Chapter Nine : After the Earth

                Sophie Steele

"Can I get you anything, miss? Something to eat, perhaps?"

I looked at the young staff member holding a tray of small plates and I smiled at her with a rare smile of mine which actually meant my smile answer was no but I don't want to make the person feel useless.

"I'm fine, thank you."

She moved on.. I moved on. That was how it worked in rooms like this one.

The villa had swallowed everyone back inside after the burial, and now the main reception room was full again in the way it had been yesterday, except the quality of the air was different. Yesterday was anticipation and arranged grief. Today was the real thing, quieter and heavier, the kind that sat on people's shoulders and made them speak in half sentences and reach for food they wouldn't taste.

I stayed near the edges.

I accepted condolences when they came to me. An older man with a grey beard who said Richard had been a good man and meant it. Two women from what I gathered was Richard's side of the business, who held my hands briefly and moved on. A young cousin I didn't recognise who said something about it being a long time and I agreed that yes, it had been.

Between each exchange I reset my expression and kept moving slowly along the perimeter of the room.

My phone was in my bag. I had not taken it out since the second message this morning. The clock is running, Sophie. Have you decided?

No. I had not decided. What I had decided was that I was going to get through this gathering without doing anything visible, and then I was going to think clearly in a room by myself, and then I was going to make a decision from a place of sense rather than panic.

I picked up a glass of water from a side table and held it without drinking it.

Across the room Gerald was moving through the guests with the ease of a man who had been working rooms his entire life. He paused, he listened, he placed his hand on arms and shoulders. He laughed at the right moments, softly, the laughter that communicated warmth without disrespecting the occasion. Everyone he spoke to left the conversation looking slightly better than they had before it.

I watched him and thought about the message sitting in my camera roll.

I thought about the precision of the language. “I know about the boy.” And now I heard about the boy, not I think I know, but ... .I know. The level of certainty that doesn't come from guessing.

"You look well."

I turned…

The woman standing in front of me was sixty in the way that some women were sixty, which is to say she wore it like a choice rather than something that had happened to her. Tall, composed, dressed in black that fit with the particular intention of clothes that had been selected rather than simply worn. Her hair was silver and she had done nothing to apologise for it. Her eyes were grey. I knew those eyes.

Ethan had those eyes, same thing with Dominic. And this woman, Vivienne Steele, had them in the original, sharp, still and totally occupied with whatever they were looking at.

Right now they were looking at me.

She took my hands before I had fully decided how to respond to her presence. Her grip was cool and firm as she looked at my face like a document one is reading very carefully, going over each line twice.

"Considering," she added.

I kept my smile in place. "Thank you for having me."

"I didn't," she responded.

She said it pleasantly. There was no blade in her voice, no performance of unkindness. She was simply being accurate and had decided that accuracy was more respectful than pretending.

"Richard wanted you here," she continued. "I simply didn't interfere."

I looked at her. "I appreciate that."

"You appreciate the distinction," she said. "That's different from appreciation."

She was still holding my hands and still reading my face. I stayed still under it because pulling away felt like the wrong move and because some part of me, unexpectedly, did not entirely want to.

There was something about Vivienne Steele that was difficult to look away from. I'd not call it warmth, exactly. She was not a warm woman. But she was a present. She was entirely here, in a way that a lot of people in this room were not.

"You were kind to come," she said after a moment. "Whatever the complications."

I said nothing to that. There were too many possible responses and none of them were simple. She released my hands. Then settled hers in front of her, composed.

Then her voice dropped without drama. Just enough that it became a conversation between two people rather than anything the room could overhear.

"Whatever business brought you back," she said, "conclude it carefully." She glanced once, very briefly, at the wider room. "This family has teeth, Sophie. Even when it's smiling."

I opened my mouth.

She was already turning away slowly without rushing, not fleeing. 

I stood there with the water glass still in my hand and watched her cross the room.

My heart was doing something it was not doing five minutes ago.

That was not a warning from an enemy. I knew what warnings from enemies felt like. They arrived before sunrise on unknown numbers with countdown clocks attached.

That was something else... I was still working out what.

I set the glass down on the nearest surface and pressed my fingers briefly against the side of my neck, where my pulse had decided to make itself known.

“This family has teeth, Sophie. Even when it's smiling.” She had looked at the room when she said it. 

I turned, slowly, and let my own eyes move across the gathering. Gerald laughing at something, hand on a man's arm. Two older men near the window in a conversation that looked professional rather than social. Staff moving through the space efficiently with trays and glasses. The whole room performing its function without a single visible fault line.

Teeth.

I thought about the message again. I thought about the precision of it. I thought about how information like that, about a child in Los Angeles who shared the wrong colour eyes, did not simply emerge from nothing. Someone had it before I arrived. Someone had been sitting on it.

And now someone was using it.

My jaw tightened. I looked back at the room and found, without planning to, that I was looking for Dominic.

He was across the room. Standing near the doorway to the hall, a glass in his hand, not talking to anyone at that moment. He was looking at me.

His look did not project surprise. He had clearly seen the exchange with Vivienne. His face gave me nothing readable, not concern, not curiosity, not the complicated expression I had been collecting from him since I arrived. Just steady attention, that particular quality of focus that he had always carried like a physical thing.

Then he gave me the smallest nod.

One movement, barely visible. But it was direct, deliberate and it said, as clearly as if he had crossed the room and spoken it into my ear: “I saw that. I'm aware.”

I held his gaze for a second.

Then someone stepped into my line of sight and when the space cleared he had already looked away, back to the person who had approached him, his expression settling back into the composed distance he wore publicly like a second coat.

I picked up my water glass again.

My phone buzzed in my bag.

I did not move for three full seconds. Then I reached in, slowly, and looked at the screen.

Not an unknown number this time.

Miriam. I answered immediately, turning toward the wall. "Miriam."

Her voice was steady but there was something underneath it. "Sophie, I need you to listen to me carefully."

My hand tightened on the phone. "What happened?"

"Nothing's happened," she said quickly. "Ethan is fine. He's right here with me." A pause, shorter than it should have been. "But someone called the studio this morning, asking for you. They said they were from the Steele family estate."

The water glass in my other hand went very still.

"They asked," Miriam continued, her voice dropping, "whether you had brought your son with you to the burial.”