“Gross,” Maeve says. “Gross—that is not at all what I wanted to hear.”

“You asked. I’m sure it bruised his ego. He thinks of himself as some kind of alpine playboy.”

Maeve closes her eyes and opens them again. Debating.

“What about Sadie?”

Karo thinks about that.

“I think Sadie is rather too single-minded for him. Argumentative. That would be too much for Dan in a girl her age.”

“No, I mean—you’re quite sure you can trust her?”

“Sadie?”

It’s the wrong question, or the wrong timing. Nevertheless.

“Sadie’s a pleaser,” Karo says, casually flipping a page in her catalog. “An achiever. It’s what makes her an excellent assistant—she gets a real buzz from praise. I imagine it makes her an excellent doctoral candidate.”

“This morning—” Maeve stops, then starts again. “The reason I asked—this morning, upstairs, I found her going through Anna’s things. She said she was looking for Justin’s camera. She’d been using it for something, some kind of secret. Something to do with Sim—”

Being a pleaser, she thinks, also makes you easy to groom.

But Karo just stares at her blankly and doesn’t offer anything in reply. Maeve stumbles on: “I thought it was strange,” she says. “I mean, for her to be there at all.”

“We all have things we’d rather others didn’t see.”

Maeve pulls up short. This isn’t the response she’s expecting.

She stands and begins to brush off her jeans as though they’ve become ashy. Really, she just has an urge to wipe the slate, wipe herself clean. “For the record, my thing with Sim—it was meant to be easy and quick. A bit of fun. That’s all I wanted.”

“Men never think we’re capable of that.” Karo gives a brisk nod and turns back to her catalog. “And, for the record, you’re right, of course: Sadie shouldn’t have been going through Anna’s things.” She looks up again. “I took the camera. I have it now. It was causing too much trouble, all that sniping, back and forth—and I have absolutely no interest in a disaster documentary for High Water. I thought it would be best to remove it from the mix.”

Maeve stands there, a little stunned. Karo struggles to her feet. When she goes into her office and shuts the door, Maeve is relieved to be alone.

At first, she thinks of using the upstairs hallway as a practice space, somewhere she can refocus without a witness. Karo is unlikely to brave the stairs in her condition. Maeve hasn’t been able to shake off the desperate urge to hit things, to smash her knuckles into a wall. Using her body will feel good: the extra adrenaline still buzzes in her limbs.