"I'm dying, you know." Edwin Mercer pressed himself deeper into the Egyptian cotton sheets and let out a moan that could curdle milk. "Truly dying this time."

The private suite at Kensington Wellness Retreat cost four hundred pounds a night. The marble bathroom had heated floors. The minibar was stocked with Pol Roger. And Edwin had been running up the tab on Alexander Blackwood's black Amex for six weeks straight.

He deserved it. Twenty-three years as Estate Manager for the Blackwood family. Twenty-three years of Alexander's barked orders at six in the morning, of little Sophie Blackwood hiding his reading glasses for sport, of organizing dinner parties for seventy with twelve hours' notice. A man earned his luxuries.

Of course, Edwin hadn't come to London purely for the spa treatments.

The door to his suite burst open. Margaret, the round-faced day nurse assigned to his wing, rushed in with her orthopedic shoes squeaking against the hardwood. "She's here, Mr. Mercer. Your daughter. She's coming up the main staircase now."

Edwin lunged sideways in bed. The Zeiss binoculars he'd been using to observe the gardens -- old habits from decades of intelligence-gathering in the Blackwood household -- slid toward the edge of the mattress. He shoved them under the duvet, yanked the covers to his chin, and arranged his face into an expression of terminal suffering.

Then Edwin Mercer began to groan.

Margaret retreated, pulling the oak door shut behind her. But she didn't leave. She pressed her back against the corridor wall and positioned her ear at the gap between door and frame.

Footsteps. Confident, measured, with the faint click of hard-soled oxfords on stone.

The door opened again.

The figure in the doorway was tall for a woman -- five foot eight in flat shoes -- wearing a navy single-breasted suit cut for a man, the jacket hanging loose over narrow shoulders. Dark brown hair pulled back in a low ponytail. The face was striking: high cheekbones, a clean jaw, dark eyes that held equal measures of intelligence and stubbornness. Without makeup, without jewelry, with that posture and that suit, Vivienne Mercer could pass for a beautiful boy of seventeen.

That was precisely the problem.

Edwin cracked one eye open, saw the suit, and produced a groan that was entirely genuine. "You're wearing it again."

Vivienne's mouth curved. The smile lasted half a second before her expression reset to neutral. She crossed the room with long strides, lowered herself to the chair beside his bed, and set a leather satchel on the floor. "I had a cross-gender assessment this morning. Twelfth Night. I played Cesario."

Her voice was low, textured, with a deliberate rasp -- the male register she'd been training at RADA for two years. It was good. Disturbingly good.

"I don't care if you played the back end of a horse." Edwin clutched the duvet. "I told you, Vivienne. Every time you visit, every single time, you show up dressed like this. Do you want me dead? Is that it? You want to finish me off so you can inherit my pension?"

"You don't have a pension. Alexander Blackwood pays you in cash and Caribbean holidays."

"Don't change the subject."

Vivienne exhaled. She reached up and pulled the elastic from her ponytail. Dark brown hair spilled past her shoulders, and the transformation was immediate -- the androgynous sharpness of her face softened, the suit suddenly looked like a costume rather than an identity. She was twenty-two and beautiful, and she looked it now.

"It's only for class," she said. Her voice had changed too. Clear, warm, unmistakably female. The shift between registers was seamless, the product of hundreds of hours in RADA's voice studios. "When I'm offstage, I'm perfectly normal. You've nothing to worry about."

"Nothing to worry about." Edwin sat up straighter, abandoning his death pose. "My only daughter wants to spend her life pretending to be a man on a stage, and I've nothing to worry about. Your mother, God rest her, would be horrified."

Vivienne's jaw tightened. She didn't take the bait. Not yet.

"Drop out," Edwin said. "I'm asking you properly this time. Leave RADA, come back to New York, take a position at the Blackwood trust office. Or better yet, let me introduce you to Harrison Whitfield's son -- he's just made partner at Sullivan and Cromwell, very eligible, very --"

"No."

"Vivienne."

"I said no."

Edwin studied his daughter's face and saw his late wife's stubborn mouth staring back at him. Clara had been the same way. Once she made a decision, God himself couldn't reverse it. She'd decided to marry a household servant from New York, and she'd done it. She'd decided to raise their daughter in London, close to the theater world she loved, and she'd done that too. And then she'd decided to die of cancer at forty-one, and even Edwin's desperate bargaining with every deity he could name hadn't changed a thing.

He missed Clara with a ferocity that surprised him, even now, six years later. But he hadn't flown to London and faked a medical crisis to wallow in grief. He'd come here with a plan, and it was time to execute it.

Edwin Mercer rolled onto his face and began to cry.