Sophia arrived on a Friday.
She called at eight in the morning and said she was getting on a train and would be there by eleven and I should have coffee ready and she was not asking permission. I said I would have coffee ready. She said good. She ended the call.
I had known Sophia since we were seven years old. Twenty-two days after the engagement party she had sent me a voice message that was four minutes long and consisted entirely of the things she thought about Marcus Blackwood, which I had listened to twice and saved. She had visited twice since I had moved into the estate and both times she had walked through the house with the specific attention of someone building a detailed case file that she intended to review later.
She did not miss things.
She arrived at ten past eleven with a canvas bag over one shoulder and two pastries from a bakery near the station and the expression she wore when she had been thinking hard about something on the train and had arrived at a conclusion she needed to test.
I met her at the door.
"You're different," she said, before she had fully come inside.
"Good morning," I said.
"You're different," she said again. "Not in a bad way. Just different. Something settled." She looked at me with the specific attention. "Something happened."
"Several things happened," I said. "Come in. I'll tell you over coffee."
— — —
We sat at the kitchen table.
Clara brought coffee and pastries on a plate and disappeared with the serenity she had developed around people she had decided to accept, which told me she had assessed Sophia in approximately forty seconds and found her satisfactory.
Sophia looked at the direction Clara had gone.
"She's extraordinary," Sophia said.
"Yes," I said.
"She sized me up in the hallway."
"Yes."
"And?"
"You're still here," I said. "That's the verdict."
Sophia smiled. The real one, the loud one, the one that had gotten us sent to the corridor in school. Then she pulled her coffee toward her and said: "Tell me everything."
So I did.
Not in the careful methodical order I used with Gerald or Damian but with Sophia I told it the way it had actually happened, with the emotional texture intact, the way you could only tell things to the person who had known you longest. The contract and the estate and the study and the gala and the boardroom and the almost-kiss and the note and the statement and Vale Crisis Advisory and Adaeze and the anonymous text and Victoria in the coffee shop and Marcus at Carino's and the Saturday lunch and the dinner and the garden.
I told her about the garden last.
When I finished she was quiet for a moment.
Then she said: "The garden."
"Yes," I said.
"His hand on your face."
"Yes."
"And you put your hand over his."
"Yes."
She looked at her coffee.
"Elena," she said.
"I know," I said.
"You're in love with him."
I looked at the table.
"I'm working on it," I said.
Sophia looked at me for a long moment.
"That's not a no," she said.
"No," I said. "It isn't."
She sat back in her chair.
"All right," she said. "Tell me about the investigation."
— — —
Gerald called at one o'clock.
Sophia and I were still at the kitchen table, which had accumulated by that point two empty coffee cups, the remnants of the pastries, Sophia's notebook which she had produced from her bag at some point and filled six pages of without my noticing, and the specific organised chaos of a two-hour conversation between people who thought best when talking.
I answered on the second ring.
"Elena," Gerald said. "I have spoken with James ."
"And?" I said.
"His account is credible," Gerald said. "He kept records, he made notes on his phone immediately after the approach, the date, what was said, the number he was given. He kept the number. The number is registered to a shell company." A pause. "The shell company, when I traced it, leads back to a holding entity that Victoria Kane's lawyers have used before."
I looked at Sophia across the table.
She had stopped writing.
"So it's confirmed," I said.
"It's confirmed that Victoria attempted to gather intelligence on Marcus Blackwood's business six weeks ago," Gerald said carefully. "The significance of that in relation to the Catherine case is something I am still working through. It could indicate…" he paused… "several things."
"She was building leverage," I said. "In case the investigation moved in her direction she wanted something to trade."
"Possibly," Gerald said. "Or she was attempting to establish whether Marcus had discovered something about that night that she didn't know he had. Whether his company's activities gave any indication he had been investigating independently."
I thought about that.
Marcus had not been investigating. He had been carrying guilt, not suspicion. But Victoria would not have known that. From the outside, Marcus's erratic professional behaviour over the past year… the threats, the documents, the oscillations could have looked like a man circling something without quite knowing what he was circling.
She had been watching him the way a person watched a door they were not sure was locked.
"Gerald," I said. "The formal interview with Victoria. When is it?"
