All Chapters of My Stepfather's Son Is My Fated Enemy : Chapter 21 - Chapter 26

The fire had been going since before dark.She could see it from the upstairs window when she was getting ready, the orange pulse of it above the fence line, the smoke moving in a slow diagonal against the darkening sky. She had watched it for a moment before she finished dressing, not because it required watching but because her eyes went to it the way eyes went to fire, the old response, the one that didn't ask permission.The yard, when she came down, had been transformed in the way of things that transform while you're not watching. She did not know where the long tables had come from, or the string lights in the trees at the property's edge, or the arrangement of chairs that implied gathering without enforcing it — loose clusters, the kind of seating that allowed movement without requiring it. Kane had managed it. Elena had managed it. Together they had managed it with the efficiency of people who had done this many times, who had a relationship with this particular transformati

She knew something was wrong before Kane said anything.It was the way he called it, not the usual gathering, the kind that assembled itself organically around the dinner table or the fire pit or the back porch on a Sunday afternoon, the kind that had the quality of people coming together because they wanted to be in the same room. This was the other kind. She had learned to distinguish them in the first weeks by the quality of the notice: the organic gatherings arrived with warmth, with the specific energy of anticipation. This one arrived via Kane appearing in the kitchen doorway at nine on a Thursday morning with his shoulders set in a particular way and his voice doing the thing it did when he was being careful about what he communicated with it."Pack meeting," he said. "An hour."That was all.She noted the set of his shoulders and looked at her coffee and said: "Living room?""The study."She noted that too.She found a seat at the edge of the room and watched them come in.Sh

She found it on a Tuesday.She had not been looking for anything except the Malinowski — the anthropology text Kane had mentioned at dinner two weeks ago, the one she had finally decided she actually wanted to read rather than simply intending to read, which was the distinction she used to determine whether she was going to act on a thing or continue to carry it in the category of future intentions. The shared study room off the main hallway had a wall of shelves that functioned as the house's overflow library, the books that didn't belong to any one person's room, the accumulated reading of a household over years, and she had developed a loose familiarity with its organization, which was to say she knew it had no organization, which was itself a kind of organization once you understood the logic of it.She was working through the third shelf from the left when she found the Malinowski.It was behind two other books — pushed to the back in the way of books that had been used as booken