He took my hand in his again, so warm and strong. Large. Long fingers, perfect for playing the pianoforte or wrapping around the neck of a violin. He never played, though. Richard had no music in him. I’d never sensed that more acutely than I did now. “I don’t change my mind often, you know.”

“But . . . ?” My heart pounded.

He gave an awkward laugh, and I wrenched my hand away, all the prisming pieces of my memory shifting into focus. I’d been standing at the fence in the laundry yard, letting down every shield. Telling him everything. “She’s real. Richard, I recognize her. I’ve seen her before.”

Richard. It was Richard I’d told about seeing Rosamond. Richard standing in the shadows in my Vienna dream. How could I have forgotten? He was the only person in the world I’d ever have told, anyway. The only one I trusted.

Past tense. I would never trust him again. Yet it couldn’t be that he was betraying me—that he had betrayed me in our escape.

“I think it’s best you stay here for now, Vivvi.”

“Richard?” I felt faint.

“It’s what you need right now.”

I bolted up out of the chair, staring at my dear friend who had managed, for the first time in his rather predictable life, to be utterly surprising. “And what about Thornhill? The madman who—”

“Isn’t a patient here. And wasn’t. I looked into it—his name is Timothy Thornhill, and the patient name you gave me is Thomas.”

“That proves nothing. He locked me up when I’m perfectly sane. So many patients here are. There’s something wrong happening, and I need to prove it.”

“All this talk of enemies, some mysterious force after you . . .” He stood and took a step toward me. “Vivvi, I found that portrait. The one of the woman you said you saw.”

“Don’t you believe me, then? Richard, she’s been here and we have to find her. She exists.”

He dropped my hand, rubbing the back of his neck as he looked away. “I don’t know how to say it, but . . . well, you can’t have seen her. And she isn’t here.” He looked about the hall, then finally at me. “She’s dead, Viv. I know she is—I saw her, went to the funeral and looked down at her in that narrow little coffin. You were only three weeks old, but I remember it.”

“What do you mean? How do you—”

“It’s your mother, Vivvi. Your mother in that oval portrait, second from the end.”

Heat slammed against my chest. My mother. Rosamond was my mother?

“All this about seeing her in your home at night . . .”