Alba stared at it for a long time. Then she did something she'd never done with a client's film: she printed two copies. One for the foundation. One for herself.
She pinned her copy to the corkboard above her desk, next to the tin box. The empty space in the photograph seemed to look back at her, waiting to be filled.
Chapter 3
The Woman in the Blue Gown
Vivienne Halden had not slept either.
She sat in the morning room of the Halden house on Harrow Point — the house her great-grandfather had built with shipping money in 1898, all gray stone and white trim and windows facing the sea — with a cup of tea gone cold in her hands, watching the lighthouse turn. The morning room still held Edmund in its corners — the reading chair he'd favored, the shelf of histories he'd never finished, the faint smell of his pipe tobacco that five years had not quite lifted from the curtains. He had been kind to her in the way of a man who knew he was loved second-best and had decided, generously, not to mind. Some mornings the guilt of that was worse than the grief. Dawn came up gray and pink over the water. She had watched it come up the same way twenty-five years ago, from a hospital bed, waiting for a nurse to bring her baby.
They had never brought the baby.
"The infant did not survive the night, Mrs. Halden." Dr. Crowe's voice, smooth as oil. "These things happen. You must rest now." And her mother, Cornelia, sitting beside the bed like a sentinel, holding her hand too tightly and saying, "It's for the best, Vivienne. You'll see. It's for the best."
It had never been for the best. Not for one day, not for one hour, in twenty-five years.
Vivienne was forty-seven years old. She had buried a husband five years ago — Edmund Ross, kind and steady and twenty years too dull for the girl she'd been, but a good man, a good father to Julian. She chaired the Halden Foundation, which gave away three million dollars a year and had just celebrated its twenty-fifth anniversary with two hundred guests and a five-tiered cake. She had a son, twenty-three, handsome and clever, being groomed to take over Halden Marine. She had the house, the name, the town's respect.
And she had a locked box in the bottom drawer of her desk, which she opened now with hands that shook.
Inside: a hospital bracelet, tiny, the ink faded. A lock of dark hair. She had kept them in the box for twenty-five years and taken them out perhaps a dozen times, always alone, always at night. And a photograph, sepia-toned, of a young woman of twenty-two standing on a beach in a sundress, laughing, her dark hair blowing — with a crescent-shaped birthmark, deep rose-red, clearly visible on her left collarbone.
Vivienne touched the photograph gently, then touched her own collarbone through her robe, where the same mark lay — the Halden mark, her mother had called it once, dismissively, when Vivienne was small and asked about it. "All the Halden women have it. Your grandmother had it. I have it. It's nothing. Don't fuss."
Four generations. And last night, on a twenty-five-year-old photographer's shoulder, a fifth.
She had told herself at the gala that it was coincidence. Birthmarks were common. Crescent shapes were common. But then the girl had said twenty-five, and October — she hadn't said October, Vivienne realized, her breath catching; the girl had only said twenty-five, last week — and Vivienne had done the arithmetic anyway, the arithmetic she had done every October for twenty-five years. A child born in October 2001 would be twenty-five now.
She had done this arithmetic every October for twenty-five years — candles on no cake, presents never bought, a girl growing older in a place Vivienne couldn't picture — and the habit rose in her now like a tide, unstoppable. Twenty-five. Last week. The girl from the gala, with the mark, with the dark hair, with the eyes.
Her telephone rang, making her flinch. The foundation office. She let it go to voicemail. Then her mobile buzzed — a text from her son: Mother, are you all right? You left the gala early. Pryce said you looked ill.
She stared at the text. Miles Pryce, the family's lawyer, who at seventy-nine — no, fifty-eight — had been watching her for decades the way Cornelia watched her: with interest that felt like ownership.
I'm fine, she typed back. Tired. Don't fuss.
She looked at the photograph again. The laughing girl on the beach. Herself, twenty-two, three months before everything ended.
Vivienne had been twenty-two and in love with a dockworker named Marcus Webb, with hands like rope and a laugh like a bellows, and when she found out she was pregnant she had been terrified and exultant in equal measure. Her mother had found out in the fifth month. What followed — the fury, the threats, the "arrangement" — Vivienne had spent twenty-five years trying not to remember in detail.
Marcus had died the following year. A crane collapse at Harrow Point. Twenty-six years old. Vivienne had not been allowed to go to the funeral. Cornelia had said it would "raise questions." Vivienne had stood at her bedroom window and watched the funeral procession go down to the church from a mile away, and she had hated her mother with a purity that frightened her.
She could still see it: the black cars winding down toward St. Christopher's, small as toys from her bedroom window, Cornelia's hand firm on her shoulder — not comfort, custody. "You will not make a spectacle of yourself, Vivienne." She had stood there until the last car disappeared, and then she had gone downstairs and set the table for dinner, because that was what Halden women did: they set the table, and they buried things, and they smiled at galas twenty-five years later as if nothing had ever happened.
She put the photograph back in the box. Then, after a moment, she took it out again and slipped it into her handbag.
She called the foundation office and asked for the name of the photographer from last night. "Alba Moreno," the girl on the phone said. "Freelance. Very good, actually. Want me to book her for the winter appeal?"