Elena brought the wrong wine.
She noticed at the last gate, when the bottle rolled against her handbag and she reached to stop it. Daniel had liked the white with the yellow label. She had bought the green because it was the one she drank at home now, in her own kitchen, while marking music for Saturday's class. For a moment she considered turning back. The shop in the village would still be open. Then she moved the bottle into the footwell and drove on.
The road descended through trees with leaves turning pale at their edges. Alder Lake appeared between trunks, a long piece of silver folded under the hill. The house stood at the end of the track, facing the water, with its steep roof and little porch. One upstairs window caught the sky. Nothing else on this shore was visible from the house. That was why they had chosen it for their honeymoon, twenty years ago. It was why Elena came alone every year on the anniversary of Daniel's death.
This was the ninth time she had made the journey without him. She no longer cried at the gate. Sometimes she cried while rinsing her glass, or on the drive home when a radio advertisement made her laugh and there was no one to repeat it to. She did not arrange these things. She booked two nights, though she usually stayed only one, and left her pupils with Bea, who always said she would manage perfectly and always rang to ask where Elena kept the spare speaker cable.
The phone sounded now. Bea had sent a photograph of six pairs of feet, all pointing the wrong way. They're revolting. Enjoy yourself.
Elena replied, Make them do it again. Then give in. She put the phone away. This year she had promised to come back in time for a Sunday rehearsal. There were people waiting for her, plans she wanted, a new sprung floor she could not afford. The house belonged to a small part of her life. She protected that part fiercely.
A car she did not recognize stood beside the woodshed.
She stopped behind it. It was an old gray hatchback with a bakery bag on the dashboard and a parking ticket pushed into the corner of the windscreen. The porch door was open. Through the screen she heard a cupboard close, then somebody coughing. A warm smell reached her: onions, butter, something sharp and sweet.
The rental office had made a mistake. Elena would be polite. She would give them one opportunity to correct it before ceasing to be polite.
She carried her bag up the steps and rang the bell that Daniel had once said sounded like a spoon in a glass. The man who opened the door held a wooden spoon.
He was in his late thirties, dark-haired, with a face made uneven by tiredness. One cheek had a faint crease from sleeping on it. He looked at her, then at the bag in her hand, and seemed to swallow something he had meant to say.
“Elena,” he said.
She looked at his chest.
He was wearing Daniel's university sweatshirt. Navy blue, the white NORTHBRIDGE letters cracked across the front, a red repair in the right cuff where Elena had caught it in a cupboard handle. Daniel had complained that she could have used blue thread. She had told him he could learn to sew. For the rest of their marriage he had called that tiny red seam his war wound.
The last time she had seen the sweatshirt was eleven years ago. Daniel said he must have left it somewhere. They had searched the laundry basket twice.
“Who are you?” she asked.
“Miles.” His fingers tightened on the spoon. “Miles Rook.”
“What are you doing in this house?”
“I was waiting for you.”
She put her bag down. There were dishes on the counter behind him, shoes at the foot of the stairs. A folded blanket lay on the sofa in the sitting room. Whoever he was, he had settled in. The small fact of his breakfast bowl seemed suddenly intolerable.
“You need to leave.”
“I know how this looks.”
“Then take it off.”
He glanced down at the sweatshirt. “I will. But I need to tell you—”
“That belongs to my husband.”
“He gave it to me.”
She laughed once, a dry noise that hurt her throat. There had been scams after Daniel died, people writing from countries he had never visited, a woman who claimed to have his watch. Elena knew the watch was in a drawer at home. She had thought those people could no longer reach anything raw.
“My husband is dead.”
“I know.”
“Nine years. So whatever you're selling, you've come rather late.”
The man looked past her toward the lake. He was pale in the doorway's warm light. A bead of sweat moved down from his temple though the afternoon was cool.
“You used to hide the burnt side of the toast under his eggs,” he said. “He knew. He always ate it first so you wouldn't apologize.”
Elena did not move. A car passed far up the hill, unseen. The sound went on longer than it should have, as if the road kept unwinding somewhere beyond the trees.
“You told him it was a protein breakfast,” Miles said. “On your honeymoon. Because you'd set off the smoke alarm and wanted to sound as if it had been a plan.”
That had happened in this kitchen. There was no photograph of it. They had not made it one of their dinner-party stories. Daniel had teased her about it when they were alone, sometimes years apart, so that hearing protein breakfast still made her see him barefoot at the table, holding up the black toast in solemn admiration.
“Who told you that?”
“Daniel.”
Her hand found the porch rail. It was rough under her palm, an ordinary splintering rail that the owners had promised to replace for three summers. She held it harder.
“Don't say his name as if you know him.”
Miles lowered the spoon. Behind him something in the pan began to hiss.
“I did know him.”
“Who are you?” she said again. “Tell me what you're doing here.”
He looked directly at her then. His eyes were gray, bloodshot at the edges. He spoke without the gentleness he had been trying to put between them.
“Your husband hired me eleven years ago, in case he died before he could tell you the truth.”
The pan hissed more loudly. Miles did not turn toward it.
Elena had brought flowers in a paper cone. They lay on the passenger seat of her car. She had chosen little yellow chrysanthemums because Daniel had once said they looked like buttons in a box. She thought of them absurdly now, waiting there for a vase.
“Eleven years,” she said. “He died nine years ago.”
“Yes.”
“And you waited until now?”
“He told me not to contact you before today. This exact date.”
“Why?”
Miles looked behind him, not at the stove but at the stair. For the first time she saw that the toes of his socks were wet.
“Come inside,” he said. “Please. I don't want to say it on the doorstep.”
She almost answered that she did not want to hear it anywhere. Then a cupboard banged shut upstairs.
Miles flinched. The sound had come from the bedroom she and Daniel had always used. Elena knew the cupboard in that room. Its latch was broken. To close it, Daniel used to lift the door by its brass handle and give it one short, angry shove.
There was no one else at the house. She could see that Miles knew it too.