouth, then dropped her hand, annoyed at herself. "Not a joke sorry. Not an oops, content sorry. I knew what I was doing. I saw your face afterward, when you looked at me. I knew and I posted it anyway, because it was going to get numbers." She swallowed. "I've thought about that look every week for two years. I want you to know that. It wasn't nothing to me."

The silence lasted several heartbeats.

"You should have said it in Lyon," Julian said at last.

"I know."

"You should have said it in the foyer."

"I know that too."

"But I'm..." He paused, as though the word were foreign. "I accept it."

It was a peculiar thing to hear. She had expected him to forgive her, or refuse, or say nothing at all. Instead he had simply accepted, plainly, the way a man accepts a package at a door, without warmth and without contempt. There was a strange dignity in it. It felt more real than absolution.

"Thank you," she said, and her voice cracked slightly on the second word.

She pulled herself together. She was good at that. It was the thing she did best.

"Right," she said, briskly. "But I'd like to make one thing clear, since we're being honest."

"Please."

"You don't get to go quiet on me." She pointed a finger at him. "That thing you do. Where you decide a conversation is over and just stop. Because you did it in Lyon, and you did it in Hugo's office, and you're doing it a little now. It isn't dignified. It's a punishment. And I know what it feels like, because I do the opposite. I talk until nobody can hurt me. But it's the same move. It's the same door."

Julian stared at her.

The room was so quiet she could hear the faint tick of the old wall clock above the editing screens.

She had not planned to say it. It had fallen out of her mouth on the back of the apology, and now it lay between them on the floor like something dropped from a great height.

She waited to be thrown out.

What she did not expect was the small dry noise that came from his chest. It took her a moment to identify it as an exhale of laughter.

"Do you know," said Julian, "what's the most infuriating thing about you?"

"I have a list. You'll need to be specific."

"You do it constantly. You say the true thing. Right at the moment when it's least convenient."

"That's not a flaw. That's a feature."

"It's both," he said. He rubbed the scar through his eyebrow with his thumb. Something in his face had eased, the way ice eases at the first day of a thaw. "Fine. No going quiet. I'll try."

"You'll try."

"It's the most I can promise."

"It's more than most men manage," said Mara. "Especially the ones with tripods."

This time he did almost smile. It was a small, crooked, unwilling thing, and it altered his whole face, and she looked away from it because it seemed like a private thing she had no right to see.

* * * JULIAN He had not meant to say so much.

That was the trouble with her. He had prepared, as he prepared for everything, with the thoroughness of a man who had once lost a great deal by improvising. He had scripted the conversation in his head: the terms, the terms, the terms. Keep it professional. Keep it short. Do not tell her anything she does not need.

Instead he had stood in his own studio and told a woman he barely knew about the year he had not slept.

He watched her now as she prowled the long table, picking up a lens cap and putting it down, touching a coil of cable with one restless finger. Her hair had come loose from its clip at the back, and a strand of it curled against her neck. She was smaller than he remembered from Lyon, and less polished. The bright confident thing she wore in her videos was not here. In its place was someone quicker, warier, and much more difficult to dismiss.

He had chosen her because she was dangerous. He had known it from the start. Her gift was not charm, which was ordinary. Her gift was attention. She looked at people until they told her the truth. And for two years he had been looking at the clip of himself, and at the small, precise moment in it where she had looked at him, not the camera, and seen him entirely.

It had frightened him more than the millions of strangers.

If she could see that, he had thought, she could see the rest. Which was the entire reason he needed her, and the entire reason it was a terrible idea.

Show his real self.

His mother's handwriting, in that clause. Or rather, Hugo's typing of his mother's words, which was not the same. He had read that sentence four hundred times. In the small hours he had come to hate it and want it and be afraid of it in equal parts. His mother had never asked him for anything directly. She had asked in the way she did everything, sideways, gently, and with a cunning that had taken him thirty years to notice.

Now she was dead, and this was the last thing she had asked.

And Mara Bellamy, who had made him a joke, was standing in his studio with her hands full of his lens caps, telling him off.

He should have hated it. Instead he noticed that he was listening for her next sentence.

That, he thought grimly, was the risk.

* * * "Rules," said Mara.

She had settled on the stool again, one foot hooked on the rung, and produced a small notebook from her back pocket. Not her phone. It was cheap, spiral-bound, and covered in coffee rings. She flipped to a clean page and uncapped a pen with her teeth.

"You have rules?" said Julian.

"I have a contract. I want it to have rules."

"Hugo already drafted..."

