Camille caught her own reflection in the mirror longer than she meant to — the shadows under her eyes, the tightness still sitting behind her jaw from a dream she hadn’t fully shaken.
She dragged the brush through her hair twice more, more out of habit than need, and set it down before her hands could start trembling again.
Downstairs, the smell of coffee and frying eggs reached her before the stairwell did, warm and ordinary, the kind of smell that had no business feeling so far away from the night she’d just survived.
“Morning, Aunt Ane.” She slid into the kitchen and lifted the juice jug before her aunt could reach for it, a small daily theft that had become its own kind of ritual between them.
“Lauren.”
“Hey!” Lauren batted her hand away from her hair a beat too late, grinning despite herself.
“Sleep alright, baby?” Aunt Ane’s arms came around her briefly, but her eyes did the real work, moving over Camille’s face the way they always did — reading for cracks the way other people read weather.
“Fine, Aunty.” The lie came out smoother than it should have.
Camille looked away before it could be caught.
Some mornings she thought Aunt Ane let her get away with it purely out of mercy.
“Go on, then.” Aunt Ane nodded toward the dining room, sliding a dish into Lauren’s hands.
“Wouldn’t want to keep your stepmother waiting.
You know how she gets before nine.”
“She is how she gets before nine,” Lauren muttered, pulling a face.
“It’s less a mood and more a permanent attitude.”
Camille huffed a laugh under her breath, grateful for it, grateful for anything that could loosen the knot still sitting under her ribs.
At the table, Mr.
Wilson sat with the newspaper folded precisely beside his plate, and across from him, Helen was inspecting her coffee like it had shown up late to an appointment.
“Morning, dear.” Her father’s hand landed briefly over hers as she sat.
Camille let it stay half a second — long enough not to seem deliberate — before easing her hand free.
There had been a time she’d waited by the front door for that same hand to come home before her bedtime.
That version of him had gone missing somewhere between his office and her mother’s grave, and Helen had simply moved into the space he’d left behind, the way water finds any gap in a wall.
“Finally,” Helen said, setting down her cup.
“I was beginning to think breakfast was an impossible feat.”
Lauren, halfway out of the room already, felt Camille’s hand close around her wrist.
“Stay.”
Lauren hesitated — glancing between Mr.
Wilson and Helen the way a person checks the sky before deciding whether to bring an umbrella.
She hated these breakfasts, the particular weight that settled into a room whenever the four of them shared a table.
But she also knew what it cost Camille to sit through them alone, and that math always won.
“Let her stay,” Mr.
Wilson said, not looking up from his paper, and Lauren sat.
They ate for a while in the kind of silence that has its own texture — cutlery against porcelain, Helen’s spoon circling her coffee twice before every sip, the newspaper’s occasional rustle.
Camille pushed egg around her plate, her mind still half in a marble room fourteen years gone, until she found her voice again.
“Any word on Mum’s case, Dad?”
Something crossed her father’s face too fast to name before he folded it neatly away, the way he folded everything these days.
“Parker’s promised to call the moment there’s anything new.
You’ll know as soon as I do.”
She nodded slowly, reaching for her fork — and that was when Helen set hers down.
The small, deliberate click of it against china landed louder than it had any right to.
“Fourteen years, Camille.” Helen dabbed at the corner of her mouth, unhurried.
“At some point you have to stop chasing ghosts and start living your life.”
The table went still.
Lauren’s spoon hovered, forgotten, halfway to her mouth.
In the doorway behind them, Aunt Ane froze with a second dish balanced in both hands, her knuckles whitening slightly around the edges.
Camille didn’t look up.
Her fingers found the handle of her fork and closed around it, slow, deliberate, the only place she let the tremor show.
“Your mother isn’t coming back,” Helen went on, entirely unbothered by the silence she’d made.
“This obsession with the past — it’s eating the life you actually have.”
“Helen.” A warning, low, in Mr Wilson’s voice.
She didn’t so much as glance at him.
Camille set her fork down without a sound.
Her chair scraped back against the marble, sharp in the quiet, and she was on her feet before she’d decided to be.
“Camille—” Lauren reached for her sleeve and caught only air.
“Camille.” Her father stood too, but she was already at the doorway, and she didn’t turn around for either of them.
“I hope,” she said, very quietly, to the wall in front of her rather than to Helen at all, “that you never learn what it feels like to lose the person you love most in the world.”
Then she was gone.
The front door met its frame hard enough to rattle the glass in the windows, and the dining room settled into the particular stillness that follows something breaking.
