There were four glasses on the table.
Frankie saw them before she saw the faces. Four settings, four folded napkins, the silver slightly mismatched in a way somebody had chosen to call charming. She'd expected five or six people. A commission usually arrived with someone who wanted it and someone who wanted to explain why it couldn't be afforded.
Vivian Holt sat at the far end.
“Anna.”
Frankie stopped.
Vivian's hair was white now, swept back without a strand escaping. She wore a dark blue jacket and a brooch shaped like a small, unreasonable bird. Frankie remembered that bird. It had been on a coat in 2016, above the hand which signed the last page.
“Vivian.”
The man on her left put his wineglass down.
“Claire.”
Duncan Mercer.
Frankie knew his hands first, then the face she'd once woken beside. Older, of course. So was she. His hair had gone grey at the temples and he wore glasses which she didn't remember, though she'd made jokes about an optician wearing glasses until he'd told her to find a better joke.
She hadn't.
“Duncan.”
The woman on Vivian's right smiled.
“Maxine.”
Nina Adebayo had cut her hair. That was all Frankie could think for a second: the bright, impractical curls gone, the face underneath unchanged enough to make her feel foolish for noticing the hair.
She knew exactly who was at the table.
Every person. Every name.
“Nina.”
“That's right,” Nina said. “We're going to have fewer problems with introductions than I expected.”
Frankie stayed by the door.
Behind her, the young waiter who'd brought her up waited for the opening in which people generally gave him permission to leave. She could ask him to stay. She could ask for the manager. She could walk out with him and keep walking.
Vivian lifted one hand.
“Thank you, Aaron. We'll ring when we're ready.”
He left.
The door remained unlocked. Frankie noticed. Vivian noticed her noticing.
“Do sit.”
Frankie looked at the empty chair.
“I think there may have been a misunderstanding.”
“No,” Duncan said. “We've checked.”
His voice was the same. Not quite. There was a distance in it which hadn't been there when he used to tell her to come back to bed.
She hated that she could remember that now.
Nina gestured at the place setting.
“It's the only one. We tried arranging several escape chairs, but the room looked silly.”
Frankie sat.
She could feel the fabric of her trousers pull tight across her knees. She'd dressed for a working dinner: black, good earrings, jacket which had cost more than she could presently justify. Nothing that said she'd arrived to beg.
Vivian poured water into her glass.
“I hope you eat fish.”
“I do.”
“Good. One question settled.”
“Before we—”
“The food's ready. I won't make the kitchen wait while you decide what to call this.”
Frankie looked at Duncan.
He looked back.
She'd taken thirty-six thousand pounds from him in 2019. Claire Hart had needed it urgently. There had been a mother, a hospital, a deadline which grew more frightening the longer he hesitated. He hadn't hesitated long. He had asked what else he could do.
She remembered his kitchen. A lemon in a bowl. The charger he kept in a drawer because she was always losing hers. He had lent her the charger too.
Nina set a phone beside her plate.
“We can show you,” she said.
“You don't need to.”
“Excellent.”
“It was a long time ago.”
“For her,” Nina said, nodding towards Vivian. “Four years for me.”
“I know.”
“Do you?”
Frankie had been Maxine Vale in 2022, very interested in a festival, very sorry the sponsor's timing was complicated, very confident that Nina was exactly the person who could make it work. Twenty-two thousand pounds: the festival's seed fund, which Maxine had said must be lodged against the promised matched sponsorship. The match never came. The messages Nina sent afterwards had begun with concern and ended in fury. Frankie had read them all, watching Nina's confidence in her break down on the small screen. She hadn't answered.
Now Nina was pouring wine for Duncan. The ordinary ease of it made the three of them more alarming. They had already found ways to be together without her.
“How did you—”
“Duncan saw the photograph,” Vivian said.
Frankie thought of liking it.
