Chapter One

CHAPTER 1 Twenty-Five

The mirror in Sable's bathroom had a crack in it.

Not a new crack — it had been there when she moved in, a diagonal fault running from the upper left corner toward the center, stopping just short of her reflection as if it had thought better of arriving. She had meant to replace the mirror for two years. She had not replaced the mirror. At some point the crack had become part of how she recognized her own face: slightly divided, the left side of herself a half-centimeter higher than the right, the way a badly bound book opens unevenly.

She noticed things like that. Unevenness. Misalignment. The small physical evidence of time and pressure and the places where things had been stressed past their tolerance. It was, more or less, her job.

She turned on the shower and let the room fill with steam while she stood at the sink and looked at her reflection in the fogging glass. Twenty-five. She was doing the thing she had promised herself she would not do, which was to look for differences. To examine her face for evidence of the number. People did this on birthdays and it was, she had always thought, a form of collective delusion — the idea that the body registered calendar dates, that it knew, that it marked itself accordingly.

It didn't. She knew that. She had a degree in forensic document analysis and three years of professional experience authenticating manuscripts and she understood, at a cellular level, that meaning was something imposed on objects, not inherent to them. A number was a number. A date was a date. The body did not care.

She was twenty-five. Her face looked like her face. The mirror fogged.

She pressed her left palm to the glass to wipe it clear.