Next week there's going to be a car accident. It's going to be a footnote in the news - a short article about the short life of an author, a couple of blog posts, an update on the official website. Mélisande Bellerose (and Amerie James, pseudonym of a pseudonym) will just be some photographs, some books, some fading memories. Katherine will never find anything to explain what happened to her grandmother; Irene, she hopes, will never start looking.

(There are always flaws - unanswered questions. Irene has never struck her as somebody willing to accept something she can't know, and so much of that, that tenacity and that seemingly effortless skill, the way that she is so many steps ahead that she's already stopped playing chess and found some other, better game-- Benevenuta half expects that if she starts to look, then one day it'll be Irene on her doorstep at the German house that no one knows about, except she'd probably come in the window.)

It's a blind spot, that she doesn't think to worry about those phone numbers or that address or the photograph; instead, she leans in the doorway between the en suite and the bathroom, in laser-cut leather and mesh Gaultier for La Perla, turning the underbust corset that matches it over in her hands, studying the bloodstains with the slightly mournful expression of someone who is going to spend dedicated time to getting them out again, later. Damned if she's parting with this, too.

“I'd like that,” she says, looking up from it.