There was a man in the second-best bedroom.

Who was he? A friend of her husband's? She didn't recognise him. Should she recognise him?

Emilie clung to the doorframe, then pushed herself back into the shadows. The man turned around and looked straight at her. Pinned to the wall opposite by his blue eyes, she swallowed all sound and waited to see what he would do.

His eyes were wide, his lips pursing to cage a tiny tremble. He was... frightened?

He turned around as if he hadn't seen her.

Emilie crept back to the doorframe. The back of his head made a strange silhouette, brown hair sticking up high. An odd fashion; where could such a style come from? His clothing was somewhat like a vagrant's: some rough material for strange trousers with holes at the knees, and what surely had to be an undershirt, with its lack of collar and short sleeves. And yet it had some text emblazoned across it in bold letters. The text looked English, a language of which she possessed only a few words.

This couldn't be one of those men her husband had threatened to invite in? The kind he said would 'see to her', at those times when she was being, in his words, objectionable?

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No, the young man did not have such a bearing.

How could he linger here, unaware of the carnage in the dining room? And the wailing, ever calling from some unknowable reach of the house?

"Help," she spoke, her voice clear like a bell to her own ears.

To him, she may as well have not spoken. He continued facing the curtained window and whatever personal effects he had spread out before him on the writing desk. She had no wish to come into the man's room for a closer inspection, even though she was the lady of the house. Even though it would be improper to do so, she might enter, demand to know who he thought he was, taking up residence here. But there was an air of bristling anger to his hunched shoulders which warned her to remain outside the door.

There was no help to be found in this man. He was an ally of her husband's, clearly, and not her ally. He might as well be him; but for his clean-shaven face, he was as indistinguishable to her as her husband had been, even throughout their courtship and on their wedding day. An acceptable shape to fill the gap. The only way out; another dead end. Right down to the animal growl threatening to burst out of the shape constrained by that thin undershirt.

Emilie withdrew from the doorframe. As soon as he was out of sight, she could breathe easier.

If breathing was indeed what she was doing.

There were others in the house. She could hear them talking even now, the hum of voices resonating through her feet.

It would be easier to look at them on their own. She would wait to understand these strangers in tableau, in their own places; she alone, they alone. On as equal terms as she could arrange.

Perhaps one would hear enough to answer her.

One would be enough.