“Yes,” she said. “This is it.”
The first time Vivien had walked up these steps, she was a twenty-three-year-old young woman in love. The door was open, as if the entire house was waiting for her to arrive. When she’d stepped inside, she paused in the foyer, unsure of where to go or what to do. Dust motes danced in the air in front of the large bay window. Vivien stood and watched them. The air held the strong smell of furniture polish, and she breathed it in, remembering how the first day of school always smelled like this.
Then David had come down the stairs, opened his arms, and said, “Welcome home.”
Vivien had run into those arms, and let him swoop her up and spin her around before taking her hand and leading her on a tour of the house. It was a tall skinny thing—“Like you,” David had teased her. Those stairs went up three floors, the empty rooms unfolding like secrets and a beautiful stained glass window of a single pink tulip on the landings in between.
“So this is what it feels like,” Vivien said, standing in the room that would become their bedroom.
David turned to her, lifting one eyebrow.
“To be happy,” she said.
Two weeks later, after furniture had been delivered and the kitchen cupboards filled with dishes and glasses and the bureau drawers lined with pale blue fabric and filled with sachets of lavender and Vivien’s clothes hung in the closet on hangers covered with peach silk, she had walked up these stairs again, this time hand in hand with David. At the door, he lifted her and carried her over the threshold. “Soon,” he whispered, “you will be my bride.”
Even though Lotte, newly married and already pregnant, had warned Vivien that he would never leave his wife for her, Vivien knew he would. The wife lived in the large house on Nob Hill where she’d grown up, an heiress to a shipping fortune. She spent months abroad, traveling with her two sisters to Paris and London to shop and see theater.
“Did you ever love her?” Vivien had asked David one night, months after she’d moved in and made the house her own.
He shook his head. “I thought so,” he said finally. “But now I know what it feels like to be in love. I can hardly think straight, and when my mind wanders, it always lands on you. I never felt this way with her.”
“That’s not love,” Lotte had reminded her. “That’s infatuation. Love is worrying together and enduring each other’s moods and smelly socks. It’s not all beautiful and romantic, Vivvie. You are living in a make-believe world.”
But to Vivien, love was indeed exactly what Lotte called infatuation. It was her heart racing when she heard David’s footsteps on the stairs. It was the time spent making herself beautiful for him. It was the feel of his hand on her inner thigh as she drifted off to sleep. It was hope—for the future, for life itself.
“I will wait here,” Sebastian said, not looking at her.
Vivien did look at him, though. She knew in that moment that she could never love him, or any man, the way her younger self had loved David. But perhaps she could find another kind of love with him, a safe steady one. She knew too that she would not be able to have that unless she went into the house.
“Sebastian—” she began, but he held up his hand to stop her.
“Tonight it will be finished,” he said. “One way or another.”
“Yes.”
“When you walk out that door, our life together will either begin or it will be finished,” he said.
She almost smiled at his melodrama. Vivien had grown fond of the way he saw things in almost operatic terms. But she didn’t smile. Instead, she took his hand in hers and brought it to her lips.
“Go,” he said, pulling his hand away.
At the steps leading up to the house, Vivien glanced back and saw the ember of his cheroot glowing.
Slowly, she began to climb the stairs. No longer hopeful or young, she was thirty-seven years old, a spinster, an old maid. A woman who had silver strands in her hair and whose days were filled with stories of grief. She could hardly remember what it felt like to be lighthearted. She could only catch a glimmer of that girl who had raced up these stairs and into this house, who had stepped so boldly into an unknown future. Yet here she was, once again at this threshold, unsure of what lay ahead.
Vivien pressed the doorbell. Inside, chimes played a familiar melody. Ah! Vivien thought at the sound. Ode to Joy. David had installed this doorbell for her twenty-fourth birthday. She waited, then pressed again, listening to the first notes of Ode to Joy. Then silence, followed by footsteps. And then the door creaked open.
A scowling middle-aged Chinese woman stood in the doorway.
Vivien recognized her immediately.