Chapter 2 THE RULES OF THE HOUSE

IVY'S POV

My mouth had gone dry, but my mind hadn't. Six years of chasing liars for a living teaches you one lesson above the rest: when you're cornered, give them a truth that points the wrong way.

"I don't know what you mean, sir," I said. "Is my face a problem?"

"Answer the question."

"I needed work." I let my voice wobble, just a little. "My last employer let me go without a warning, she moved to another country with her family and I have been sleeping in a borrowed car for two weeks, and the agency said you were desperate, so I came."

It was a good lie, and most of it was even true if you counted the car I'd borrowed from my friend. I held his stare with my chin up and my hands still and counted the seconds. Seven. Eight. Nine. Then something in his shoulders gave, and he looked away first.

"Forgive me," he said, rubbing a hand across his jaw. "You resemble someone I knew. It was a shock.".

Someone I knew. He hadn't said someone I married or someone I buried, and I filed that away.

"Mrs. Pell will show you the house. You start tonight, with room and board and double what the agency quoted. I expect discretion." He paused at his study door without looking back.

"The east wing is closed. You won't enter it, not to clean and not out of curiosity. Is that understood?"

"Perfectly.".

The door shut. I realized I was gripping my suitcase so hard my fingers had gone numb, and that he had just handed me the keys to his house with my dead cousin's face on my skull. Either he was careless, or he was careful in a way I didn't understand yet.

DOMINIC POV

I made it to my desk before my knees gave out.

For one second in that hall, one stupid second, I believed the dead had come back. I saw Camille's eyes in a stranger's face and felt something tear open that I had spent fourteen months sewing shut, and God help me, I wanted it to be true.

Then the girl lied to me, smoothly, with her chin up and her hands still, though her mouth had trembled once before she made it stop. I had noticed, and I shouldn't have. The grief went cold and sensible after that.

Ivy Calloway was no housekeeper. Housekeepers look at furniture. She had looked at the staircase, the doors, my hands and Mrs. Pell, in that order, like someone counting. Her résumé was too clean and her voice too steady for a woman who had slept in her car. I've run a company through three recessions, and I know what a prepared person looks like.

So why had I hired her?

Because Mrs. Pell was leaving, and Theo hadn't slept through a night in six weeks, and Milo still cried for a mother who wasn't coming back. Because I couldn't stand to watch another nanny walk through my front door and trust me. And because everyone in Ashford's Landing belonged to somebody, to a family or a debt or an old promise, and this girl belonged to nobody. A stranger couldn't be anyone's creature. Whatever she was, she was the only person in eight years who couldn't have been sent by the town.

She might be a cop, or a journalist, or exactly what she said. I meant to find out which. I would keep her close, where I could see her, and I told myself that was strategy and had nothing to do with the way her mouth had trembled.

I opened the bottom drawer and looked at the envelope inside, the one with my name on it in Camille's handwriting, and shut the drawer again before I could break the seal..

There were things in this house I had never told another living soul, and a woman with Camille's eyes was the last person alive who should find them. If whatever had taken my wives noticed a fourth, I had just signed a stranger's death warrant with my own hand.

IVY POV

Mrs. Pell led me upstairs by the back way and recited the rules without once taking a breath. Breakfast at seven sharp. No visitors unless Mr. Ashford approved them in writing. Nobody answered the front door after dark except him. And the boys never used the main staircase unless a grown hand held theirs.

"Is there a reason for that last one?"

"There's a reason for all of them," she said "None of them is mine to explain."

My room was a narrow slice at the back of the second floor, with an iron bed and a window onto the orchard. The air smelled faintly of lilies and of something scorched and sweet, like sugar left too long on a stove. The pillowcase was so fresh it was still warm from the iron, and Mrs. Pell stood in the doorway with her hands knotted, looking at that pillow as if it might speak.

"The sheets are clean," she said, too quickly, and left.

The gallery ran the length of the second floor, lined with Ashfords back to the founding, stern men in stiff collars and women with the same long jaw, every one of them looking down at me like I owed them money. At the far end hung three newer portraits side by side. A pale, elegant woman with a perfect, polite smile: Seraphina, said the brass plate. Then Camille, laughing, caught mid-turn by a photographer who had loved her. Then Lena, soft-faced and shy, hands folded as if she were afraid of taking up space.

"Mr. Ashford won't let anyone dust that wall but himself," Mrs. Pell said quietly.

"Is that grief," I asked, "or guilt?"

She didn't answer. She walked on.

The boys were in the playroom. Milo, two years old, sat cross-legged on the rug with a dinosaur in each fist, and when he looked up and grinned, the floor dropped out from under me. Camille's crooked smile, the exact one, with the dimple she hated and I adored.

"Dino," he announced, and handed me one, which I understood to be an honor.

Theo, four, sat in the window seat with his back to the room and a book he wasn't reading, Camille's curls and Dominic's frown, wearing the stillness of a child who has learned that quiet is safer. When Mrs. Pell stepped out to take a phone call, he slid down and came to stand a few feet from me, close enough to whisper and far enough to run.

"You have Mommy's eyes."

My throat closed. "Do I?"

"Don't tell Daddy I said." He glanced at the door. "He gets sad. Then he gets scary."

He was back in the window seat before I could ask what he meant, and I made the boys a silent promise. I'll get you out of here. Both of you, whatever it takes.

I didn't sleep that night. At midnight I whispered the day into the recorder: the rules, the portraits, Theo's warning, and the way a man who had buried three wives still hung their faces on his wall. Then I lay dressed on top of the covers, listening to the house breathe. Pipes ticked. Wind worked at the shutters. At 2:17 a floorboard creaked outside my door.

I eased it open an inch. Dominic Ashford was walking down the corridor in his shirtsleeves with a ring of keys in his hand, shoulders curved, head low, a man heading somewhere he had gone a thousand times. He turned toward the east wing.

Don't, said the sensible part of me not on the first night.

I followed him barefoot, hugging the wall, my heartbeat so loud I was sure the portraits could hear it. At the end of the east corridor stood a pair of dark oak doors with a brass lock gleaming in the moonlight, and his hand trembled as he fit the key. He didn't go in. He stood with his forehead against the wood, and I heard him whisper.

"I tried, Camille." His voice broke clean in half. "God knows I tried."

Every hair on my body stood up. That was a confession.

I stepped back, and my heel landed on a floorboard that had been waiting two hundred years to betray me.

It groaned.

His head snapped up. He turned slowly, and his eyes found the exact patch of shadow where I stood.

"Miss Calloway," he said, very softly. "I know you are there."