The medication list isn't in his jacket pocket, where he said it would be. I stand in Rowan Ashford's bedroom — my employer's bedroom, which I've been in for exactly four minutes and already shouldn't be — and look at the bedside drawer. I'm his private nurse. I've been in this house for six hours. The agency briefed me on his condition, his schedule, his preferences, and very little else. What they did not brief me on was where he keeps his medication log, which I need before morning rounds, which means I'm standing here at eleven at night opening a drawer that doesn't belong to me. The drawer sticks, then gives. A watch. A folded handkerchief. A photograph, face-up, slightly curled at one corner. I pick it up because the face looking back at me is my mother's. Not a woman who looks like my mother. My mother. Sable Voss, forty-three years old, dead fourteen months ago. I know the exact angle of her jaw, the way her hair went silver at the left temple first. This is her. Standing somewhere I don't recognize, wearing a coat I've never seen, looking just past the camera with an expression that might be joy or might be terror. I turn it over. *I'm sorry I never told her.* The handwriting is not my mother's. Someone else wrote that. Someone who knew her, who knew about me, who kept her face in a bedside drawer in a house I arrived at today. I fold the photograph and put it in my pocket. I have the drawer closed and I'm three steps from the bed when the door opens. Rowan Ashford fills the frame. He's tall in a way that takes up the room — broad through the shoulders, dark hair, a jaw that looks like it was made to be set hard. He's in a grey shirt, collar open, and he's watching me with eyes that are pale and very still, the color of overcast sky. He doesn't look sick. He looks like a man who has caught exactly what he expected to catch. "You're in the wrong part of the room," he says. "I was looking for your medication log. You said it was in your jacket." "I said it was on my desk." Maybe he did. I hold his gaze anyway. "Stay out of my things." Not loud. Worse than loud — certain. He steps aside to let me pass. I walk out without touching the doorframe. In the hallway, I press one hand flat against my pocket and feel the photograph underneath. My mother's face is in there. And someone in that room knows why.