On the following Monday, at nine in the morning, Mara Bellamy signed away ninety days of her life with a fountain pen that belonged to a dead man.

"It was my father's," Hugo Laurent explained, as she turned it over in her fingers. It was heavy and black, with a chipped gold band near the cap. "He believed a signature made with a cheap pen was a signature made with a cheap intention. I do not entirely agree, but I have found that clients sign more carefully with it."

"I feel very careful," Mara said.

"That is the effect."

They were in his office again, in the pale gold light and the smell of old paper, but the room felt different now. The desk had been cleared. A green blotter lay in the center with two copies of the contract squared upon it, each a sheaf of eleven pages bound with a plain silver clip. Madame Rey had brought coffee in small white cups, real ones, with saucers. Beyond the window the lemon tree in the courtyard moved a little in the wind.

Julian sat on her left, two chairs away, as he had at the studio. He wore a clean white shirt with the sleeves rolled to the elbow and looked as though he had been dressed by a stranger who had guessed at his size. He had said good morning when she came in. Only that. His hand rested on the arm of the chair, and every so often his thumb moved against the wood in a slow, steady stroke, as if smoothing a camera strap that wasn't there.

"You will initial each page in the lower right corner," said Hugo, "and sign here, and here. Monsieur Mercer will do the same. The ninety days begin at the moment the notebook passes from the estate into his hands, which will occur at the end of this meeting. I would like the record to show that both parties entered into the arrangement freely, and with full knowledge of the conditions."

"Full knowledge," Mara repeated. "You haven't told me the conditions."

"I have told you most of them."

"Most."

Hugo removed his glasses, polished them on a handkerchief, and settled them back on his nose. It was, she was beginning to understand, what he did when a sentence was about to matter.

"There is a clause," he said, "that I have called, for my own convenience, the Authenticity Clause. It was added to the will in the last month of Madame Mercer's life. I will read it to you. I will read it in English, as my translation, and you may ask to hear the French."

He lifted a single sheet from the blotter.

"At each of the twelve places, the two shall make a record of one minute. The record shall show both of them, together, in one frame. It shall not be arranged, rehearsed, or repeated. It shall be judged by the executor's attorney as to whether it is true. And at each place, a small task shall be undertaken, which is written in the notebook, and which the two shall complete in the company of a stranger."

He set the paper down.

"A stranger," said Mara. "What kind of task?"

"I have not been shown them. The notebook has been sealed since the funeral, and I have only seen the outside." He glanced at the blue cloth-bound book resting at his elbow, tied with its yellow ribbon. "I am told by the family's notary that the tasks are simple. Small. A conversation, generally."

"With a stranger."

"With a stranger."

"Judged by you."

"By me," Hugo said, with a dignity so complete it was almost apologetic. "I am not a cruel man, Mademoiselle. I have been asked to decide whether a minute of film is true. It is not a task I would have chosen. But I take it seriously."

"And if the minute is not true?"

"Then it is repeated. As many times as necessary, within the ninety days." He looked at Julian. "I would remind Monsieur Mercer that the clock does not stop for a failed clip."

"I'm aware," said Julian.

"Then you also see the difficulty."

"I see it."

Mara looked between them. "I'm sorry, I'm missing something. Why is this a difficulty? We're going to act like a couple. I am extremely good at acting like a couple. I've done an entire series on falling in love in eight European cities. I have a face for it."

Hugo looked at her over the tops of his glasses with an expression very close to compassion.

"Perhaps," he said, "you should show me."

It turned out that Madame Rey owned a camera.

It was a small, unremarkable, silver thing, kept in a desk drawer beside the stamps, and she produced it with the air of a woman who had been waiting for this moment for years. Hugo took it, examined it with suspicion, and handed it to Julian, who accepted it with a barely concealed shudder and turned it on. The little red light came alive. Mara felt it on her skin like a hand.

They stood in front of the lemon tree, in the courtyard, on the worn stones. It was a lovely place for it. The light fell soft and green through the leaves, and a very small bird was singing somewhere in the ivy.

