Chapter seven-a crack in the house

CAMILLE

I had just finished folding Brian's laundry when Alexis walked past and knocked half of it onto the floor with her elbow.

"Oops." She didn't even try to sound convincing. "Clumsy me."

Three weeks ago, I would have apologized first and never asked questions. That version of me had learned, the hard way, that arguing with a Smith cost more than it was worth.

I looked at the pile scattered across the hallway floor, and something in me had just gotten too tired to keep playing along.

"That wasn't an accident."

"Excuse me?"

"You knocked that down on purpose. I watched you do it." I crouched and started gathering the shirts, unhurried, keeping my voice level even though my pulse wasn't.

 "I don't know what I've done to earn this from you. But I'd rather you just tell me, instead of finding new ways to make my job harder."

"Your job." She said the word like it tasted bad. "Careful. You're starting to sound like you think you belong here."

"I think I do my job well. That's not the same thing."

"Isn't it?" Her arms crossed, chin tilted in that particular way her whole family seemed to manage from birth. "I've seen how my brother looks at you. Don't think I haven't."

Something in her voice cracked slightly on the word brother,not jealousy exactly, something closer to fear, though I didn't understand it yet. I kept folding. I didn't trust my face not to give something away if I looked up right then.

"I don't know what you're talking about."

"Sure you don't." She stepped closer, and for a second the anger in her face looked almost like grief.

 "He's all I have left that isn't already ruined, Camille. I'm not going to just stand here and watch someone like you get close enough to take that too."

I didn't have an answer for that. I hadn't expected one that honest.

"Alexis."

I hadn't heard him come around the corner, and from the way she flinched, neither had she.

"Zack. We were just…."

"I saw what you did." His voice stayed even, but there was something underneath it I hadn't heard directed at his sister before. 

"The laundry. That wasn't an accident, and we both know it."

"It was nothing….."

"It wasn't nothing." He looked between the two of us…. at me, still crouched with an armful of shirts, at her standing over me like she had any right to. 

"I'm going to say this once, and I'd like it to be understood clearly. Camille works in this house. She does not get mistreated in it,not by staff, not by guests, and not by family. That includes you."

"You're taking her side over mine."

"I'm not taking anyone's side. I'm telling you how things are going to be." He held her gaze until she looked away first. 

"Am I clear?"

She didn't answer him. She turned and walked off, heels sharp against the marble, and I stayed crouched on the floor a second longer than I needed to, still turning over the crack in her voice, the thing that had almost sounded like please don't take him too.

I found Zack in the study later, after Brian was down and the house had gone quiet in that particular way it did after ten.

"Thank you," I said from the doorway, "for earlier."

He didn't look up from whatever he was reading right away.

 "You don't need to thank me for doing what's right."

"Most people in your position wouldn't have." I lowered my eyes 

"Most people in my position are cowards about their own families." He finally looked up. 

 "I'm not particularly interested in being one of those."

I stepped further into the room, not entirely sure why, except that leaving felt like the wrong instinct right then.

"Can I ask you something?"

"You always do."

"Why do you notice?" The question came out smaller than I meant it to. "When something's wrong with me. You always seem to catch it before I say a word. I don't understand why."

He was quiet long enough that I thought he wasn't going to answer at all.

"There's a reason," he said finally.

 "It isn't recent. It's…."

He stopped himself. Physically stopped, like he'd caught his own sentence by the collar before it could finish walking out of his mouth.

"It's what?"

"Nothing." He looked away first this time, which he never did. 

"Forget I said anything."

"You don't get to start a sentence like that and just take it back." I stated 

"Watch me."

The room went quiet in a way that felt different from the silences we had before. More like two people sitting in something neither of us had a name for yet, except now there was a locked door in that silence too, one he had shown me the edge of and then shut again before I could see inside.

I didn't lean toward him. He didn't reach for my hand. But when I finally said goodnight, he caught my wrist, just briefly, just long enough to say, "For what it's worth. I don't do this. Any of this. Ever."

I didn't ask him to explain what this meant. I think we both understood it better left unsaid.

I was halfway down the hall toward the staff quarters when I heard Mrs. Smith's voice through the study door, low and clipped, the particular tone she used on the phone with people she didn't consider worth her patience.

I shouldn't have slowed down but I did anyway.

"...yes. I understand what that costs. I don't need a lecture on the number, I need to know it can be done quietly." A pause. 

"Good. Then we understand each other."

I heard her set the phone down, and for a second the house was silent enough that I could hear my own pulse in my ears.

"Yes," she said again, quieter now, almost to herself, in a voice that made the hair on my arms rise before I'd even understood why.

 "I finally know exactly what she needs most."

I didn't wait to hear anything else. I walked the rest of the way to my room fast, my mind turning over every possible meaning of that sentence and landing, every single time, on the one thing I couldn't afford to lose.

My mother.