There was an attachment. I clicked it open: It was a full PDF of the mocked-up cover. On the front, Carey Logan stood on the shores of the black lake, wearing the cartoon-dipped white dress she’d worn in the “Perpetual Persephone” photo shoot. THE ART OF LOSING, it said, in beautiful gold letters below her feet. On the back cover, another photograph took up all the space—of me, standing in front of a basketball hoop, gazing into the camera with desperation in my eyes.

The back cover. Not even—like Fleur had implied—the front.

There, in the luxurious reliquary of Max’s office, sitting at her beautiful desk, smudging the keyboard of her golden computer with my oily fingers, in my shabby clothes and tangled hair, a dirty little ball of rage penned inside this concrete kennel—I figured it out.

Max didn’t love me like a sister.

She loved me like a pet.

Max didn’t have the manuscript, I realized. Fleur would probably have it. She was the writer.

*  *  *

I was asleep by the time Max and Fleur came home, or at least I was pretending to be, door shut, my lights out. They giggled and talked a hair too loudly and smoked a cigarette somewhere—I smelled the edges of the smoke curling under the door—and then they were calling good-nights to each other, and bathrooms and bedrooms were slamming shut, and Eliot House was quiet again.

Everything was back in its place, I was certain. Still: I lay there for another hour, waiting for either woman to burst out of her room and march over to mine and demand to know what I’d been doing in her underwear drawer.

Yes. Underwear drawers, bedside tables, mattresses, closet shelves, under sofas. For three manic hours, I pried and peeked and snooped and climbed on chairs, in every room except Charlie’s office, which was locked up tight.

In Fleur’s room there was an empty suitcase under the bed and an assortment of minimalist silk clothing draped from the hangers. Her underwear was folded neatly and she only had two pairs of shoes. There was a phone charger, but no phone, and no gold computer; those were almost certainly in her handbag.

The other guest rooms turned up nothing. Max and Charlie’s bedroom revealed a lot of expensive clothes and accessories, which I was tempted to take, or destroy, like a bad dog, but didn’t. When I typed 1839 into the keypad on Max’s darkroom, the door sprang open.

The room was exactly as I’d last seen it. Red lights glowed in the ceiling and hundreds of negatives hung from clips around the room. The little pile of scorched ash from where she’d burned my portrait was still on the floor; it had been scattered, stepped on, maybe, but not cleaned up.