I did not set out to write a pair of books about women in houses.
That is what happened, though. What the Mirror Knows came first — a house in the west of England, sealed and still and perfectly proportioned, a woman who arrives with a professional purpose and finds something she was not expecting. Then Between Silk and Secrets, which is set in the older world of a private estate commission, a restorer and a painting and a family that erased someone out of the particular tenderness people extend to their own comfort.
Both books have walls. Both have women who are better at reading hidden things in other people than they are at reading themselves. Both have men who are withholding something — not out of cruelty, but out of the complicated loyalty that certain people owe to situations they did not choose and cannot easily leave.
I noticed the resemblance when I was finishing the second one. I found it reassuring rather than alarming.
What I find interesting — what I always find interesting — is the relationship between what is concealed and what is revealed by the very act of concealing it. Iris, in What the Mirror Knows, arrives at Ashford House already skilled at interpreting surfaces. She does this for a living. Her mistake is assuming that skill transfers to the man who lives there. It doesn't. Not because Daniel is deliberately obscure, but because his withholding is not a choice — it is the shape grief has left in him, the room he keeps locked because he hasn't decided yet what it costs to open it.
Helena, in Between Silk and Secrets, faces a different version of the same problem. She is looking for a painting. What she finds is a record of everything a family preferred not to know about itself — maintained across decades with the same attention she gives a canvas. The concealment is an act of love, in its way. That is what makes it so hard to undo.
Both books are on Amazon now. I link to them below, if you have not found them yet.
If I had to describe what they share in a single phrase, it would be this: a woman in a house, and the question of what the house has been protecting.
That question turns out to have many answers. I have not finished being interested in what they are.
Manuela
What the Mirror Knows — amazon.com/dp/B0GV174PD2
Between Silk and Secrets — amazon.com/dp/B0CZ7Y3771