“The dinner,” Duncan said. “Halden Design. The hotel's post came up when I was looking for somewhere to eat. There was Claire, thanked as Frankie Voss. I rang the office and asked who'd organised it.”
“Don't,” she said.
His eyebrows lifted.
She wanted to take the word back. She wasn't in a position to direct his tone.
Vivian took a flat folder from the chair beside her.
“The office brought the question to me. I knew the face.” Vivian opened the folder. “Nina used to work here. When her festival fell apart, she put out an appeal for anyone who'd dealt with Maxine Vale. It had a photograph. I remembered the appeal after Duncan rang and went back to look at it. There was Maxine. I sent Nina the picture from my own lobby. We compared more than names.”
“I never met Anna,” Nina said. “I've enjoyed meeting her work.”
Frankie looked at Vivian.
“You kept everything.”
“Some of us have drawers.”
Inside the folder was the brochure.
She recognised the pale cover. The flattering view of the hotel. The sentence she'd written about guaranteed group bookings, which had seemed persuasive until she reread it in this room.
Under it were printed messages and a photograph of Frankie with darker hair, standing in the lobby in a coat she'd since given away.
Vivian didn't spread everything out.
She let the edge of the brochure rest beside her plate.
Seventy-four thousand pounds. Personal reserves, Vivian had told her then. Frankie had praised her decisiveness.
There was a knock.
Vivian called for Aaron to come in.
Four plates arrived. Fish with a sauce brightened by something green, potatoes small enough to be expensive, vegetables set in a tidy line. The waiter explained the sauce. Frankie heard all of it and understood none of the flavour.
When he'd gone, Vivian began to eat.
Nina took a bite.
“Oh, that's good.”
“Yes,” Vivian said. “He's very pleased with it.”
Frankie looked at her plate.
“You invited me for a business opportunity.”
“We did.”
“This doesn't look like one.”
Duncan picked up his knife.
“It looks like dinner. The opportunity comes after the fish.”
Frankie nearly laughed. The reflex was so quick she had to swallow it. Nina saw and smiled a little, as though she was pleased Frankie could still be caught responding.
“I am sorry,” Frankie said.
No one moved.
She'd rehearsed versions of that sentence before, privately, whenever some ordinary thing brought a name back. A woman at a train station who looked like Nina. A hotel brochure. A pair of glasses on a bedside table. The sentence had always been large enough in her head to occupy the whole encounter.
It wasn't large enough here.
Vivian tasted the sauce.
“Is this tarragon?”
Frankie didn't know whether she was asking her.
“Possibly.”
“It is. I approved it. I don't know why I asked.”
Nina laughed.
Duncan ate two bites before setting his fork down.
“You're sorry for what?”
Frankie turned towards him.
“The money. What I told you.”
“And?”
She looked at his face.
There was no good way to say intimacy in front of two other people. No good way to admit that she remembered the feeling of his hand on her waist and had also remembered how to make him offer what she wanted.
“What I let you believe.”
He waited.
She couldn't improve it.
“That'll do for now,” he said, and picked up the fork.
Her relief came too quickly.
Vivian saw it.
“Now isn't always very long.”
Frankie tried the fish.
It was good. That annoyed her. She'd have preferred something she could leave untouched without appearing childish.
“Do you want me to pay it back?”
“With what?” Nina asked.
“I work.”
“We saw.”
“I can—”
“Over how many years?”
Frankie had no answer she wanted them to hear.
Nina leaned back.
“I'm not asking because I want you to promise. I'm asking because I spent two years answering people who wanted to know where their money was. I can spot a long answer approaching.”
Frankie put the fork down.
“What do you want?”
Vivian folded the folder shut.
“That's much better.”
“If you've brought me here to report me, you don't need to do it over dinner.”
“We haven't,” Vivian said. “I gave the police the booking papers in 2016. It didn't bring the money back. Now I've got your face in my hotel again, and I'd like more than another folder.”
