He paused in the doorway of the client room, looking at the pale sofa.
“Not there,” Claire said.
He withdrew his hand from the back of it.
“Sorry.”
“I mean—there's a bathroom upstairs.”
The sofa was washable. She knew that. She had chosen it because it was washable, and a child had tested the claim with chocolate within the first week. But she had set the room for an appointment the next morning, and her mind, confronted with blood, had gone first to the clean towels upstairs. The decision was ordinary enough to frighten her.
Evan followed her up.
In the bathroom she washed her hands and gave him a clean folded cloth. He held it to the cut while she wet another to wipe the blood below it. The tissues had left bits of white on his cheek. His eye was beginning to swell.
“Does your head hurt?”
“Yes.”
“You should get it checked.”
“I said I would.”
“I'll take you.”
“You're doing a lot of taking me places.”
She looked at him. The joke had no smile attached. He was trying to get through the next few minutes, as she was. She stepped back to let him clean the corner of his own mouth.
There was blood on her sleeve. She hadn't noticed him catching her arm outside Graham's house, or perhaps it had happened as she handed him the cloth. A small red mark near the cuff. She looked at it too long.
“Is that yours?” he asked.
“No.”
“Sorry.”
“Stop apologizing.”
“Stop giving me things to apologize for.”
This time she laughed, a short, helpless sound. He leaned his good shoulder against the bathroom door frame. It was a narrow space for two people, the room designed when a family owning one toothbrush each was apparently the height of ambition.
“You can sit in there,” she said, pointing across the landing.
Her bedroom.
He went in while she got the small dressing packet from the cupboard. She remained in the bathroom for a moment, looking at herself in the mirror. There was a pink line on her forehead where she'd pushed hair away with a damp hand. Her face was not the face of someone who understood what she was doing.
In the bedroom Evan sat on the wooden chair where she usually put clothes. He had moved a cardigan onto the bed, neatly, with the careful manners of someone occupying a room without an invitation that felt sufficient. The window was shut. The curtains were half-drawn. She went across and opened both because the room was warm.
“Better?”
“Fine.”
He lifted the cloth away. The bleeding had slowed. Claire didn't touch the cut or try to decide what it needed beyond the clean dressing. He would go to a clinic. She could do this part and stop pretending it was the whole job.
She cleaned a streak beside his eyebrow. He closed his eye while her fingers came near it, and the small trust of that made her chest tighten.
“Did you expect him to hit you?” she asked.
“No.”
“You sounded like—”
“Like what?”
She lowered the cloth. “Angry.”
“I was.”
“I know.”
“Do you?”
She couldn't answer the question she heard under that one. He opened his eye and looked at her. She was close enough to see the different colors in the iris, a gray outer ring around something warmer. Yesterday it had been pixels. Today she could hear him breathe.
Her phone began ringing downstairs.
“Beth,” she said, as though she knew.
“Go.”
“Keep that there.”
She placed the dressing against his brow and let his hand take over. Downstairs, the phone stopped before she reached it. A missed call from Beth. Claire called back and heard her sister answer from just outside the front door.
“What's Graham doing here?”
Claire looked toward the hall. “Here?”
“Across the road.”
She went back upstairs while Beth was still talking. The white shirt lay at the top of the laundry basket, where she had put it that morning. Her stained cuff scraped against the banister. In the bedroom, Evan had risen from the chair and was standing by the chest of drawers, looking at a small framed photograph of Claire and Beth as children.
“I'll be a minute,” she said to Beth.
She put down the phone, pulled off the stained shirt, and put on the white one from the basket. Evan turned toward the window, giving her privacy with a promptness that made the intimacy greater instead of less. The shirt smelled faintly of yesterday's soap. She could have chosen another. She didn't.
Outside, Beth stood on the path with one hand open beside her. Across the road Graham's dark van filled the space usually occupied by a neighbor's little blue hatchback. He sat behind the wheel.
