I moved to the living room, to the desk that John rarely used, the drawers transformed into a receptacle for papers and pens. Surely John had written down Charlie’s contact information somewhere. I sorted through each, flinging paper to the ground around me, not caring about the mess that I was making, frantic to find something, anything at all, so long as it would help dispel the image of John’s lifeless body from my mind. As long as it would stop it from becoming a reality.

“What are you looking for?”

I jumped at the sound of her voice, slipping in the process, my already bruised knees connecting with the hardwood floor. Lucy stood above me, her hair hanging loose around her shoulders, the long strands trailing down her soft white blouse, which seemed to glow in the morning light.

She gave a small laugh. “You’re too easily startled, Alice.”

I blinked. It wasn’t a trick of the light, a trick of my mind. She was there, still. I shook my head—it wasn’t possible. I had asked her—no, told her—to leave, just the other night. I remembered standing there, staring in at her, asleep in the bed, knowing that I could no longer allow my fear to persuade me to remain silent. And so I had spoken the words, had finally released them, at last.

It had happened.

“Lucy,” I sputtered. “What are you doing here?” They were similar to the words that I had spoken to her the first day she had arrived in Tangier. My head felt fuzzy, weighted down—my mind filled with nothing but the certainty of her presence and the terrible implication of what that might mean. I placed my hands on the floorboards beneath me, used the force of my arms to push myself upward, grit pressing into my skin. “I told you to leave.”

Lucy gave a quick, short laugh. “Don’t be silly, Alice. We were tired, we had a bit too much to drink.” She gave a slight shake of her head. “You don’t have to worry. I’m not going anywhere.”

I could feel it, that all-too-familiar sensation of fear, in the very center, in my very core, pushing and pulling. My limbs trembled, and I was convinced that just one more moment in her presence would undo me completely. I pushed past her, walking—practically running—back to my bedroom, back to safety. I bolted the door, my fingers fumbling over the lock.

I SAT IN THE CORNER of the bedroom, waiting.

Earlier, I had heard her footsteps as she had approached the door, heard the slight creak of the wood as she had leaned on it, presumably listening for me, just as I listened for her now. The symmetry of it made me shiver. My eyes roamed the space of the room, searching, though for what I could not explain—a way out, a trapdoor, something that would let me escape from what was happening around me, a nightmare I could not wake from. My eyes fell on the telephone next to John’s side of the bed.

It had been an extravagance, something we had not needed—two telephones in one small household, it was absurd, I had told him—but John had insisted, telling me he wouldn’t be dragging himself out of bed and down the hall each and every time my aunt decided to check in on us. An excuse, I soon realized. What he really meant was that he wanted to be able to conduct meetings while still in bed, so that I would have to turn away, a pillow pressed against my ears in an effort to block out the sound. As I crawled toward it now—pausing every so often as a board shifted under the weight of my frame, listening, waiting, frightened at what might happen if she were to realize what I was about to do, as if Lucy could already sense my plan, as if my thoughts were able to slip from my mind, porous and unreliable as it was—I silently thanked him for the decision.

Once next to the bed, I clasped the cold Bakelite between my hands, the one and only number that I had ever managed to commit to memory, ready on my lips.

At the sound of her voice, I grasped the telephone tightly between my fingers.

“Alice?” Aunt Maude asked, sounding for one moment as if she were there in the room with me and not thousands of miles away. “Alice, what is it? What’s happened?”

I wondered briefly how she had known—that it was me, that something was wrong. If she could somehow feel it, despite the distance between us. But then I remembered the operator and I shook my head, embarrassed. “It’s John,” I began, realizing that she was waiting for me to speak. “He’s—” I hesitated.

“He’s what?” she demanded, her voice, so typically calm and measured, now sharp with panic. I thought I could feel it, vibrating through the phone.

