Chapter 1
2 | The Woman in the Beige Chair
I need to back up two weeks so you understand why that chair mattered.
Mrs. Teague arrived from Brooklyn on a Tuesday with three suitcases for a one-week trip, and the first thing she did was rearrange my kitchen cabinets.
That sounds small.
It was not small.
She made tea, she asked about the florist, and she stood too close to Peter every single evening while we ate dinner at the table I had paid for with my own overtime.
I work in IT for a Manhattan law firm, and I have spent nine years learning how to read a room — not for drama, for security.
When a server is behaving strangely, you do not argue with it.
You watch it.
I watched Mrs. Teague watch Peter.
She watched him the way a landlord watches a tenant who is three months behind.
The Thursday before the wedding, I was clearing plates while Mrs. Teague sat in the living room with Peter, and I heard him say my name in a low voice, the way you say a name when you are asking someone a question about a person who is standing four feet away.
I did not hear her answer.
What I did hear, later that same night, was her going through the box in the pantry where I kept old photographs of my mother.
I found that out because the lid was on the wrong way.
On Friday morning I went through the box myself, and near the bottom there was a photograph I did not remember seeing before.
It had been folded and unfolded so many times that the crease ran right through the face of a young woman standing on the steps of a courthouse in Lower Manhattan.
She was wearing a pale dress with a lace bodice, and I swear to you I had seen that exact dress in my mother's photo album from 1984.
I carried the picture into the kitchen and held it up while Peter was drinking his coffee.
"Who is this?"
I asked him.
He barely looked.
"That is Mrs. Teague's godmother's mother," he said.
"The family kept everything.
She used to collect other people's history."
I nodded, because that is what I do when I do not believe something yet.
But I remembered a different story.
My mother used to tell me that Mrs. Teague was called the guardian of the family record, because she was the only one who could be trusted to keep the documents safe.
She never once mentioned a godmother.
On Saturday afternoon, while I was upstairs half-dressed and Peter was parking the car, I came out onto the balcony off the landing to grab the charger I had left in the flower box.
Mrs. Teague was standing at the railing with her back to me, phone to her ear, and I heard her before she heard me.
"The papers are old, Peter," she said.
"She was never supposed to find them."
I did not move.
She lowered her voice, and I heard two more words, and they were my daughter's name.
She said, "Not the child," the way a person says not the dog, and then she laughed, short and polite, like someone making an apology in a restaurant.
I stood there with the charger in my hand and my heart doing something in my chest I had not felt since I was a kid, which is the particular feeling of being a guest in a house you thought was yours.
She turned around and saw me and did not flinch.
"Gwen," she said.
"You are going to catch cold up here."
I said we should go down because the caterer was calling, and I smiled at her, and I walked back into the room, and I closed the balcony door behind me with both hands.
That night I lay awake in my apartment with Rosie asleep in the room next door, and I told myself I was being paranoid, because I have been paranoid before and I was wrong, and I wanted to be wrong again.
But the next morning I drove to the firm on my day off and I stood in the file room with my badge and I asked the system a question I had no business asking.
I typed in three words and one number, and the screen came back with a name.
MARGUERITE TEAGUE.
May you like
And then I sat down in a chair that was not mine, in an office that was not mine, and I looked at a date from the 1980s, and I understood that my mother had not been telling me family history.
She had been telling me a warning.