Beth looked straight toward him. Claire could see the angle of her face, the set of her mouth. The driver's window lowered. Beth said, “No,” loudly enough to reach the bedroom.
Then she stood still, looking.
Claire stopped beside Evan. Her hand came up because the edge of his dressing had slipped as he turned. She caught it with two fingers, near his forehead, and saw Beth's face below them through the open window.
There was no camera across the street. There didn't need to be one. The photograph had not shown a man taking a photograph. It had shown this.
Her house. Her sister. Herself beside the stranger, whom she could now name, whose blood was in her bathroom sink.
“What?” Evan said.
Claire took her hand away.
“He's followed us.”
Evan moved toward the window. She caught his wrist.
“Don't.”
He looked down at her hand. She released him.
Beth turned and came to the door. Graham's window went up. Claire heard the knock below, then the scrape of the van's tires as it pulled away.
“I'll get it,” she said.
She left Evan in the bedroom and went downstairs.
Beth entered with her phone still in her hand. Her hair had come loose at one side, and she pushed it back without finding a pin.
“He asked if Sam's brother was in here,” Beth said. “He said he'd followed your car, and wanted me to fetch him out. I told him no. Then he asked if Vivian had called me.”
“What did you say?”
“That she had. I wasn't going to stand in the road giving him her conversation.” Beth looked toward the stairs. “What did you do?”
“We asked her about Sam.”
“We?”
“His brother. Evan.”
“Where is he?”
“Upstairs.”
Beth stared at the stair, then at Claire's shirt. “You brought him here?”
“Graham hit him.”
“Vivian said there was an argument.”
“There was. Then Graham hit him.”
Beth let her head fall back for a moment. Claire saw her taking in one more difficulty on top of something Claire didn't know.
“She's terrified,” Beth said.
“Of Graham?”
“Of all of it.”
“Did she meet Sam on Sunday?”
“Don't do that.”
“Beth.”
“You don't get to come at me with the same questions because she wouldn't answer them.”
Claire stood beside the workroom door, holding a clean dressing packet that she hadn't opened. She put it on the hall table. Her hands were shaking enough to make the paper rattle.
Beth looked at them.
“What's happened?” she asked, differently now.
Claire went into the workroom and opened the first image.
Beth followed. She looked at the screen and went very quiet.
“When did you take that?”
“I didn't.”
“Claire.”
“It was among the wedding files. Saturday night. Before Sunday.”
Beth leaned closer. “That's Sam.”
“I know.”
“That's—” She stopped. “She went back.”
“You knew she saw him?”
Beth stepped back, crossing her arms. “She told me they met. She didn't tell me this.”
“Look at the date.”
“It says Sunday.”
“It said Sunday on Saturday.”
Beth turned to her. The anger had not gone away, but bewilderment had entered it.
“That's a clock. It can be wrong.”
“I thought so too.”
“You were there Sunday?”
“No.”
“Did someone send it to you?”
“No.”
Claire opened the second image.
Beth's arms came uncrossed. She stepped toward the screen again, more slowly.
“That's today.”
“It came last night.”
“When?”
“After the wedding. When I called you.”
Beth looked at the window within the photograph, the two people there. Then she looked up at the ceiling, toward the room overhead.
“This isn't funny.”
“I know.”
“You could have made this.”
“I hadn't met him. I didn't know who he was.”
“You could have put him in it this afternoon.”
“Why would I?”
Beth rubbed her forehead. “I don't know. I don't know why you'd do any of this.”
Claire told her the sequence, not gracefully. The late edit, the service road, the news report. The week of work. Last night's transfer at the desk, Beth pictured alive, the man in the window, the phone call that hadn't become a confession. She kept looking at her sister while she spoke, wanting belief and afraid of what belief would require.
“So you knew about the first one all week,” Beth said.
Claire nodded.
“And didn't tell me.”
“I didn't tell anyone.”
Beth's face hardened. “That's worse.”
The words landed without drama. Claire almost said she'd been frightened. The fact would explain something, but it wouldn't answer Beth.