“He’s missing,” I finally managed, the words coming out cracked, broken. “Someone from his work showed up at the flat this morning, looking for him. I told them he was supposed to be in Fez, with his friend Charlie—but now I don’t know if that’s true.” I took a deep breath. “They told me not to go to the police, but I think something has happened. And I think—I think I know who might have been involved.”

There was no response.

“Auntie?” I whispered, worried that I might have only imagined her voice a few moments before.

“Yes, Alice, I’m here.” There was another pause. “I want you to listen carefully to me, now. I am going to have my secretary book a flight to Spain, and I’ll board a ferry from there. I’m not sure how long it will take to organize, but I am going to do my best to be there by the end of the week. Do you understand?”

“Thank you.” I breathed. “Thank you so much, Auntie.” I thought, then, of Aunt Maude, sturdy and solid, of her uncanny ability to take a complicated mess and sort it into something orderly and structured. I felt relief wrap itself around me, tight and comforting in its insistence.

“Alice,” she said, her voice cutting into my thoughts. “I want you to promise me something.”

I nodded. “Yes, of course.”

“I want you to promise me that you won’t speak to the police. You said they don’t know about John’s disappearance yet, and I want you to promise me that you won’t go and tell them.”

I nodded again, though she could not see me. “Of course,” I promised. I knew that it would not be hard to keep, for the thought of going into the station on my own, against the advice of that man with the scar from earlier, of reporting John’s disappearance and trying to explain everything that had happened, caused me to pale. “I promise, Auntie.”

“Good,” she said. “And if they come to question you, I want you to tell them that you won’t speak without your guardian.”

Again, I nodded. I still had several months left of my guardianship, and though I had felt the chains of it rankle at times—eager to be in charge of my own finances, my own life, to feel as though I was no longer a child—now, I was grateful to still be tied to Maude in a way that was legal and binding. For while I knew that she was my aunt, that she was my family, I had always sensed a distance between us, a confusion on Maude’s part toward the girl she had been forced to raise upon her brother’s death. She had never wanted children, and though she had never complained about her duties as my guardian, a part of me often wondered whether she had resented having to take me in. I brushed aside my concerns. We made a plan to speak soon, and I was just about to place the telephone onto the receiver when I heard her voice again: “I said, did your friend ever get in touch with you?”

I frowned. “My friend?”

“Yes, what was her name? I noted it here somewhere.” Aunt Maude paused, and I thought I heard the rustling of papers. “There. Sophie Turner. I ran into her on the streets of New York, oh, it’s been months now, but she said she was trying to get ahold of you. Did she ever manage?”

My fingers grasped the telephone. I had never spoken a word to Sophie Turner during my years at Bennington. And there was only one person who would have recognized Aunt Maude. Lucy. She had admitted, just the other night, that she had worked at a publishing company in the city. It had to have been her. I had wondered how she had found me, but then, Lucy had always managed things that others couldn’t.

“Alice?”

“Yes, yes, she did,” I replied. My voice dropped to a whisper as I looked around the room, convinced that she was listening. It was as if I could feel her presence, breathing, just there, on the other side of the door, so that I shot a quick, harried glance over my shoulder. I turned back to the telephone, still clasped between my fingers.

At first I had thought to warn Aunt Maude about Lucy, to tell her that she was in Tangier and that it was happening all over again—that the fog had lifted and I had remembered everything I had wanted to forget. But the words felt too dangerous to speak aloud, the walls too thin, too tenuous. I worried that even the telephone connection might not be safe, that it too held the possibility of being altered and changed. After all, there were telephone operators stationed in Tangier. Perhaps Lucy had befriended one and convinced them to keep her apprised of any conversations that might pass between me and others. I shook my head. It was mad—and yet. I paused, an idea growing. Perhaps if I told Aunt Maude about Sophie Turner, a sort of code for the real Lucy, the explanation would come easier once she was in Tangier. She would be able to see, then, just how devious, how manipulative Lucy Mason really was, for there would be nowhere to hide.