"Monday morning," he said. "I contacted her solicitor yesterday. She agreed without conditions."
I registered that.
Without conditions.
Either she had nothing to hide, which the James Kola… information suggested was not quite right or she had decided that cooperating fully was the only remaining option that gave her any control over what happened next. Which was, in a way, exactly the calculation I had made about the statement six weeks ago.
Tell your version before someone else tells it for you.
"Don't lead with James Kola," I said. "Let her give the Catherine account first. In full. Then show her what you have."
A pause.
"Why?" Gerald said.
"Because if she tells the Catherine account first and it's the truth and I believe it is, I believe she went out after Catherine and something happened that she has not yet fully named even to herself then we have her full account on record before she knows we have the James Kola information. That protects the account's integrity. It can't be shaped around the other thing retroactively."
Silence on the line.
"And if the Catherine account is not the truth?" Gerald said.
"Then the James Kola information will be visible in the gaps," I said. "Either way we learn more by waiting."
Another pause.
"All right," Gerald said. "Monday morning. I'll call you after."
He ended the call.
Sophia looked at me from across the table.
"You just directed a solicitor's interview strategy," she said.
"I suggested," I said.
"He agreed."
"Yes."
Sophia looked at her notebook. Then at me.
"Six weeks ago," she said slowly, "you were standing in the rain with nothing."
"Yes," I said.
"And now you are running a crisis advisory division, managing a formal investigation into a possible death, directing solicitors, and are in love with a man who puts coffee outside your door every morning."
"Working on the last part," I said.
"Elena."
"Yes."
"You know the difference between working on it and already being there."
I looked at the table.
I did know the difference.
I had known it for a while.
"Yes," I said quietly. "I know the difference."
Sophia reached across the table and put her hand over mine for a moment. The same gesture as the garden, I thought. Different person, same impulse. People putting their hands over other people's hands when words were not quite enough.
"What are you afraid of?" she said not pressing but genuinely asking.
I thought about it honestly.
"That I got here too fast," I said. "Thirty-eight days. That's not a long time to go from the rain to…" I stopped. "To whatever this is."
"You didn't get here in thirty-eight days," Sophia said. "You got here in twenty-two years of being exactly who you are. The thirty-eight days just gave it somewhere to go."
I looked at her.
She looked back at me with the steady practical warmth she had been looking at me with since we were seven years old sitting next to each other in a classroom and she had decided, with the specific certainty of a seven-year-old who has identified a person worth knowing, that we were going to be friends.
"Sophia," I said.
"Yes."
"I'm glad you got on the train."
She squeezed my hand.
"I know," she said. "You always are."
— — —
Damian came home at four.
I was in the library when he came in, Sophia was upstairs in the guest room she had claimed without being asked, on the basis that she was staying the weekend and the guest room had a view of the garden and she wanted to see this famous garden properly, and Clara had not objected which meant the matter was settled.
He appeared in the library doorway.
"I heard a voice earlier," he said.
"Sophia," I said. "She's staying the weekend."
Something in his expression… not complicated, just absorbing. He had heard about Sophia the way he had heard everything I told him about my life before the estate carefully, with the specific quality of a person who wanted to understand the context.
"The one from the voice message," he said.
"The very same," I said.
He looked at the doorway in the direction of upstairs.
"She'll want to assess me," he said.
"She already has," I said. "She arrived at ten-eleven. She's been building the case file since then."
"And?"
I looked at him.
"You're still invited to dinner," I said.
Something at the corner of his mouth.
"That's the verdict?" he said.
"That's the verdict," I said.
He looked at me for a moment in the particular way he looked at me since the garden. Not different from before continuous with before, the way a path was continuous even when it turned.
"Good," he said.
He went to the study.
I looked back at my book.
Outside the library window the garden was doing its late afternoon thing, the light changing, the frost beginning to form again on the hedges, the east wall just visible in the distance.
The bench by the east wall.
The path.
The garden that had been the wrong kind of place for so long and was becoming, slowly, a different kind.
I thought about what Sophia had said.
Twenty-two years of being exactly who you are. The thirty-eight days just gave it somewhere to go.
I turned a page.
And let the afternoon continue.