“I reported Maxine,” Nina said. “I still had to answer the people I'd persuaded to work. Finding you doesn't give me my festival back.”
Duncan turned his glass once.
“I didn't report Claire. At first I thought something had happened to her. Later I didn't want to explain how long I'd believed it.”
“You can now,” Frankie said.
“I know. Don't make that sound like something you've given me.”
“Then what?”
Duncan wiped his mouth. He folded the napkin in the way he used to when he intended to get up but didn't know whether she wanted to finish eating first.
“I could send this to people you work for,” he said. “You know that.”
“Yes.”
“And I could give it to somebody whose business it is to ask you questions.”
“Yes.”
“I don't know what would happen next.”
Frankie looked at him.
“I don't need to know,” he said.
Nina tapped her phone with one finger.
“We've got our own messages. Payments. Names. We've compared quite a lot.”
She could leave. She could refuse whatever came next and begin telling clients something which sounded honest enough to preserve a little work. She might even keep some of them.
Isobel's photograph was on the hotel's public page. Frankie had sent invoices under her own name. Her landlord had a real address to inspect. This was the life she'd built when she stopped taking people's money, and it was inconveniently reachable.
Vivian poured more water.
“Now,” she said. “Gideon Rusk.”
Frankie looked up.
She knew the name. Hotels, events, expensive things hired for people who wanted to be photographed in front of them. She'd seen his company on the sides of vehicles arriving at venues. Never worked directly for him.
“What about him?”
“He has money,” Vivian said.
“Lots,” Nina added.
Frankie looked from one to another.
Nina was enjoying this. She could see it in the way the smile arrived and vanished, held back until the moment would serve it best. Duncan wasn't enjoying all of it. Vivian seemed almost impatient to leave the old losses behind and begin talking about something new.
That was dangerous.
It was also interesting.
Vivian looked towards the closed door.
“This house used to have a Tuesday Table.”
Frankie waited.
“A little supper group. People who mattered to one another, which in the photographs looks remarkably like people who thought they mattered to everybody. I've got the menus.”
“How long ago?”
“Long enough to be useful.”
“Vivian.”
“Don't sound so responsible. It doesn't suit you.”
Nina laughed into her glass.
Duncan looked at Frankie. The corner of his mouth moved, then stopped.
She hated them a little for being able to make her want to stay.
Vivian said, “We intend to bring it back.”
“As an event.”
“As something Gideon will want a place in.”
Frankie could already see the room. The photographs. The authority of something nobody alive had attended, a tradition with just enough dust on it to look as though it couldn't possibly have been made this week.
She stopped herself.
“You don't need me to hold a supper.”
“No,” Vivian said. “We need you to sell one.”
“A real one?”
Nina put her glass down.
“A beautiful one.”
“That wasn't what I asked.”
Duncan looked at the brochure beside Vivian's plate.
“We know what you asked.”
For a moment nobody spoke.
Then Frankie leaned back, because she didn't want them to see how far forward she'd moved.
“You've found me together,” she said. “You know what I did. You've got enough to make things very difficult.”
“Extremely,” Vivian said.
“And you don't want the money back.”
“Don't be ridiculous,” Nina said. “I'd love it back.”
“Not only like that,” Duncan said. “I want to be here when you do it. I want to choose something for once, instead of going over what I missed.”
“You want to watch me lie to him.”
“Yes.” He didn't seem pleased with the answer. “And I want my money.”
“I want a show with my name on it,” Nina said. “Not another year explaining why it never happened.”
Vivian touched the folder. “And I want this house full. I know what we're proposing. Don't pretend you're the only person here who can want something badly enough.”
Frankie looked at them.
Vivian slid the brochure into the folder. Anna Reed's promised guests disappeared beneath the cover.
“We want you to do it again,” she said.
“With us.”
Frankie looked down at the remains of dinner.
She had been invited to talk about work.
Against every sensible interpretation of the evening, a part of her still thought she had arrived at the right place.