Elena went to the foot of the stair. Miles followed, carrying the torch he had brought for his car. The hall light worked, but he switched the torch on anyway.
Above them the landing was longer than it had been. The end bedroom still faced the lake. Between it and the bathroom stood another door.
It was low and blue. Elena recognized the color before the object: the underside of their honeymoon boat, painted so brightly that she had joked about being rescued by a piece of sky. Water ran down its panels and disappeared beneath it. The handle was a round brass knob, clouded with fingerprints.
“There,” she said.
Miles aimed the torch down the landing. Its beam crossed the bathroom door and stopped on a blank stretch of cream wall.
“What?”
“The blue door.”
He took three steps upward. “Elena, there's no door.”
She went past him. Her balance was still poor after the cold water, and she kept one hand on the rail. At the top she could hear something behind the blue panels: a slow, deep thudding, followed by a struggle for breath that never quite completed itself.
The room on the other side was not a room. She knew that before touching the handle. It lay below the lake's surface. Her body had once been there, stilling while Daniel tried to find her. She had told the story for twenty years as a frightening afternoon that ended in bed. The door held the missing part.
Miles stood beside her. The torch illuminated the wet handle; she could see its reflection, a curved white line. Yet he reached beyond it to touch the wall.
His fingers went through the door Elena saw and stopped at plaster.
She grabbed his wrist. “Don't.”
He stared at her. “What is it?”
“I think it's where I was.”
He lowered the torch. She could see he understood more than he could see. His mouth tightened.
“He wrote about something behind the rooms,” he said. “Something he couldn't get into. But he didn't describe a door.”
Elena put her fingers on the knob.
Cold moved up her arm with a violence that made her teeth ache. The landing vanished from the edges inward. She was looking into dark water, though the door had not yet opened. In that darkness a white skirt turned very slowly. One shoe slipped from a foot. A hand rose, fingers spread, then sank.
She could hear her own heartbeat. It slowed. Something in her chest wanted to stop following it.
She took her hand away.
Miles caught her as she stumbled backward. His grip hurt, and she was grateful for the hurt. She could feel the carpet beneath her, the solid bones in his arm. The thudding behind the door continued without her.
“No,” she said.
“You don't have to open it now.”
“I don't have to open it ever.”
He did not contradict her. She resented his silence more than she would have resented an argument.
The handle turned on its own.
Elena stepped back until she hit the railing. A thin line of water appeared beneath the door. In it floated a little flower, blue on white cotton. She knew the pattern on her dress. The flower touched her bare toe and she made a sound that sent Miles to the top of the stair, searching the wall for whatever he could fight.
“Come down,” he said.
She could not move. The door had begun to open, a crack wide enough for a breath of lake air. Beneath the slow thudding she heard Daniel pleading. Younger Daniel, terrified, saying her name without any of the teasing she remembered in it.
Miles stood in front of her. It broke her view of the crack. He took both her hands and moved backward, one step, then another. She followed because his body gave her something to follow. At the stair he turned sideways, keeping her against the rail.
They descended slowly. She looked back only once. The blue door stood closed again. A wet line marked the runner in front of it.
In the kitchen Miles poured her tea into the sink because it was cold. She sat with her hands flat on the table. He wanted to ask something. She could feel him waiting until she could hear it.
“What was behind it?”
She shook her head.
He put the kettle on. She watched steam begin to rise from the spout. Her throat hurt where the lake had entered it. She wanted ordinary pain, a blister, a pulled muscle, something that belonged to the body she knew.
“It was me,” she said at last. “Not remembering. Still there.”
Miles leaned against the counter. His face changed, and she looked away before she had to ask why.