Caught on Camera

CHAPTER FOUR

Elena — First Person

I was still thinking about the photograph when my phone exploded.

That is the only word for it  exploded. Seven messages in just under two minutes, then twelve,then too many i couldn't even count. I watched the notification stack up on my screen with the detached confusion of someone who does not yet understand that the world had shifted beneath them.

The first message was from cara.

“Elena. Call me now.”

The second was from my colleague Priya.

“Hey have you seen social media this morning? Pls don't panic just try to calm down”.

The Third,fourth,and fifth were from numbers I didn't recognise.

The sixth was from Daniel.

“What is this? Call me immediately.”

I sat very still on the guest room floor with my mother's journal in my lap and my phone lighting up like something on fire and I thought with a strange underwater calm:something had happened which was definitely very  bad.

I opened Cara’s message frist. She had sent a link.

A gossip site,one of those breathless, image-heavy pages that existed entirely to document .the private moments of people who moved in circles considered worth documenting. I had never been one of those people. I had spent my entire life being careful not to be one of those people.

The headline read: FORBIDDEN CONVERSATION? HART HEIRESS AND ASHFORD HEIR SHARE INTIMATE EXCHANGE AT WHITMORE GALA.

Beneath it:a video.

Forty-seven seconds long.

I pressed play with a hand that had gone entirely cold.

There we were.

Whoever filmed it had been across the room,angled slightly above us,the phone held at the practiced casualness of someone who did not want to be noticed doing what they were doing.the footage was close enough to be damning and distant enough to be deniable.

Adrian and I by the tall windows. The city lights behind us.His body angled toward mine with an attention that focused on me. My face turned up towards his. The space between us closer than I realized while I was standing in it.

We were talking. Just talking. Anyone who watched it could see we were only talking.

But the way we acted aimed otherwise.

The way he leaned in slightly when I said something, the way I did not step back. The way neither of us looked away from the other for the entire forty-seven seconds,as though the rest of the room had simply ceased to exist.

I understood with a cold drop in my stomach like the beginning of something.

Because it was.

The comments beneath the video were already hundreds,some curious,some hate, some already constructing narratives about arguing dynasties and star-crossed connections and all the other languages people reached for when they wanted to make someone else's private life feel like entertainment. 

I closed the app.

I sat on the ground with a confused face, for exactly four seconds.

Then I heard my father's voice downstairs

Not his ordinary voice,not the measured , not the controlled voice he used at breakfast or meetings or when he was managing something he had anticipated.  This was the other voice, the one that lived beneath all his composure, the one l heard only a handful of times in my life and that meant something had broken through. 

“MARGARET.”

My mother's name, full,no softening.  

I was on my feet before I had decided to stand. I was at the top of the stairs before I even thought of moving my legs.Below me through the half open living room door, I could see my father standing in the middle of the room with his phone in his hand,his back facing me,his shoulders carrying a tension so complete it looked like a physical weight.

My mum appeared from the kitchen doorway,She looked at him. Then with the particular stillness of a woman who had learned to read atmospheres the way sailors read weather, her eyes moved to the phone in his hand.

“What is it?” She said,quietly.

He turned the phone around to face her without speaking.

I watched my mother watch the video.

Her face did what faces do when they are trying not to do anything,she watched all forty-seven seconds of the video without looking away. 

When it finished,she looked up at my father.

The silence between them was huge.

“She doesn't know what she's doing,” my mother said finally. Carefully,like a woman choosing every word the way you choose your footing on uncertain ground.

“She knows exactly what she's doing ,”my Dad said. His voice was quiet now,that was somehow worse than the shout.”She was raised knowing,she was raised understanding what that name means to this family and what it cost us and what it continues to cost us every single day.”

He stopped,breathed,sat his phone down on the side table with a precision that was the most controlled thing I had seen him do.

“And she stood at a window with his son for forty-seven seconds and smiled at him like he was someone she wanted to know.” 

The words landed on me from the top of the staircase like stones dropping in still water. I felt each one.

My mother said,very quietly,”perhaps it was nothing _”.

“You saw the same thing I saw.”

I should have gone downstairs.I should have walked into the room and said: it was a conversation,it was nothing, it was forty-seven seconds at the party and it meant less than it looked.I should have said all the things that were technically true and which would have closed this whole misunderstanding before it opened any further.

I stood at the top of the stairs and said nothing.

Because of the other thing that was true,the thing I could not say,the thing that had been true since the moment I had heard his voice behind me at the Gala was that it had not meant nothing to me.

It had been the opposite of nothing.

And some part of me,the part that had lain awake for four hours and stared at a ceiling and thought about grey eyes and a voice like a river,that part already knew Twenty-three minutes was only the beginning.

My Dad picked up his phone again. I heard him dial  a number.

“I need to know everything”,he said.Everything about Adrian Ashford, Where he goes, who he sees, what he wants then a pause. Then,very quietly,the word that hitted me like cold water:”And I need to know if my daughter has had any contact with him beyond what's on the video.” 

— ✦ —

I pressed my back against the wall at the top of the stairs.

My heart was doing something loud and inconvenient in my chest.

My father was having me investigated.  

My Dad,who built his entire identity around loyalty,around the sacred obligation of the Harts to stand together against the people who had wronged us,was now downstairs making a phone call that told me exactly how little he trusted the daughter he had raised. 

And the worst part,the part I could not understand was me still trying to balance both the photograph in my mum's old journal of her laughing beside Reginald Ashford burning in my mind and the video that just got viral.

My phone was still buzzing in my pocket.

And when I finally looked down at the screen.

It was a message from a number I didn't save to my contact.

Four words.

“Are you alright, Elena?”

Adrian Ashford had found my number.