Part 2
Mara’s lips parted again. This time the sound that came out was barely a breath.
“Phone.”
Daniel went still.
Arthur looked at him.
Claire looked at him too.
Daniel shook his head before either of them spoke. “She has it.”
“Where?” Arthur asked.
“I don’t know.”
“You were following her.”
“I was trying to stop her from doing something stupid.”
Claire’s head turned slowly toward him. “Something stupid?”
Daniel swallowed. “That is not what I meant.”
“No,” Claire said. “It is exactly what you meant.”
Arthur reached into the inner pocket of his suit jacket and took out his phone. The screen lit his face from below, cold and white. His thumb hovered over it.
Mara’s fingers tightened again around his sleeve.
“Dad.”
The word was clearer this time.
Arthur put the phone down in his palm and bent close enough that his silver hair brushed her cheek.
“I’m here.”
“Don’t call.”
It was not a request. It was fear, stripped down to two words.
Arthur’s eyes stayed on hers. “You’re hurt.”
“I’m fine.”
“You fell.”
“I know.”
Her voice broke on the last word. She tried to push herself up on one elbow, and pain crossed her face before she could hide it. Arthur caught her shoulder. Daniel moved instinctively at the same time, then stopped when Claire looked at him.
Mara’s eyes found Daniel.
For the first time since she hit the floor, something focused in them.
“You said you wouldn’t tell him.”
Daniel’s face changed.
Arthur did not look at Mara when he spoke. “Tell me what?”
Daniel stared at the floor.
Claire stood up slowly. Her satin dress whispered against itself in the silence.
“What did he tell you?” she asked Mara.
Mara’s gaze moved from Daniel to Claire. “Nothing.”
“Don’t do that,” Claire said.
“I’m tired.”
“You are not tired. You are terrified.”
Mara turned her face away.
The wall of glass held the dark night like a mirror. In it, Arthur could see them all doubled: his daughter on the floor, his wife standing too straight, Daniel trapped near the center of the room with his sleeves rolled to his forearms. Nobody looked like the person they had been before dinner.
Arthur had not intended for dinner to become a confrontation. He had intended it to become an agreement.
That was the kind of mistake he had been making for years: believing that a room could be arranged until truth behaved itself.
He looked toward the low sofa. Mara’s handbag lay beneath the far edge of it, half-hidden in shadow. Its strap had twisted under the frame. Next to it sat one ivory heel, abandoned sometime before she began to run.
Arthur saw Claire notice it too.
Daniel saw it last.
“Mara,” Arthur said carefully, “what is in the bag?”
Her mouth tightened.
“Nothing.”
“You ran with it.”
“She runs with everything,” Daniel said before he could stop himself.
Claire turned on him. “Do you hear yourself?”
Daniel’s face flushed. “I didn’t mean—”
“No. You did. You just thought it would sound different in your head.”
Arthur stayed where he was. One hand remained at Mara’s shoulder. The other closed around his phone. He had spent most of his life understanding the value of silence. Silence in negotiations. Silence at a board table. Silence after someone made a threat they regretted. He had taught Daniel that silence could be useful.
Now silence made him feel old.
“Mara,” he said, “I need you to tell me whether you’re in danger.”
Her eyes opened fully for a moment. They were brown like his own, though hers had always looked warmer. When she was little, she had cried with her whole face. Even then she had never learned how to hide what she felt.
“You don’t get to ask that,” she said.
Arthur’s hand paused against her shoulder.
Claire’s expression folded inward, then hardened again. Daniel looked toward the hallway as if he had just remembered there were doors in the house.
Arthur followed the movement of his eyes.
“No one is leaving,” he said.
Daniel gave a short, disbelieving breath. “Arthur.”
“No one leaves until I understand what happened.”
“You don’t understand anything because nobody ever tells you the truth until they’re already gone.”
The sentence came out of Daniel before he could pull it back.
Claire stared at him.
Arthur’s face changed by almost nothing. The kind of change that people who had worked with him for decades learned to fear.
“Be careful,” Arthur said.
Daniel’s shoulders dropped, not in surrender but exhaustion. “I have been careful. That’s part of the problem.”
Mara closed her eyes.
Claire looked down at her daughter. “Did he hurt you?”
Mara did not answer.
“Did Daniel hurt you?”
May you like
The question entered the room and stayed there.
Daniel looked at Mara too. He did not look angry. Arthur almost wished he did. Anger would have been easier to place. Easier to use.