"One minute," said Hugo, from a garden chair, watching his wristwatch. "Please behave as you would if you were a couple who had been together some months, and had come to an agreeable place. Begin."

Mara reached for Julian's hand.

It was the natural thing to do, and she did it naturally, the way she had done it a hundred times in front of a hundred lenses. She smiled up at him, warm and amused, the smile of a woman who had just been told something private and delightful. She tilted her head. She said, in a low, teasing voice, "You've got lemon blossom in your hair."

Julian, who did not have lemon blossom in his hair, looked down at her.

"Have I," he said.

He said it beautifully. His voice was steady, faintly amused, faintly tender, exactly as a scriptwriter would have wanted. He lifted his free hand and brushed a nonexistent petal from his temple, and let his gaze rest on her mouth for the space of a breath. It was an excellent piece of work. She would have cast him.

"You're very handsome when you're embarrassed," she said.

"I'm not embarrassed."

"Liar."

They both laughed. The laughs were perfectly timed. She leaned in, and he inclined his head, and for a moment it looked precisely like a photograph in a magazine about people who were happy.

"Time," said Hugo, quietly.

The red light went out. The little bird was still singing.

Neither of them moved. Mara realized she was still holding Julian's hand and let it go, casually, as though it had been an accident. Her palm was faintly damp. She did not know why. She had done this, she reminded herself, a hundred times.

Hugo folded his watch into his pocket and rose from the garden chair, and looked at them both for a long moment.

"I am sorry to tell you," he said, "that you look like an advertisement."

Mara opened her mouth. "That's..."

"For what, I could not say. Perhaps a very good mattress."

"We were good."

"You were excellent," Hugo agreed. "Every line landed. Every glance was placed. Your timing, Monsieur Mercer, was that of a professional, and yours, Mademoiselle, was better still. It was, in fact, so accomplished that I could not tell you what either of you was feeling, or if you were feeling anything." He inclined his head, not unkindly. "The clause does not ask for a performance. It asks for a truth. I could not approve that clip in a hundred years."

Julian said nothing. His jaw had gone tight. Mara knew, with a jolt, that it wasn't anger. It was a kind of recognition, the look of a man who has been caught doing the very thing he despised.

She turned to him. "You were good," she said, defensively. "You were really good."

"That's the problem," said Julian.

She stopped.

"I'm a filmmaker," he said, very low. "I know what a good take looks like. I know how to give you exactly what you want to see. I've spent ten years learning how to make other people look as though they're telling the truth. And I just did it to myself." He rubbed his face. "It's what I do instead."

Mara looked at him. The bird had stopped singing. In the quiet she could hear, very faintly, Madame Rey's typewriter.

"Well," she said slowly. "That's terrifying."

"Yes."

"Because I did it too. And I didn't even notice."

"You noticed," said Julian.

She had. That was what made it so unpleasant. She had felt the exact place where the truth might have been, the small soft place between one line and the next, and she had stepped neatly over it, the way she always did.

"So the clip can't be fake," she said. "But we're fake."

"Yes."

"Which means for it to work we have to..."

"Yes."

"Be real. Somewhere. At every stop. On camera."

"Yes."

"For ninety days. With a person we don't like."

"I don't dislike you," said Julian, with terrible honesty. "I dislike your voice. It's different."

She stared at him. Then, helplessly, she laughed, the real laugh, the one that was too loud and had a snort in it. Hugo raised an eyebrow. Julian's mouth twitched.

"There," said Hugo, softly. "That. If I had that on film, I would consider it."

They both turned to look at him.

"Not the clip," he added. "The laugh. If I may say so, it is the first thing either of you has done this morning that I believed."

* * * They signed at ten o'clock.

Mara initialed eleven pages in a cramped, fast hand, and Julian in a neat and upright one, and Hugo blotted each signature with a small rocking blotter and looked satisfied in a way that suggested he was unaccustomed to feeling it. The retainer of five thousand euros was transferred to her account in a single discreet message, and Mara stared at the figure on her phone and felt something between joy and vertigo.

