“No.”

“It’s no trouble, love. All part of the service.”

“I said no.”

The short woman makes a face. “Suit yourself.” She puts the bags down and returns to her van.

I look down at the bags. The topmost item peeps out of the nearest one. Cheerful plastic packaging with a picture on the front. Pearly teeth. Dimples. Golden curls. I bend down and reach for the picture, stretching out my fingers until I feel peachy skin, soft as roses. Plump little thighs. Ten tiny toes. This little piggy went to market, this little piggy stayed at home.

“How old’s your baby?”

I jump. The delivery woman is back with an electronic signature pad.

“Huh?”

“Your baby.” She points at the plastic picture. “How old?”

I can feel her staring at me, at the dressing on my wrists. I pull down my sleeves and look up. Our eyes meet and she flinches. I wonder what she might look like with her head staved in. Like a freshly cut watermelon, I decide, and laugh.

CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

EMILY

THE NEXT morning, Emily woke to discordant birdsong and a faint wash of light. She lifted her head, her hair sticking uncomfortably to her cheek. Her eyes felt sore and puffy, and her jaw ached, a sure sign that she’d been grinding her teeth.

Heaving herself upright, Emily rubbed her eyes.

Yves and the bald man.

The secret staircase.

Blood in the sand and a pale-green eye.

Had she been dreaming? Despite the heat, she shivered. Dread and nausea burned in her stomach.

Wrapping the top sheet around her body, she crossed to the window and looked out. Querencia lay spread before her, just the same as it always was. There was the lawn, green and ordinary. There were the trees and the flowers and the pool. No sign of anything unusual or sinister. And yet everything seemed different somehow.

Within ten minutes, she was out the door and in the car. There was no real plan, just a burning desire to be away from the property: alone, but among people; just close enough to be sure they were still out there.

As she drove the SUV toward the gates, Emily was seized by an urge to accelerate so powerful that she almost plowed the car straight through the iron bars without even stopping at the control panel. At the last minute, she pulled up sharply next to the silver keypad and entered the code. She waited, tapping her fingers on the steering wheel, but nothing happened.

Emily frowned. She reached out and pressed the buttons again, more slowly this time. But still the gates remained closed, the mechanism silent. The small red light in the right-hand corner of the keypad, the one that turned green just before the gates opened, wasn’t flashing. It wasn’t even lit.

She got out of the car and examined the keypad. The digital display panel was blank. Then she looked through the gates at the unit on the other side. No lights anywhere. Even the security cameras, one mounted on either side of the towering wall, were inanimate. The whole system was dead.

She grabbed the bars and rattled them. Locked. A hot swell of alarm rose up in her rib cage. But then she remembered. These are the keys to the house and your car. This little one is for the front gate, but the security system is electronic so you won’t need it. Scott had been right; it had been so unnecessary she’d forgotten she even had it.

Running back to the car, she yanked the whole bunch out of the ignition. The littlest key slipped into the manual lock at the center of the gate and turned easily. Heaving the gates open, Emily drove through to the other side, taking care to close and lock them after her.

The dirt track was dry. She tapped the accelerator and sped up, sending clouds of dust billowing into the air. Above her head, sunlight searched for a way through the thick canopy, painting everything with an eerie shade of green. Green grass, green stalks, green moss, and layer upon layer of bright-green leaves.

Green. Like Aurelia’s eye.

She couldn’t get the image out of her head. It was like a sunspot burned into her retina. Thinking about it gave Emily the weirdest feeling. It was sort of like déjà vu: like she’d always known, deep down, but had forgotten.

She frowned and shook her head. Stop obsessing. You’re tired. Just think about something else. But every time she closed her eyes, she saw it: a ring of light around a small black circle. A pale-green solar eclipse.

* * *

Emily drove north for about an hour, finally ending up in a pretty town set in a curved bay. She’d seen it before—she and Yves had passed it on their way from the airport on her first day—but had only properly noticed it during the awkward car ride with Scott; she remembered gazing enviously out the window at all the people drinking coffee and reading papers in the early morning sunshine.

The town had a small sandy beach and a cobbled esplanade lined with shops. Perfect. The emerging plan was to sit at a café, order something chocolatey, and watch the world go by. She also badly needed to digitally retox: binge on Wi-Fi. Her head was too noisy, so she would quiet it down by catching up on celebrity gossip, and checking out what her friends had eaten for dinner and where they’d been on holiday. She’d gorge on other people’s fake lives, and maybe after that she would take a walk on the beach and eat an ice cream. Then she would feel better.

She reached for her phone—and stopped dead. Shit. Yet again, she’d totally forgotten to grab it from the top shelf of the wardrobe. Never mind, she thought, quickly adjusting her plan.

She wandered for a while, eventually spotting a cute little building with bright turquoise chairs, mosaic-topped tables, and a sign in the window that read CYBER CAFé. Emily approached the counter and asked for a café au lait with a pain au chocolat. The waitress took her order and her money, then powered up a dusty old computer sitting in a corner. Emily took a seat and waited for the ancient PC to warm up.

When it arrived, the warm flaky pastry turned out to be exactly what she needed; she could literally feel the stress sliding off her shoulders with every crunchy, oozy bite. Living and working at Querencia had been a dream come true, but it occurred to her that in eleven weeks, she hadn’t taken a proper day off; she hadn’t felt the need. But now, sitting at the café and gazing out the window at a whole new landscape filled with busy strangers, she realized just how trapped she’d been feeling lately. She should have done this much earlier. Just leaving the estate without telling Nina made her feel light, as if she were made of paper.

Nina.

The past few months had been so intense that Emily had forgotten almost everything about her life before. The estate and its owners had become everything to her. No one had ever made Emily feel even half as welcome as the Dennys had—so unconditionally accepted. What was the saying? You can’t choose your family. Well, maybe that was true, but if Emily had been asked a month ago to sign a legal document cutting all ties with Juliet and Peter and binding her instead to the Dennys, she would have done it.

But that was then.

Emily leaned back in her chair. The awful asphyxia of the previous evening had eased, and her mind felt released. Away from Querencia, it was easier to lay out all the questions and examine them; specifically, what the hell had been going on last night? Why had Yves shown up? Who was the bald man? What was with the secret basement and all the boxes? And the smell—what was that all about?

In fact, here among the little blue tables in the bright daylight, a lot of things were starting to look a bit odd. The absence of Wi-Fi. The broken phone. Even the weekend with Scott. It had been an amazing few days, but how many housekeepers went skinny-dipping with their bosses? She’d become so close to Nina that they now shared a physical intimacy that Emily took for granted … but was it weird? Had Scott taken it as some sort of green light? If she tried to explain it to a friend, it might sound like she had joined a polygamist cult.

The most important question, though, was this: was Nina really faking Aurelia’s illness? People did that sometimes. It had a German-sounding name. Munchausen. That was it. Munchausen by proxy. It seemed a bit far-fetched, though. She tossed the idea around, looking at it from all kinds of angles, but it didn’t make sense. Nina was a good person. She would never hurt Aurelia; she was her mother. Then again, that didn’t always mean what it should.

Also, if it was Munchausen by proxy, then both Scott and Yves were in on it. They were protecting and even facilitating it. Why? What did either of them stand to gain?

She sighed and closed her eyes. There it was again. The solar eclipse. The little half bubble. Green, brown, green, brown.

The computer beeped. It was ready. Emily grabbed the mouse and clicked. Seconds later, she was reunited with Google.