It wasn’t a good sleep, because I knew I ought to be awake. Time and again I dreamed that Cory came into the room and knelt at my side, stroking my throat—except that the sensation was more delicate than the touch of a hand; it was more like a length of red silk trailing across my skin.

Cory keeps hanging his Stella paintings up and Diana keeps taking them down again.

—Diana moans into her pillow and wonders if this ever actually happened. It has the character of an exhausting nightmare.

The game goes on for years after Stella’s disappearance, although they never talk about it. They never talk, anymore, about what is foremost in their minds. Some vast, lurid nude will appear in one of the downstairs rooms, and Diana will unhook it and put it in Cory’s studio, facing the wall. She is more dogged than he; gradually she gains the upper hand.

—It did. It did happen.

“Just get rid of them,” she pleads in her braver moments, but he won’t do that. She wonders why but tries not to wonder too hard.

The mended picture is her one concession; she allows it to hang in the hall, opposite the front door. It has a kind of moral heft, she decides, given how the three of them created it together: Cory with his genius, Stella with her ill will, Diana with her love.

Diana opens her eyes in the darkness. The room smells of roses and urine, and she’s not sure which is more distressing. Where is Cory? He was here, and now he’s gone.

A voice calls out his name; Diana suspects it of being her own. Not that it matters whose voice it is, because nobody answers.

One hot evening—was it last year? this year? August?—Diana finds Cory in his studio. She needs a walking stick to negotiate the house now, and yet she can’t rest; the pain drives her on from room to room.

Cory has brought the mended Stella painting upstairs, from its place in the hall. He is breathing too quickly as he hugs it to his chest, and his eyes are wild.

“Goodness!” Diana exclaims, in fear rather than jest. “You look as if you’ve seen a ghost!”

There’s a noisy wedding in the garden. People are laughing and talking, and there’s a jazz band playing “Dream a Little Dream of Me” under the fairy lights. There are bridesmaids in pale green dresses—mere tots—running amok in the rose garden.

Cory usually scoffs at any mention of ghosts, but this time he just breathes hard, and stares, and trembles.

Chapter 8

8

A cool draught on my face; that couldn’t be right. Even in my nightmares I knew I was shut inside the little attic room.