"Hugo drafted the legal ones. I want the ones that matter." She scrawled a number one and underlined it. "One. I get to edit the clips. Not just film them. Cut, color, sound, whatever. If we're going to be judged on whether it looks fake, I'm not handing my face to a man who thinks a good edit is a door with a shadow on it."

"It's a very good door."

"It's a door, Julian."

He inhaled through his nose. Another tiny movement of his mouth. "What else?"

"Two. I get final say on what leaves the frame. If I look ridiculous, it's out."

"You won't look ridiculous."

"You haven't seen me at seven in the morning."

"I will," he said, and both of them heard it, and both of them let it pass unmentioned. A faint color rose at the tips of his ears. Mara pretended to be very busy with her pen.

"Three," she said, a shade too quickly. "You tell me if something is off. If a place has a thing. If a person has a thing. If I'm walking into a room where something is about to hurt you. I don't need to know the whole story. But I need to know there is one."

He was quiet for a moment.

"That one," he said, "I can't promise."

"Why not?"

"Because I don't know what's in the rooms."

It was an honest answer. It was the most honest thing he had said all morning, and it had a cost that showed in his face. She looked at him, this tall closed man in a sunlit warehouse, and she saw for a second the outline of the thing he was afraid of. Not her. Not the camera. A room, somewhere, that he did not want to open.

She wrote three anyway, with a question mark beside it.

"Fine. And what do you want from me?"

"One thing." He said it at once. He had clearly been holding it ready. "You post nothing. Not a photograph, not a caption, not a story, not a single frame. Nothing leaves this arrangement. Not the clips, not the places, not my mother's handwriting. If it appears anywhere, online, in any form, I stop, and you don't get paid."

"That's harsh."

"That's the only condition I care about."

"You realize that's my entire profession."

"I do." His eyes held hers. "I'm asking you to set it down for ninety days. If you can't, I'd rather know now."

Mara looked at the notebook on her knee. She thought about the animal under her ribs, which was quiet this morning, uncharacteristically quiet, as though it too had put down its phone. She thought about the tote bag that said Grow Together. She thought about Lisbon, and the little glowing exit sign.

She thought: I have not been unrecorded for more than a few hours in nine years.

It ought to have terrified her. It did, a little.

But under the fear, she could feel something that felt uncomfortably like relief.

"I can do that," she said. "I'll have withdrawal symptoms. I'll probably narrate my lunch out loud to a seagull."

"That's acceptable."

"But if I edit, I edit for us. Not for anyone else. It stays in a drive, your drive. Fair?"

"Fair."

"Then I'll say one more thing, and it isn't a rule." She closed the notebook. "I'm going to be good at this. I want you to know that. I'm not going to phone it in, whatever you think of me. If we do it, we do it properly."

"I know," said Julian. "That's what I'm counting on."

"So." She held out her hand. "Deal?"

He looked at the hand. It was small and brown from the sun, with a thin silver ring on the index finger, worn smooth. There was a faint ink stain on the side of her thumb. He looked at it a fraction too long, and then he took it.

His palm was warm and dry and calloused across the base of the fingers, the hand of a man who carried heavy equipment up hills. The grip was firm. It lasted exactly as long as a handshake should. It lasted one second longer than that.

"Deal," said Julian.

"Deal," said Mara.

She let go first. She always did.

He went to the crate under the table and drew out her phone. He handed it back with a formality that was almost comic, and she took it, and noticed that her fingers were not quite steady.

At the blue door she turned. He had followed her, as far as the threshold, and stood there in the bar of harbor light with his hands in his pockets. Behind him the studio stretched away, whitewashed and enormous and empty, full of photographs of places and none of people.

"Julian," she said.

"Yes?"

"The door in Sicily. The one you said was just a door."

"What about it?"

"It's not." She smiled, faintly. "Somebody was just about to walk through it. I could tell. You caught the second before."

He did not answer. He simply looked at her, and in his face was an expression she had not seen there before, and could not have named, though she felt it land somewhere deep in her chest.

She walked away along the quay with the sun on her shoulders and the sound of the gulls in her ears, and only when she reached the corner did she realize what she had done.

She had said yes. She had shaken his hand. She had agreed to be, for ninety days, the girlfriend of a man she had spent two years feeling guilty about, in a story that neither of them understood, written by a dead woman she had never met.

"Deal," she said aloud, to nobody, to the harbor. Her voice was almost steady.

And in her pocket, against her hip, the phone lay quiet and dark, like a small animal that had finally, for once, been told to wait.