DEIRDRE

I hadn’t wanted to attend the fancy luncheon before I got Caro’s message, and I sure as hell wasn’t going after I saw it. When I read it again, I noticed a link at the bottom that said, Click for file access. I did and a web page opened up—with the words There are no files. I was caught in a hell loop. I didn’t know what to do, so I got back on the subway. Elmhurst, my neighborhood in Queens, was fifteen minutes from Manhattan by the express E train. I needed to be alone to think.

The train was mostly empty, and I flopped into a seat. My heart was racing, and my brain felt like it was spinning out of control. I took deep breaths from my diaphragm. It was funny—no one wanted to take the subway anymore, because they worried about inhaling germs—but there I was, sucking them all in to combat a panic attack. An old lady in a full plastic face shield gave me a death glare until I pulled on a paper mask. Face coverings weren’t mandatory anymore, but some people were ready to fight if you didn’t don a mask in close quarters.

I got off the train at Roosevelt and hopped on a local for two stops to Grand Avenue–Newtown. On a normal day, I would’ve walked, but on a normal day stilettos would not be tormenting my feet. I picked up a lychee drink at Kung Fu Tea and hobbled home.

Caro wasn’t snobby about my neighborhood—it was close to where we’d grown up—but she didn’t like me living in a basement. She’d offered to pay for a place in a building that, as she put it, would at least be a legal apartment. I was one of six tenants renting in a single-family home on Fifty-Fifth Avenue. I had a hot pot and minifridge instead of a kitchen, and there was a toilet and sink in my room, so it wasn’t the worst place I’d ever lived. I’d never been easy about asking for help, and Caro’s repeated offers always made me uncomfortable. I have money now, and what’s the point if I can’t do anything good with it? she liked to say. As I walked to the house, it hit me that my sister was the only person in the world who’d tried to make my life easier, and she was gone.

I held my breath when I unlocked the front door, praying my landlord wouldn’t be home. Saira Mukherjee wasn’t a bad person, but she was nosier about my comings and goings than my mother had ever been. There was a staircase from the basement to the backyard that I invariably used to exit the house away from Saira’s prying eyes, but a tall gate that couldn’t be opened from the street kept me from entering the house that way. She wasn’t around, but I heard footsteps above me. I kicked off my shoes, picked them up, and rushed downstairs to my room. I unlocked the door and quickly shut it behind me.

My dungeon room—that was how I thought of it—was tiny and devoid of natural light. The walls were an unforgiving shade of green, as if an earlier occupant had decided to imagine life inside an unripe avocado. I wasn’t allowed to paint over it, and I didn’t really care. I didn’t own much, just a futon and a folding table, a bookcase, and a lone chair for phantom guests I never actually had over. I disliked clutter, but the shelves were my secret shame, overflowing with books, photographs, and carvings. I had a bad habit of tossing mail on the bookcase. On top of a volume of Gustave Doré’s drawings for Dante’s Divine Comedy, I found what I was looking for: a large manila envelope with my name and address written in black ink in Caro’s distinctive curlicued script.

I was going to mail it if I didn’t see you, Caroline told me when she’d handed it over.

What is it?

Remember when you said you wished you had some family photos? I finally got my act together and made you a few prints. There’s more on the memory card.

I’d glanced at a few shots when I’d come home that night, noticed one that included my father, and instantly tossed the envelope on my bookcase. Out of sight, out of mind.

I extracted the envelope and reached for a protein bar before taking a seat on the futon. Inside were new prints of old family photos. On top was one of Caro and me together, hugging in front of a Christmas tree when I was five and she was ten, both of us wearing red velvet dresses with flouncy hems that our mother had sewn for us. The next was one of us with our parents, taken two years later. That was the one I’d seen a couple of weeks back, the one that made me shove the photos back into the envelope. I’d hated it because it was a lie: in that moment, we looked like a happy family, which was something we’d never been. Now that Caro was dead, my heart thudded with longing as I stared at it.

I drank some of the lychee tea and braced myself. Caro must’ve gotten the photos from our father. The envelope held more than two dozen prints, a collection of four-by-sixes and five-by-sevens, with a pair of larger portraits mixed in. There were a couple of Teddy on his own, and one of Caro with her son playing on a golden beach, but most of the images were much older. She’d included a photo of our parents on their wedding day, standing in front of a Belfast church I couldn’t remember the name of. Our mother looked beautiful, her face gentle and serene. Our father appeared smug, clearly proud of tricking this sweet woman into marrying him. I’d literally chopped him out of the one old photo I had, but I didn’t have it in me to reach for the scissors after a funeral.

I keep thinking of Mom, and how you never believe you’re going to end up like one of your parents, until you do.

There was a portrait of our mother as a teenager, and one of seven-year-old me in my first gi at the Higashi School of Karate. There were birthdays and Christmases, ending with the one when I was fifteen. After that, there were no photos of me. That was no surprise. For a stretch of almost four years, my mother was the only family member I spoke to—or more accurately, the only one who spoke to me. The surprise was that there was a lone shot of Caro that had to be from those years of radio silence. In it, she stood on a staircase wearing a short dress of pale-pink lace, her arm around a man who was clearly not her husband. He was tall and blond and ruggedly handsome. I would’ve guessed he was Caro’s prom date, except he looked like he was in his thirties. On the back of that print, in my sister’s elegant script, were the words With Ben, at the Clarkson/Northcutt house in High Falls, New York. There was no explanation, and I wondered if Caro had mixed it in by mistake.

After spreading all the photos on the futon, I realized Theo wasn’t in any of them. It was as if Caro had written her husband out of her life. I knew he was away a lot for work, and Caro never seemed to care. But his absence suddenly felt all wrong.

If you’re reading this, I’m already dead.

Caro’s message twisted through my brain like a tornado. From the outside, her life looked charmed. She had married into a wealthy family, joined their business, and had an adorable son. It wasn’t perfect—Caro’s dislike of her sister-in-law was intense—but she loved Theo’s father and stepmother, and I knew they spoiled her. I had no ambition to live on the Upper East Side, but even I was jealous of the town house they’d given Caro and Theo as a wedding present. With its gargoyle sentinels and stained-glass windows, it looked like something out of a gothic fairy tale, equal parts stunning and sinister.

No matter what it looks like, my death won’t be an accident.

The last time I’d seen Caro was the Saturday before she died. She’d been distant and distracted, but my sister was always wound up tight when working on a big project. The Thraxton hotel chain had suffered in the pandemic, and a lot was riding on her public-relations campaign to revive the brand. Teddy had been running around, making me laugh, and keeping the conversation from getting too serious.

Theo killed his first wife and got away with it.

This was the one part of Caro’s message that made me question whether it was real. What first wife? Theo hadn’t been married before. Back when he and Caro were dating, I’d vetted him online. You couldn’t hide a secret like that. Could you?

I turned every photo over again, reading Caro’s notes. There was nothing about Theo’s first wife. I grabbed my laptop, tried the file link from Osiris’s Vault again, and came up empty. I inserted the memory card. There were 1,702 files on it. I clicked on the first few. A photo of Theo finally popped up; in it, he was standing over his father and son in front of a towering Christmas tree. His arms were crossed and his expression was inscrutable as he watched his father and son playing with a model train. They looked like they were having a good time; Theo did not.