Helen folded her arms, chin lifting.
“That temper of hers—”
“Enough.” Her father’s voice stayed level, but something in his face had gone hard as stone.
“That’s enough, Helen.”
“I only told her the truth.”
“No.” He shook his head slowly, each word landing with the weight of a door closing.
“You told a girl who watched her mother murdered in front of her that she’s not allowed to still be grieving.
She was nine years old, Helen.
Nine.” He set his napkin beside his plate with a finality that ended the conversation whether she liked it or not.
“You don’t get to decide when someone’s permitted to stop hurting.”
Helen’s mouth opened, ready with something else — but he was already walking away, and the door of his office closed behind him before she could spend it on anyone.
Lauren stared down at her plate.
In the doorway, Aunt Ane quietly withdrew back into the kitchen, pretending, out of long practice, that she hadn’t heard a word of it.
Inside his office, Mr.
Wilson sat with the laptop open in front of him and hadn’t absorbed a single line of it in ten minutes.
His own reflection stared back at him faintly from the dark edge of the screen — older than he remembered feeling, tired in a way sleep had stopped fixing years ago.
His phone lit up against the desk.
Detective Parker.
He answered before the second ring finished.
“Talk to me.”
Silence.
Not ordinary silence — the kind that knotted his stomach before a single word had even been spoken.
Then Parker finally spoke, his voice lower than usual.
“…They contacted me.”
Mr.
Wilson frowned.
“What do you mean?”
“They know.”
His grip tightened around the phone.
“Know what?”
“That I’m getting closer to the case.”
The color drained slowly from Mr.
Wilson’s face.
His heartbeat stumbled.
“…Who?”
Another silence.
When Parker finally answered, he barely spoke above a whisper.
“The Patriarch.”
Everything inside Mr.
Wilson went still.
For a long second he couldn’t breathe.
His fingers curled tighter around the phone.
“No,” he said, voice barely audible.
“That’s impossible.”
“I’m sorry,” Parker said quietly.
“I don’t know how they found out about the reopened case.
His men came to my office this morning.
They shot two of my security officers — just to prove they could reach me.”
Mr.
Wilson shut his eyes.
“They threatened you?” His own voice cracked on the question.
A pause, and when Parker spoke again his breath shook audibly around the words.
“…And they threatened my family too.”
“What did they say?”
Another pause.
“They know everything about me, Mr.
Wilson.
Everything about my family.
My wife’s workplace.
Where my children go to school, their schedules.
Where I live.” His voice thinned further.
“And they mentioned Camille.”
Mr.
Wilson’s eyes snapped open.
“They said—” Parker swallowed audibly.
“If you continue pushing for an investigation into Mrs.
Wilson’s murder, your daughter is next.”
The office went painfully quiet.
Everything stopped.
Parker’s voice broke completely on what came next.
“I’m sorry, Mr.
Wilson.
I can’t do this.
I can’t lose my family.
I’ve spent months chasing this case, but I can’t keep looking over my shoulder every time my kids leave the house.
I won’t put my family on the wrong side of the Patriarch’s men.
I can’t risk them being next.”
Mr.
Wilson lowered himself slowly into his chair, looking, in the span of a few seconds, ten years older.
His eyes fixed blankly on the wall.
After a long silence, he finally spoke.
“…Then they’re watching us.”
“I believe so.”
Another long pause stretched between them before Mr.
Wilson exhaled — a slow, defeated sound.
“Drop it.”
Parker didn’t answer.
“I said,” Mr.
Wilson repeated, this time with heartbreaking finality, “drop the investigation.
Close the file.
Destroy every copy.
I don’t want another officer looking into my wife’s murder.” His voice cracked.
“If they believe we’re still searching, they’ll come for Camille.
I already lost my wife.” He squeezed his eyes shut.
“I’m not losing my daughter too.
I won’t survive that.”
Parker stayed silent for a long moment.
“I understand.”
The call ended.
For several moments, Mr.
Wilson didn’t move.
The office felt suffocating around him.
His gaze drifted slowly toward the framed family photograph resting on the corner of his desk — his wife smiling forever inside that picture, little Camille laughing between them, blissfully unaware of the future waiting for her.
A tear escaped before he could stop it.
“I’m sorry,” he whispered, voice breaking.
“I couldn’t save you.
But I’ll save her.” His eyes stayed fixed on the photograph.
“Even if she spends the rest of her life hating me for it.”