There was another folder underneath. I didn't decide to open it. My hands did it while the rest of me was still processing the first one.
Different name. Same format. Same columns. Same clinical accuracy, the same language you used for things rather than people.
12.
I put that one down.
My hands were very steady. I noticed that in a distant way.
Third folder.
I understood the format now. I knew what I was looking for without wanting to. Name. Description. Medical. The number.
14.
I sat in Judah Beaumont's chair in Judah Beaumont's study in the house his family had owned for a hundred and fifty years and I went through the folders one by one. Each one the same. Each one a name and a body reduced to inventory notation and a number in the upper right corner in his handwriting.
16. 11. 15. 13.
I didn't let myself think the word yet. The word was there — it had been there since the second folder — but I wasn't ready tothink it and my mind was, apparently, still willing to grant me a few more seconds without it.
Then I got to the last folder in the stack.
The name at the top was Celeste.
I sat very still.
Dark hair. Five foot four. The medical column. The destination — a city I recognized, far enough away to mean something, close enough to have been reachable from St. Francisville on a single night's drive.
The number in the upper right corner, circled in his hand.
17.
I closed the folder.
I put it back where I'd found it, under the correspondence, the corner showing at the same angle. I put my hands flat on the desk. The wood was warm from the afternoon sun coming through the window.
I sat in his chair for a long time without moving.
The word was there now. I was thinking it. I couldn't stop thinking it.
I knew what the cellar smelled like.
I knew why the flyer had come down.
I knew what a gold cherry meant when a man handed it to a woman at a party full of men with old money and older habits, and I knew what it meant that Judah had gone still when he'd seen it pinned to my dress.
15. 12. 14. 16. 11. 15. 13. 17.
I got up from the chair.
I walked out of the study and down the corridor and stood at the top of the servant's stairs. At the bottom, the cellar door. The iron handle. The cold air I'd felt once before coming up through the gap.
I didn't go down.
I already knew.
I went upstairs instead. Lay down on the bed — his bed, our bed, the bed with the fresco ceiling and the generational money in every fiber of it — and stared at the cherubs faded to indeterminate shapes above me.