She was still staring when the door opened without a knock.

"I am so sorry," said a woman's voice, warm and low and slightly out of breath. "Am I terribly late? The train from Cannes was a disaster. Please tell me I haven't missed the signing."

Camille Mercer came into the room like the arrival of good weather.

She was thirty-three, and she was beautiful in the steady way of women who have never needed to prove it. Tall, like her brother, with the same dark hair, but hers was cut in a smooth bob to her jaw, and her eyes were a warmer brown, crinkled at the corners. She wore a cream linen dress, a thin gold watch, and the sort of sandals that cost more than they looked. She carried a paper bag from a bakery, an enormous tote, and a look of such genuine delight at seeing the room that it was impossible not to be disarmed.

"You must be Mara," she said.

She crossed the floor in three strides and, before Mara could stand, took both her hands in her own. Her fingers were cool and dry, and she held on for slightly longer than a stranger would.

"I've heard so much about you," Camille said. "Well. I've watched so much of you. Your night trains series is the only reason I ever took a night train, and I'll tell you honestly, it changed my life. I cried in a sleeper car in Bulgaria. It was marvelous."

Mara blinked. "That's..."

"You're smaller than on camera. Isn't that funny? Everyone says that." Camille laughed, a low warm sound. "Oh, I'm so glad. I'm so glad it's you."

"Camille," said Julian.

His voice was very even. It was the voice of a man setting a glass down carefully on a table already crowded with glasses.

Camille turned and her whole face softened. "Julian," she said. "You look terrible."

"Thank you."

"You look like a man who hasn't eaten. I brought brioche." She lifted the paper bag and kissed his cheek, briskly, and Mara noticed that he stood through it like a man standing through a light rain, neither welcoming it nor leaving. "Don't be cross. I'm the executor. It's my job to be exhausting."

"You're not supposed to be here," said Julian.

"I'm not here. I'm delivering brioche." She winked at Mara. "Hugo, don't tell anyone. I am absolutely not compromised."

"You are extremely compromised, Madame," said Hugo mildly. "But I have decided not to notice."

She laughed again and set the bag on the desk, and then she did something Mara did not expect. She sat on the edge of the chair beside her, close, so that their knees nearly touched, and looked at her with a directness that made the room feel suddenly small.

"May I tell you something?" said Camille.

"Of course."

"My mother would have liked you."

She said it quietly, with no flourish. There was no calculation in her face, only a soft, tired sincerity, and behind it something that looked very much like grief.

Mara felt her throat tighten.

"I never met her," she said.

"I know. That isn't what I mean." Camille's eyes slid to the blue notebook on the desk and rested there for a moment, and then came back. "She loved people who talked. She said she'd never trusted a quiet person she hadn't seen laugh. She would have adored the way you tell stories. She would have wanted you at the table."

"Camille," said Julian again.

"Yes, I know. I'll stop." She squeezed Mara's hand once more and released it. "I only wanted you to hear it from someone in the family. It's such a strange thing we're asking of you. I know it. I wouldn't blame you if you ran."

Mara found herself smiling, despite everything. "I've been told I run very well."

"Have you?"

"Just ask my mother's cousin."

Camille laughed, and Julian, at the far end of the desk, let out a breath so slowly that Mara might not have noticed if she had not been watching him. He was standing with his back very straight. His thumb had begun to move along the seam of his trousers.

He is scared of her, she thought suddenly. No. Not scared. Braced. Like someone standing at the edge of a swimming pool who has been pushed in before.

She put the thought away. It was not her business. She had known these people for less than a week.

"I brought you something," Camille said, rummaging in the tote. "It's silly. Julian will roll his eyes. But a friend of mine at the Ministry of Tourism had these printed years ago, and I've always thought they were far too beautiful to sit in a drawer."

She drew out a folded map and spread it across the desk.

It was old, or made to look old, printed on thick cream paper with a soft, hand-tinted border. The coastline of the Mediterranean ran across it in a long blue curve, from the French border in the west to the lower reaches of Italy. Villages sat along it like beads on a thread, each lettered in tiny copperplate. In the corner a small compass rose was decorated with a dolphin.

