It takes Odette a moment to register her voice and turn. Her expression falls, at first in anguish, then closes off, hard and blank. ‘Why have you come?’
‘What do you mean? Do I need a reason to want to see you?’
‘You shouldn’t be here. It’s not – I don’t know what’s going to happen.’
The dark hollows beneath Odette’s eyes are more pronounced than ever, and she cannot keep her hands still, picking at her cuticles and twitching at the buttons on her cuffs.
‘Have you slept?’ asks Cecilia, coming to sit on the bed with her.
‘That’s not important.’
Cecilia tries to take her hand, to still her worrying, but Odette yanks it back as though the touch burns, and she looks over her shoulder, through the window into the street beyond as though tracking something.
‘I wanted to apologise for how I reacted to the séance yesterday,’ says Cecilia, hoping to draw Odette back. She has thought about how to approach this, and there seems no obvious way to go back to how things used to be between them, but she can start with softness. ‘You put your trust in me, taking me with you to that place, and I don’t feel like I honoured it.’
Odette pulls at a hangnail hard enough that the skin grows red. ‘You gave your truthful account. That’s all I asked.’
‘It frightened me. I wasn’t kind. But it mattered to you, and I should have treated it more carefully.’
‘It was stupid.’
‘I don’t think it was.’
‘Don’t lie to me,’ Odette snaps. ‘I don’t need your pity.’
‘You assume it is pity when it is not. Will you listen to me?’
Odette seems to war with herself for a moment, then drags her attention back to Cecilia and nods.
‘There is something I have been meaning to speak to you about, but it has hardly felt like the right time for so long, and now it all weighs on me too heavily to wait any longer.’
Odette’s expression grows wary. ‘More secrets?’
There is no point denying it. ‘Yes. Though I never meant to keep them.’ Cecilia is out of her depth in a conversation like this; she can feel her feet reaching for the bottom that is not there. ‘Ihave been trying to find out what happened to the money Lydia promised you.’
Odette considers her for a moment, with a searching, sharp look, and Cecilia is struck with the sense that this is not Odette. NotherOdette. The person she knew has gone, and she is left with this shadow, this imposter. She wants to clutch at Odette and shake her, will her back into her rightful shape.
‘The sale never happened.’
‘No, but the paintings were gone all the same,’ says Cecilia. ‘I tracked them down to Mr King’s gallery. He claims he has bought them all from the estate.’
‘I don’t understand.’
‘Neither did I, so I asked Leo.’ Cecilia draws a breath to steady herself. ‘Lydia changed her will before she died to make Claudine her executor. Leo said Claudine was “helping” her with it. Which means she has been in charge of your mother’s estate, and she sold all the paintings to Mr King directly, and the money has all gone back to Uncle George and – and – Odette, I’m so sorry. I should have told you I was looking into it all but I didn’t want to say anything before I had something meaningful to tell you.’
The silence is too long. Cecilia cannot let it lie.
‘I’m so sorry. Can you forgive me?’
Odette still does not speak. She closes her eyes, draws a slow breath, and Cecilia thinks she might be crying.
‘You should stay out of Claudine’s business,’ she says eventually.
‘But, Odette, she—’
‘I don’t want to hear it. Don’t speak of her. Don’t look into any of this anymore. Forget it ever happened.’
‘I don’t understand. Are you listening to me? She has been planning all this from the start. I mean the real start: before you were born, she and—’