‘Can I talk?’ she said abruptly, puncturing the silence.
‘Of course. I’m just doodling, nothing serious.’
‘Do you think there’s a possibility we’re imagining all this? That it really was an accident.’
‘After what you told me earlier?’
‘But it all leads to nothing. Everything that seemed wrong or suspicious. He,’ she tipped her head at the window again, ‘was just her friend; Turk was stealing the sketches, and it looks like the only person who’s broken in here is you.’
He smiled at that but shook his head. ‘No. I’m more certain than ever that something happened. I – we – just have to keep going.’
Under the lip of the table, Rowan clenched her fists and she heard Marianne’s voice, low and urgent, as if she were whispering just behind her: I need to talk to you.
When Cory spoke again, his words seemed to come from a distance. ‘Are you all right, Rowan?’
‘How do I know it’s safe, what I told you?’ she said, pulse drumming. ‘That I’m safe? How do I know that you won’t drag it all out into the open? If Marianne died because of Lorna, you won’t be able to help exposing the truth about what happened back then, even if you don’t mean to.’
‘I won’t do that. I promise.’
‘How can you? And why would I trust you, anyway? You kicked the door down, for fuck’s sake – you went through my things.’
Hands still, Cory kept his eyes fixed on the drawing for several seconds. She had the sense that he was making a decision. ‘I won’t tell anyone,’ he said finally, ‘for the same reason you never have.’
‘What?’
‘Because I loved her,’ he said. ‘No, that’s still not the whole story. I was in love with her.’
The words echoed. There was no question that he was telling anything other than the truth: it was written on his face. As if he knew it and was embarrassed, he looked down abruptly and went back to the sketch. Rowan was beginning to take shape on the paper before him. He’d drawn her almost in profile, one eye visible, the other nearly hidden. Now the soft pencil was shaping a corner of her mouth.
‘Did she know?’ Rowan asked.
‘I don’t know. Yes, I think so.’
‘Was there ever . . . ?’
‘Nothing happened,’ he said, fierce again. ‘Ever. All right? Not that it’s anyone’s business.’
Except perhaps James Greenwood’s, she thought, but she kept her mouth shut.
‘I didn’t plan it,’ he said. ‘She was in a relationship and I wasn’t looking for anything like that. I had a girlfriend in New York and it ended very badly. She left me – crushed me, actually, if you want to know. I thought we’d get married, have kids, but as it turned out, she didn’t. It was one of the reasons I decided to come here. The trigger, anyway – I couldn’t be in that apartment any more. Even the city. I needed to be somewhere I wasn’t reminded of her every time I turned a corner.’
‘So why choose Marianne for a subject? Forgive me for saying so but you seem to have form when it comes to getting involved with the women you paint.’
‘No. The other way round. I’ve painted the women I’ve been involved with.’
‘Subtle distinction.’
‘Not really.’ He gave her a hard look and she struggled not to snap at him. Why did he talk to her as if she were an idiot? Why did she feel like an idiot around him?
He went back to the sketch and, with a series of tiny strokes, hatched in an area of shadow below her lower lip. A pout.
‘Marianne,’ he said, ‘she was subtle. She was a will-o’-the-wisp – I couldn’t get a hold on her. She fascinated me – the more she told me, the less I seemed to know, and I wanted all of it. I wanted to know everything.’
For all her annoyance, Rowan felt a pang of envy. How would it feel to be described like that by a man like Cory? To be able to captivate someone like him?
‘Don’t you feel differently now?’ she asked. ‘Now that you do know.’
He held the pencil at both ends and turned it slowly between his fingers, watching it as if it, too, suddenly fascinated him. ‘I’m not sure yet,’ he said.
‘Here.’ He took a final look at the sketch then planted his fingertips on it, hand spider-like, and spun it across the table so that it reached her the right way up. It had taken him ten minutes, less even, but he’d caught her. There she was, not the version of herself she liked, the best-angle, soft-focus Rowan, but her knowing, thinking, hard-eyed avatar, Rowan the survivor, the one who had to do everything on her own. The version of herself that, in the privacy of her mind, she knew was the real one.
‘What do you think?’
‘You got me,’ she said.
‘Will you be okay?’ he asked on the doorstep. ‘I feel bad leaving you with the door like that overnight. I’ll find a carpenter first thing tomorrow, pay whatever it takes to get it fixed right away.’