Someone had marked it.

Not in ink. In soft pencil, so lightly that at first Mara mistook it for a crease. But when she leaned in, she saw that there were tiny circles drawn around a dozen places, connected by a faint and careful line. It followed the coast. It skipped a bay here, doubled back to an island there. It looked like the path of a very patient traveler with somewhere important to go.

"These are the twelve?" she said.

"Oh, no," said Camille, at once. "Heavens, no. I haven't seen the list. Nobody has. That would be cheating." She waved a hand. "These are only my favorites. The places I used to love as a child. I thought you might like something to look at on the way. A little... orientation. A gift. Something to say welcome."

Mara looked at the pencil line. It was a very good line. It ran smooth and confident from Nice down toward Italy, and she found that she could not stop tracing it with her eyes. She had the odd, unbidden impression that it had been drawn by someone who knew exactly where she would get lost.

It was a small thing. It was probably nothing. It was a woman's kindness, and she was being ridiculous.

"It's beautiful," she said. "Thank you. Really."

"Keep it in your bag," said Camille. "Or on the wall. I don't care. Just, please, take care of yourselves. Both of you." Her eyes flicked to her brother and softened. "Please."

Julian met her gaze. Something passed between them, wordless and heavy, like a bucket handed down a well.

"We will," he said.

"Good," said Camille, and she rose and smoothed her dress and smiled, brilliantly, and said, "Then I'll leave you to it. Hugo, thank you. I'll call you tonight." At the door she paused and turned back, and her eyes met Mara's again. "I really am glad it's you," she said. "I hope you know that."

And then she was gone, in a soft rustle of linen and a trace of orange blossom, and the room seemed to exhale.

Nobody spoke for a moment.

"She's very nice," Mara said, tentatively.

"She is," said Julian. "She's the kindest person I know."

He said it in the tone of a man reading out a diagnosis.

* * * The ceremony of the notebook was very short.

Hugo rose. Madame Rey came in to witness, standing by the door with her hands folded. The lawyer lifted the blue book from the desk and held it in both hands for a moment, and something moved across his face that was not professional at all.

"I knew Madame Mercer for twenty years," he said. "She was not a woman who asked favors. This is the only one she ever asked of me." He cleared his throat. "Monsieur Mercer. By the authority of the estate, I place this notebook in your hands."

Julian took it.

He held it as though it might burn. His long fingers closed around the faded cloth, and for a moment he looked down at the yellow ribbon, and his whole body went still, a stillness so complete that Mara stopped breathing.

Then, slowly, without lifting his eyes, he turned and held the book out to her.

"You keep it," he said.

"Me?"

"I'll carry it. But I'd like you to hold it." He seemed to choose the words. "I don't want to be the one who opens it first."

Mara hesitated. Then she took it.

It was heavier than she expected. Not in weight, it was a slim thing, barely two hundred pages, but in something else. It seemed to settle against her palms with a low, steady pressure, the way a sleeping animal does when it trusts you. The cloth was soft, worn thin in the center of the cover where a thumb had rested on it for years. It smelled faintly of orange blossom and old paper, and of something she could not name, something like salt.

She thought, absurdly: it was waiting for me.

She pushed the thought away. She was tired. She had signed her name to a thing she did not understand.

"Thank you," she said, and her voice came out lower than she meant.

Julian nodded. He did not look at her. He was looking at the notebook in her hands with an expression so raw that she turned her eyes to the floor to give him privacy.

Hugo glanced at his watch.

"Nine minutes past eleven," he said. "The fifteenth of June. The record shows that the notebook was passed at this hour, and that both parties were present, and that both parties were willing."

He took off his glasses. He looked at the two of them, standing side by side in the golden light, not touching, with a little more than an arm's length between them and a blue book in the space in between.

"Ninety days," said Hugo Laurent gravely. "Starting now."

And through the open window, from the courtyard, the small bird began to sing again.