“Well.” Lily’s delicate hand floats softly as a butterfly back down to the bed. My gaze is briefly arrested by the scorpion tattoo on her inner wrist that’s the size of a pound coin. With a deeply indrawn breath, she gathers her composure. “It seems our marriage needs work.”
“Do you remember being married now?” Dr Hamid asks.
“No. Did I wear white or black?”
“When?”
“At the wedding.”
“I don’t know. You’ve been in my care nearly a month, but really, we’ve just met.”
Mrs Black looks at me, and I find myself arrested by those striking emerald eyes. “Were you there? At the wedding, I mean.”
“No, madam. The pleasure was not afforded to me, as that was before my time.”
Her gaze narrows slightly, and she looks towards the windows. “Are we in London?”
“Manhattan,” I tell her. “I’m English, however, as you surmised.”
She takes stock of the room as if cataloguing every surface. She is near in age to my daughter, but there’s a hardness in her jewelled gaze thankfully absent in my child.
“Mrs Black –”
Lily suddenly shakes with laughter that soon verges on hysteria. Tears well, then trickle down like trails of liquid diamonds. Despair is weakening her, casting a troubling shadow over her vivid beauty. She squeezes her eyes shut and slides down into the bedclothes. “I want to wake up now.”
The doctor doesn’t take her eyes off her patient when she asks, “Frank, what’s the status of the ambulance?”
He looks up from his mobile, his mouth thinned into a tight line. “It’s here. They’ve got the gurney in the elevator and are on the way up.”
“We’re going to take you to the hospital, Lily,” Dr Hamid says soothingly. “Now that you’re awake, we need to run some additional tests. I’m going to be with you every step of the way.”
“Please excuse me,” I tell Mrs Black, fiercely reluctant to leave her. She is as fragile as spun sugar, delicate threads of sanity hardening to breaking point. “I’ll direct them back here.”
I leave the room, coming to an abrupt halt in the hallway to avoid colliding with Mr Black.
He ceases pacing. His dark eyes are as wet as Lily’s and look equally wild.
“You should be with your wife,” I tell him. “She needs you.”
“That’s not my wife.”
Something cold and slippery slithers around my vitals. “Mr Black –”
“She looks like Lily. Has her voice. Her skin. Her scent.” He rakes both hands through his hair and grips his scalp. “But there’s something about her eyes … Don’t you see it?”
I stare at him, roiled by confusion. His wife’s exquisite face is unparalleled. More than that, she looks at him as she always has in her portrait, with a feverish love, a possessive hunger. He’s slept beneath that gaze for all the years I’ve known him. How can he not recognize it?
His hands drop heavily to his sides. “Arrange for private security at the hospital,” he orders, his words raw as if cut glass lines his throat. “No visitors. Anyone who asks for her should be followed until they’ve been identified and vetted.”
I nod my acquiescence. “I’ll see to the emergency personnel now, then address the security. Do you want to keep guards on rotation here as well?”
“Yes.”
“Will you be travelling to hospital with her?”
“Of course.” He scowls. “What do you take me for? You think I’d let her go alone?”
The storm wind shoves against the building, which creaks and moans like a ship on a heaving sea. I look back before I turn into the entry hall.
My employer hovers in the space outside his wife’s room, notably more haunted by her revenant than he ever was by her memory.