"For seventeen weeks."
"Then hear this unrehearsed." He came around the desk slowly and stopped at the distance kept by a man trying to be a person and not a verdict. "You will not be leaving today. I am not refusing you. I am refusing to answer a seventeen-week speech with a temper I have had for one night. That would be another policy, and I have heard what my policies sound like, in a corridor."
He picked up the photograph and put it, after a moment, in the breast pocket of his jacket, over his heart, with the air of a man who does not know he has done it.
"Go back to Sofia, Miss Rowan. Rest. Eat. Dr. Klein's orders, not mine. We will speak again when I have something to say that I have finished thinking."
At the door, with her hand on it, she said the thing that had not been in the rehearsal at all.
"He kicks," she said. "In the evenings. In case your arithmetic wanted a fact that isn't a number."
And she went out, and closed the door an inch too carefully, the way everyone in that house closed doors, and stood in the corridor with her back to it and her eyes shut, while downstairs the gates stayed open and the cars came and went, and nothing had been decided except the one thing she had not asked for:
She was still there.
Chapter 6: The Lockdown
By morning, the house had changed its posture, and Tessa felt it before she could name it.
She woke the way she had woken for weeks, in the blue hour before Sofia's alarm, one hand already resting low on her stomach out of habit, and lay listening. The estate had a sound at that hour β sprinklers ticking on the south lawn, Aggie's radio murmuring somewhere below, the old radiators knocking as they came awake. This morning there was something else layered under it. Boots on gravel. A radio that answered another radio, in the flat shorthand of men who did not want to be understood.
She dressed in the loose cardigan, the one with the pockets, and went down the back stairs with her shoes in her hand, as she always did, to make Sofia's cocoa before the child's day began. Aggie was already in the kitchen, and the housekeeper looked up from the stove with an expression Tessa had never been aimed at her before: pity, swiftly rearranged into briskness.
"You're to sit," Aggie said. "Doctor's orders, or near enough. I'll bring it up."
"I always make her cocoa."
"You always did a great many things." Aggie set a mug in front of her anyway, coffee she was not supposed to be drinking, poured like an apology. "Sit down, Tessa. Eat something. You're pale enough to read through."
In the study yesterday, she had kept her voice. That was the thing she held onto, through the night, through this altered morning: Rafael had asked his questions the way other men signed documents, and she had answered them, and she had not begged, and her one request β let me go β had been received in a silence so complete that she still did not know whether it had been refused or merely filed. Now the house answered for him. By eight o'clock she had counted the changes the way she had once counted her savings: methodically, and with her heart going too fast.
There were two men at the gate where there had been one. The second car stood at an angle in the drive that was not careless. When she took Sofia out to the terrace after breakfast, a man she had never seen before detached himself from the shadow of the carriage house and walked β not near, not far β in the unhurried rhythm of a man matching a child's pace. Escort, she thought. The word the house would use. Sofia, who noticed everything and forgave most of it, watched him over her toast.
"He's new," she said.
"He's helping Mr. Marco."
"He's helping very quietly."
By ten, Tessa understood about the phone. It was not in her bag. It was not in the drawer of the hall table where she sometimes left it charging, nor on the kitchen counter, nor anywhere in the geography of her small, mapped life. She found Marco by the garage, checking a tyre with the side of his boot, and made herself ask lightly, the way you ask about weather.
"Have you seen my phone, Marco? I think I've put it down somewhere stupid."
Marco did not lie to her. That, she would remember later, was the mercy and the indictment of the man: he straightened up, and he looked at her with his whole face, and he said, "It's being held, Miss Rowan. For safekeeping. Mr. Castellano's orders."
"My phone is being kept safe from me."
"I'm sorry," Marco said, and meant it, and did not give it back.
She walked the length of the terrace twice, slowly, with the new man at his distance and Sofia's kite string tangled in her fingers, and she did the arithmetic of a cage. Her passport was in the drawer of her dresser β or had been. Her money, folded small and smaller in the sock drawer, she had not dared check since yesterday, because Aggie went in and out of her room now with laundry and broth and reasons, and if the drawer had been opened by other hands she did not want to learn it while being watched learning it. The bag under her bed β packed at seven weeks, repacked every Sunday with a faithfulness she had never given any prayer β she could not look at that either. A gilded cage, she thought, is still a cage. The bars here were men with radios. The lock was a sentence: for your protection.
At noon she went to the front door for the post, as she had done a thousand times without thinking, and the new man opened it for her β pleasantly, with a nod, as though service were all it was. She thanked him. Her voice, to her own ears, had become a guest's voice in the house where she worked.
It was Dr. Klein who said it aloud, that afternoon, in the small sitting room, with her bag still unopened on the chair beside her.
"I've been told security has been increased," the doctor said. "I want to be clear about my position in this house, Tessa, because I suspect no one else will be. I examine you. I answer to you. If anyone β anyone β asks me to be a lock on your door, they will need a different doctor." She took Tessa's wrist, not for the pulse; or only partly for the pulse. "Now. Tell me how you're sleeping."