Elena found the photographs first.
They lay on the sitting-room floor, spilling from a brown box that had once lived beneath their bed. Honeymoon pictures, Christmases, a holiday when Daniel had grown a beard she disliked. She crouched and picked one up. He was standing outside her first studio, holding a spirit level. He had fitted the mirrors with a friend, then insisted on a photograph because he claimed nobody would believe him capable of straight lines.
The photo was real. She had it at home. The copy in her hand was warm at one corner, and when she turned it she found a black mark spreading across the back.
The carpet smelled burnt.
Miles stood in the hall. A white mark had formed on his cheek beside the red one. She could not tell which bothered him more. He kept away from her.
“Did he burn these?” she asked.
“He tried to burn something.”
“That's useful.”
He took Daniel's sheet from the kitchen and held it out. She did not reach for it. He laid it on the sofa arm and backed away.
The last section was in different ink, cramped into a space below the first account. Elena had ignored it earlier because the writing was so hurried. Now she lifted the sheet toward the lamp.
“He asked me to send the sheet back,” Miles said. “He added that part and posted it to me the week he died. I kept it in the same envelope.”
Daniel wrote that he was going back to the house on their eleventh anniversary. Two years after he hired Miles. Nine years before this night.
I can't keep pretending that what I did to you was kindness. I think if I destroy what it holds, it will have nothing to take. There is a place I can't reach. I see water when I close my eyes, but I can't get inside it. I won't bring her. I won't let her stand where she drowned.
He had signed his name, then crossed it out as if a signature made the page too final. At the bottom: If this doesn't work, remember the date. I am sorry.
Elena sat on the sofa. She remembered that morning, nine years ago. He had gone ahead while she finished a lesson. There had been an ordinary argument about a suitcase, the way he packed shoes on top of clean clothes. She had kissed him in the doorway, still annoyed, and told him to leave something for her to do when she got there.
He had said, “There'll be plenty.”
The sofa under her grew damp.
Miles stepped into the room and looked toward the wall. A blackened shape appeared around the fireplace. Not soot lying over the modern mantel, but another mantel beneath it, burned down one side. Ash drifted onto the photographs. The air grew hot enough to make Elena stand.
Daniel's voice came from upstairs. “No. You can't have her. I've given you enough.”
There was a bang, then another. Elena moved into the hall. At the top of the stairs water spilled over a charred threshold. A man's shoe struck the railing from the other side. She knew the shoe, its broken lace end that he had melted with a match to stop it fraying.
She started up the stairs. Miles caught her sleeve.
“It's already happened.”
“Let go.”
“It's already happened.”
Daniel coughed. The sound tore through her. She pulled free and reached the fourth step. Water came down over her feet, forcing her to grip the rail. At the top he was trying a door. She could hear him hitting it, hear the breathlessness between the blows. The blue door did not appear. Only charred wood and water, and behind them the empty guest room.
She called his name.
The sounds stopped.
Elena stood on the stair while cold water ran past her. She knew how this ended. She had seen his body, had touched the skin at his temple because no one could tell her she should not. There would not be another ending if she went up there now.
Miles waited below. She backed down toward him. He did not help until she asked for his hand.
“He died doing this,” she said.
“Yes.”
“He was trying.”
“I know.”
His answer made her want to cry more than an accusation would have. She held the sheet against her chest, feeling its edge under her thumb. Daniel had written to a man he had paid to disappear into this place and then gone alone to try to undo it. She folded the wet corner of the sheet inward, away from the ink.
Miles looked up the stair. “It wasn't like this for him. These rooms weren't open. He wrote that he could hear them. That he could find only scraps.”
“And now?”
“We're walking through them.”
“The one that matters is behind the blue door.”
He nodded slowly. “You can see it. I can't. He couldn't.”
Elena went to the sitting-room window. Outside, the lake reflected the dark sky. Somewhere beyond it emergency lights might be moving along a road. No siren reached her.
The carpet by the fireplace had stopped smoking. The photographs were gone. Behind the hall wall she heard a man laugh, and a saucepan lid falling to a floor she had not heard for nineteen years.
She closed her eyes. “Don't,” she said to the house.
The laugh came again.