So Susan.
Her feeling of being watched now passed.
She lowered her hands from her breasts.
She moved to the nearest window and said, “Alfred, raise the bedroom security shutters.”
The motorized, steel-slat, Rolladen-style shutters were mounted on the inside of the tall windows. They purred upward, traveling on recessed tracks in the side jambs, and disappeared into slots in the window headers.
In addition to providing security, the shutters had prevented outside light from entering the bedroom.
Now the pale moonglow, passing through palm fronds, dappled Susan’s body.
From this second-floor window, she had a view of the swimming pool. The water was as dark as oil, and the shattered reflection of the moon was scattered across the rippled surface.
The terrace was paved in brick, surrounded by a balustrade. Beyond lay black lawns. Half-glimpsed palms and Indian laurels stood dead-still in the windless night.
Through the window, the grounds looked as peaceful and deserted as they had seemed when she had surveyed them through the security cameras.
The alarm had been false. Or perhaps it had been only a sound in an unrecollected dream.
She started back to the bed, but then turned toward the door and left the room.
Many nights she woke from half-remembered dreams, her stomach muscles fluttering and her skin clammy with cold sweat but with her heart beating so slowly that she might have been in deep meditation. As restless as a caged cat, she sometimes prowled until dawn.
Now, barefoot and unclothed, she explored the house. She was moonlight in motion, slim and supple, the goddess Diana, huntress and protector. She was the essential geometry of grace.
Susan.
As she had recorded in her diary, to which she made additions every evening, she felt liberated since her divorce from Alex Harris. For the first time in thirty-four years of existence, she believed that she had taken control of her life.
She needed no one now. She believed in herself at last.
After so many years of timidity, self-doubt, and an unquenchable thirst for approval, she had broken the heavy encumbering chains of the past. She had confronted terrible memories, which previously had been half repressed, and by the act of confrontation, she had found redemption.
Deep within herself, she sensed a wonderful wildness that she wanted desperately to explore: the spirit of the child that she’d never had a chance to be, a spirit that she’d thought was irreparably crushed almost three decades ago. Her nudity was innocent, the act of a child breaking rules for the sheer fun of it, an attempt to get in touch with that deep, primitive, once-shattered spirit and meld with it in order to be whole.
As she moved through the great house, rooms were illuminated at her request, always with indirect lighting, becoming just bright enough to allow her to negotiate those chambers.
In the kitchen, she took an ice-cream sandwich from the freezer and ate it while standing at the sink, so any crumbs or drips could be washed away, leaving no incriminating evidence. As if adults were asleep upstairs and she had stolen down here to have the ice cream against their wishes.
How sweet she was. How girlish.
And far more vulnerable than she believed.
Wandering through the cavernous house, she passed mirrors. Sometimes she turned shyly from them, disconcerted by her nudity.
Then, in the softly lighted foyer, apparently oblivious of the cold marble inlaid in a carreaux d’octagones beneath her bare feet, she stopped before a full-length looking-glass. It was framed by elaborately carved and guilded acanthus leaves, and her image looked less like a reflection than like a sublime portrait by one of the old masters.
Regarding herself, she was amazed that she had survived so much without any visible scars. For so long, she had believed that anyone who looked at her could see the damage, the corruption, a mottling of shame on her face, the ashes of guilt in her blue-gray eyes. But she looked untouched.
In the past year she had learned that she was innocent victim, not perpetrator. She need not hate herself anymore.
Filled with a quiet joy, she turned from the mirror, climbed the stairs, and returned to her bedroom.