Chapter 8: Tea With Brigitte

Matthias sent two men to the care home at dawn, and they came back with an empty locker.

The young nurse with the twisted lanyard had gone home sick the night before, at midnight, and had not answered her phone since.

"She's been moved," he said at the breakfast table. "Or hidden."

"By Brigitte."

"By someone who watched you walk through that lobby."

I held my bandaged hand in my lap and thought about the cut, and about his thumb across my wrist in the kitchen.

I had replayed that thumb all night, and I had not liked how many times.

At nine a courier brought an invitation on cream paper.

Tea, four o'clock, the Reinholt conservatory.

Come alone, my dear. I only want to talk.

"No," Matthias said.

"She'll send worse if I refuse."

"Then I go with you."

"I said alone, and she said alone," I said. "If you walk in, she gets to say you hold me on a leash."

He did not like it, and I watched him not like it.

"The driver waits at the gate," he said. "If you're not out in an hour, I come in."

"Fine."

"One hour, Ilse."

"I heard you."

The Reinholt conservatory was a glass room full of ferns and white wicker, and Brigitte sat in the middle of it pouring tea.

She wore a pale blue cardigan and her pearls.

She looked like somebody's grandmother, and that was the point.

"My dear," she said. "You came."

"You asked."

"Sit, sit. You look thin. Are they feeding you in that house?"

"Well enough."

"Lemon or milk?"

"Neither."

She smiled and set the cup in front of me anyway.

I did not touch it.

"I want to say first that I'm sorry," Brigitte said. "That whole dreadful morning. Lukas has been very foolish, and I've told him so."

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