In the soft lamplight, Maddison stood naked before the full-length mirror that hung beside the closet door. Whispering to her reflection, she slowly slid her hands over the voluptuous contours of her body. For all of Emily Carlino’s sensuality, modesty had been a fundamental thread of her personality. Although Maddison Sutton could pass for Emily, this delight in her reflection, perhaps more than anything else, confirmed that she was a different person.

If he had not been twice spent, David might have been aroused by her performance, but he was weary, and sleep outbid libido. As he closed his eyes, allowing his mind to fade into dreams, her whisper grew more intense, so that for the first time he clearly could hear the words she spoke to herself.

“This is who you are. This is who you are and who you always will be . . .”

| 28 |

Sunlight slashed through the gaps between the blades of the shutters, and the bedroom was striped with light and shadow when David woke alone shortly after dawn.

He didn’t for an instant think the lovemaking had occurred in a dream. The sensation had been too intense and the emotion too overwhelming to have transpired in sleep, where fragmented fantasies of the unconscious mind lacked the continuity and nuance to turn the heart inside out, as his had been turned.

The robe he’d left on the chair was gone. Naked, he got another robe from the closet and put it on and went in search of Maddison.

He found her in the kitchen, barefoot, wearing his robe. Her clothes were scattered across a counter, where perhaps she had left them the previous night, before she’d come into his bed. She stood at the sink, treating her dress with a clear fluid that she squirted in a stream from a squeeze bottle that she had evidently removed from a nearby tote bag.

She was muttering angrily. “Take it, take it, take it, quick and sharp. Damn it, let go, damn it, be done. You want some more? I got more. Take it, be done.”

When David arrived at her side, he saw that the pliable plastic bottle contained something called Perky Spotter. Large areas of the pale-yellow dress were wet with it. A protein-eating ingredient in the spot remover metabolized a final stain the size of a hand, instantly sluicing away the color, a moment of alchemical magic so quick and complete in its effect that he could not be certain that the stain he’d seen had been blood.

She didn’t look at him. She didn’t seem to be aware of him.

“That’s better.” She was still red-faced though her anger had abated. “That’s the way it ought to be.” She shuddered violently. “Everything will be so much better now.”

“Maddison?”

She stared at the dress. She set aside the spot remover.

“Maddison?” he repeated.