“Yes,” she said.
Upstairs a floorboard creaked. Beth looked toward the doorway.
“Does he know?”
“Not yet.”
“You'd better tell him.”
“I will.”
“Now.”
Claire went to the foot of the stairs and called Evan's name. It was the first time she had called it in her own house, loudly, as though he belonged somewhere within reach.
He came down holding the cloth. His face had more color now, except around the injured eye. Beth introduced herself, then asked whether he'd been checked by a doctor. He said not yet. She said she would drive him after this, leaving Claire no room to make another offer.
“After what?” he asked.
Claire turned the screen.
She showed him Sam first.
He stood so close to the desk that the edge pressed against his thigh. The ordinary laughing photograph had made him bend toward it. This one made him rigid.
“Where did you get this?”
She told him.
He didn't interrupt. That was worse than an interruption. He let her tell the whole impossible thing, then looked at the date and asked again when she'd received it.
“Saturday night,” she said. “Before he was found.”
“You thought it was a mistake.”
“Yes.”
“Then he was found.”
“Yes.”
He turned his head slightly, as though the movement hurt. “And then?”
“I didn't tell anyone.”
Beth moved away from the desk. The room felt too full of faces Claire could not improve.
“You could have told someone Sunday,” Evan said.
“I know.”
“Before they found him.”
Claire looked at the man on the screen. She could not say that she had known he would die, because she hadn't. She could not use that as if it removed the fact that she had looked at him, become frightened, and done nothing.
“I thought there was an ordinary explanation.”
“There was a man on the ground.”
“I know.”
“Stop saying that.”
She stopped.
He put the cloth on the table beside his water glass. There was a small red stain in its fold. Claire watched him looking at his brother and wished, uselessly, that the picture had shown less.
After a while he said, “I don't know if I believe you.”
“I don't know how to make you.”
“You didn't hesitate to ask Vivian questions with me.”
“No.”
“Did you already know she was there?”
“Only this. Only what the picture shows.”
He looked at her then. “That isn't only.”
Claire opened the second file. Beth made a small movement as though she wanted to stop her, then didn't.
Evan saw himself and went still in a different way. His gaze moved from the man in the window to Claire, back to the man, down to Beth.
“Last night?” he said.
“Yes.”
“You knew me when I came to the door.”
Claire nodded.
“That's why you let me in?”
“You wanted Sam's pictures.”
“That's what I wanted. What did you want?”
She couldn't give him an answer clean enough to be kind. She'd wanted him not to be real. Then she'd wanted him to stay. She'd wanted to know how the woman in her bedroom became her, and had helped make it happen while pretending not to.
“I wanted to know who you were,” she said.
His mouth moved at one corner. Not humor this time.
Beth said, “The picture happened. Just now. Outside.”
“I was there.”
“I mean I didn't arrange it. She didn't tell me. I was looking at Graham in his van.”
Evan sat down abruptly on the sofa. He looked older than he had on the path. Claire stood beside the desk and let him occupy the washable fabric.
For a while no one spoke. The house was small enough that Claire could hear the tap in the bathroom dripping. She had not turned it off firmly. She could fix that later.
“Did Vivian tell you what happened?” Evan asked Beth.
Beth shook her head. “Not all of it.”
“Will she?”
“I'll ask. I won't bring her here to be cornered.”
“I didn't want to corner her.”
“Then don't.”
He looked at his hands, then up at Beth. “Ask her.”
“Tomorrow. I'll call you.”
Beth wrote down his number. Claire watched the practical exchange happen without her, and felt both relief and a small, ugly wish to be necessary.
At the door Evan stopped.
“Send the laughing one,” he said.
“I will.”
“Not that.” He looked toward the workroom. “Not yet.”
They left together. Beth would take him to have the injury assessed, and then she would speak to Vivian. Claire had been given neither job.
Upstairs, the curtain moved in the open window. She went to the bathroom and turned off the tap.