Sisterly Concern (Public) 

(Marlowe)

My aunt Priscilla has never once in her life asked a question she didn't already know the answer to. She did it anyway that Sunday, over the good china, in front of eleven relatives who'd clearly all been briefed before I'd even taken my coat off.

"Marlowe, darling." She set her fork down with the care of a woman about to say something rehearsed. "Sable mentioned you've been under a lot of strain lately. Is everything all right?"

I felt every head at that table turn toward me, gently, almost imperceptibly the way a room full of people angles itself without seeming to, when everyone's agreed in advance to watch someone closely.

"I'm fine," I said, and heard how thin it sounded even to my own ears, worn down from a hundred identical answers to a hundred identical questions.

"Of course you are." Priscilla smiled, warm and terrible. "It's just Sable said you'd been having some trouble with your memory. Phone calls you don't remember making. That sort of thing."

"There was a wire transfer too, wasn't there?" Someone else added, from further down the table Cousin Edward, I think, though I've spent more time than I'd like to admit since that afternoon trying and failing to place exactly who said it. "Quite a large one, in March?"

The room went still around me in that specific way it goes still when everyone already knows what's about to be discussed and is only waiting to watch the person at the center of it react.

I hadn't told a single soul about that transfer. Not Thorne, not Sable, not one relative at that table. I'd found it alone, at midnight, and told no one.

"How do you know about that," I said, before I could stop myself.

Edward blinked, faintly startled by the sharpness in my voice, and glanced sideways as though checking whether he'd said something he shouldn't have.

"I'm not sure," he admitted. "I think Sable mentioned it. Or perhaps Beatrix."

I looked at Sable, three seats down, and she met my eyes with an expression of such open, wounded concern that for one disorienting second I nearly believed she'd said it out of love rather than strategy.

"I made a phone call," I said carefully, to the whole table now. "That's not the same as not remembering it."

"Of course not," someone murmured, in the tone people use when they've already decided the opposite.

I sat through the rest of that lunch with my spine perfectly straight and my hands folded in my lap, performing composure the way I'd performed it my entire adult life in rooms full of men who wanted me to fail except this time the room was full of people who shared my blood, and wanted, I was starting to understand, something far stranger than my failure. They wanted my compliance. My smallness. A version of me easy enough to worry about instead of one they'd have to answer to.

Desmond sat across the table, saying almost nothing, his eyes on his plate for most of the meal. I caught him looking up once, right as Priscilla asked her question, and something moved across his face I couldn't read at the time and have thought about every day since not concerned exactly. Something closer to dread.

"Your father's been quiet today," Beatrix observed lightly from the head of the table, her hand settling briefly over Desmond's on the tablecloth. "Haven't you, Desmond."

"Just tired," he said, and didn't look up again.

I watched the exchange and felt something small and cold move through me, a suspicion I couldn't yet put into words, that whatever was happening to me in this house had roots reaching further than Thorne, further than Sable, into corners of the family I hadn't thought to examine yet.

After lunch, while the others drifted toward coffee in the sitting room, I found myself alone with my father for the first time in weeks, both of us lingering near the window while everyone else's attention moved elsewhere.

"Dad." I kept my voice low. "Is there something you want to tell me?"

He looked at me then, really looked, and for one unguarded moment I saw the man who used to lift me off the ground in hotel lobbies at two in the morning, who used to tell me I'd run the whole company one day and mean it like a promise.

"Marlowe." His voice came out rougher than I'd ever heard it. "There are things about this family I should have told you a long time ago."

"Then tell me now."

He opened his mouth, and I watched him actually gather the words, watched him get right up to the edge of whatever he'd been carrying and then Beatrix's voice cut smoothly across the room from the doorway, bright and unhurried, asking whether anyone wanted more coffee before dessert.

Desmond's whole face closed like a door.

"It's nothing," he said quickly, already stepping back, already reaching for the cup someone handed him. "Forget I said anything."

I watched my father disappear back into the performance of the afternoon, and understood, with a clarity that frightened me more than anything Priscilla or Edward had said at that table, that whatever he'd almost told me had been real and that Beatrix had known exactly when to walk into that room to stop it, the same way she'd apparently known, somehow, about a wire transfer I had never once mentioned out loud to anyone in my own family.