"I'm not suggesting anything." Vivienne crossed the room and took Alba's hands. Her own were ice-cold. "I'm asking. Please. Would you — would you take a DNA test? With me? Discreetly. No one needs to know. If I'm wrong, I'll apologize and never trouble you again."
Alba looked down at their joined hands. At the photograph on the table. At the woman's face, wrecked and hopeful and terrified.
She thought of Rosa's too-long silence that morning in the kitchen. Of the birth certificate filed four weeks late. Of the signature she couldn't read.
"Yes," Alba heard herself say. "All right. Yes."
Chapter 6
The Portrait Sitting
They agreed on the following Monday. Vivienne wanted the portrait taken in the morning room, with the lighthouse visible through the windows — "the light is honest at ten," she said, and Alba, who understood light better than she understood people, knew exactly what she meant.
Alba arrived with her medium-format camera and her nerves. She metered the light first — the honest ten-o'clock light Vivienne had promised, falling across the chair in clean planes — and had Vivienne turn three-quarters toward the windows, chin down, hands loose in her lap. "Don't smile," Alba said. "Just — think of something true." It was what she always told her subjects, and it always worked: the face dropped its public arrangement and showed, for a fraction of a second, the person underneath. The shutter clicked, clicked again. In the viewfinder, grief moved across Vivienne Halden's face like weather, and Alba — professional to the bone — kept shooting, because that was the portrait, that was the true one. She arranged Vivienne in the wing chair by the window, adjusted the reflector, and began to shoot — and as she worked, the woman relaxed by degrees, the practiced smile softening into something real and tired and unexpectedly young.
"Tell me about your grandmother," Vivienne said during a pause, while Alba changed film. "The one who raised you."
"Rosa." Alba smiled without meaning to. "She was a maternity nurse for forty years. She caught half the babies in Greyport — that's what everyone says. She's seventy-two now and still tells me to wear a scarf when it's fifty degrees."
"She sounds formidable."
"She is. She's —" Alba hesitated. "She's my whole world, basically. My mother died the night I was born. It was just us."
Vivienne was quiet for a moment. "That must have been lonely, sometimes. For both of you."
"It wasn't, really. Rosa filled every room." Alba lifted the camera again. "Chin down a fraction. There."
The shutter clicked. In the viewfinder, Vivienne Halden looked directly into the lens, and Alba saw — with the pitiless clarity the camera gave her — a woman holding herself together with extraordinary effort, the way you hold a cracked vase.
"Tell me about Edmund," Alba said, changing the film to give her hands something to do. "Your husband." Vivienne was quiet so long Alba thought she wouldn't answer. Then: "He taught Julian to sail. He kept bees, did you know? Three hives behind the carriage house. He said the foundation was my music and the bees were his." She smiled, real this time, lopsided. "He asked me to marry him twice. I said no the first time — I was still —" She stopped. "The second time I said yes because he looked at me like I was a person, not a Halden. Nobody had done that in years."
"Can I ask you something?" Alba said, lowering the camera. "That night at the gala — when you saw my birthmark. What did you think?"
Vivienne looked out at the lighthouse for a long moment. "I thought," she said slowly, "that the dead don't usually come back wearing green consignment gowns." She smiled, but her eyes were wet. "Forgive me. That was — I've spent twenty-five years being careful, Alba. Careful is exhausting."
They talked then — really talked — for over an hour, the portrait session forgotten. Mrs. Ives came in twice with fresh tea and was waved away twice, and the lighthouse turned beyond the windows, keeping its own patient counsel. Vivienne told her about the Halden mark: her grandmother's stories, the old wives' tale that it appeared on Halden women who were "meant for the sea." She told her about Edmund, her late husband — kind, steady, gone five years now. About Julian, her son, twenty-three, "being polished into something I don't entirely recognize."
And Alba told her about Rosa's kitchen, about the lighthouse wallpaper of her childhood, about the tin box with the yellowed hospital bracelet.
"May I see the bracelet sometime?" Vivienne asked, too quickly. "I'm — I'm interested in old things. Occupational hazard of a foundation chair."
Alba laughed. "Sure. It's just plastic. Nothing special."
Nothing special. But Vivienne's hand trembled as she poured more tea, and Alba noticed, and filed it away with all the other things she was noticing and didn't know what to do with.
They finished the session with the light going gold across the floor, Vivienne in the wing chair with the lighthouse behind her, looking — Alba thought, checking the ground glass — like a queen in exile. "These will be beautiful," Alba said, and meant it. Vivienne smiled, and for a moment the tiredness lifted, and she was twenty-two again, laughing on a beach, before everything.
When the sitting ended, Vivienne walked her to the door herself — past the oil paintings, past Mrs. Ives's disapproving gaze. They stood at the open door with the sea wind coming up the lawn, and Alba felt the session settling into her the way a good shoot always did — not as pictures but as weight, as something carried. "You take beautiful photographs," Vivienne said suddenly. "There's kindness in them. You look at people the way I wish people looked at me." At the threshold she stopped.
"Alba." She held out a card. "This is Dr. Sen's clinic. Private, discreet. I've arranged everything. Whenever you're ready — no rush, no pressure." Her fingers closed around Alba's for a moment. They were cold again. "Whatever it shows, I want you to know: I'm glad I met you."
Alba drove home along the coast road with the card burning in her pocket and the sea glittering to her left, and she thought about the way Vivienne had looked at her — not like a chairwoman looks at a photographer, but like a woman looks at a door she thought was bricked up forever, finding it suddenly, impossibly ajar.