Chapter 8

A month passed. The leaves outside the tall windows turned from green to gold, and the rain that had blurred the glass on that grey afternoon gave way to the clear, hard light of autumn. Rowena folded towels and kept the linen cart tidy, and every morning, at seven o'clock, Pippa stood at Elias Marchetti's left side and checked his brace.

She did it the same way every day. She knelt, small and serious in her lemon-yellow cardigan, and she ran two fingers along the lowest strap, then the strap above it, then the hinge plate. She tested the buckle, sliding it a quarter inch one way and then the other. She listened, sometimes, pressing her ear close to the metal, as if she could hear something the rest of them could not.

This morning was no different. Rowena stood at the linen cart, a stack of fresh towels in her arms, and she watched her daughter work. Elias stood still, his cane planted beside him, his shaved head bent toward the small figure at his feet.

"The strap is good," Pippa said. "The hinge is straight. The buckle will hold."

Elias nodded. "Thank you."

He did not thank anyone else for anything. Rowena had noticed that. He thanked Pippa, and he thanked her, and he thanked Griffin, and that was the end of his gratitude. He was a man who kept his words small and his promises large.

The Great Room was quiet this morning. The glass doors were closed, the walnut table empty, the temporary-authority papers long gone. The six men had been replaced by three new faces, men and women who had passed through the board's vetting process with letters of recommendation and interviews that had lasted four hours each.

The oldest man, the one who had given Pippa the silver pin, had retired. He came to the house once a month, always unannounced, always asking for a moment with the small witness. He sat with Pippa on the steps of the terrace, looking out at the lake, and he told her stories about welds he had checked and joints he had tapped, and she listened with the same absorbed attention she gave to buckles and hinges.

He was here this morning. He had arrived early, before the sun had fully risen, and he was sitting on the terrace steps with Pippa, their two figures small against the expanse of water.