YARA I stand in that hallway a long time after the silence swallows the rest of Beau’s sentence.
Long enough that my water glass goes warm in my hand, long enough to hear him hang up, hear his footsteps cross the study floor, hear the desk chair creak as he sits back down alone with whatever he just said out loud to my mother.
I don’t go to him.
I don’t know what I’d even say.
I heard you.
Who’s dead.
What did our family do.
The questions feel too big for a hallway at midnight, too big for a girl still holding a glass of water like it might steady her.
I go back to bed instead.
I don’t sleep.
The name sits behind my eyes the whole night, Callahan, Callahan, turning over and over like a stone in a current, and somewhere under it, quieter, the shape of Mrs.
Ashford’s voice.
Yara could be a different family entirely.
By the next evening I’ve decided I’m done waiting for anyone in this house to hand me the truth.
If nobody’s going to tell me anything, I’ll have to start listening for it myself.
That’s how I end up outside Yasmin’s door.
I wasn’t looking for her.
I was on my way down the back stairs, the ones that cut behind the linen closet and come out near her room before they reach the kitchen, and I hear her voice through the door before I mean to.
It stops me cold on the third step.
It isn’t her voice.
Not the one I know.
The one that floats through breakfast honeyed and soft, the one that makes grown women melt at luncheons.
This voice is low, flat, and hard in a way I’ve never heard out of my sister’s mouth in nineteen years of living beside her.
“I don’t care what he thinks he knows,” she’s saying, each word clipped short.
“You handle it.
That’s what I’m paying you for.” A pause.
I press myself against the wall, my heart loud in my own ears.
“No.
Not yet.
Let him grieve a little longer.
It makes him easier to manage.” Something that might be a laugh, quiet and cold, nothing like her real laugh, the bright ringing one she uses in rooms full of people.
“And get that Texas transfer moved before anyone at the bank thinks to ask whose name is really on it.
I don’t care what it costs.
I care that my name isn’t anywhere near it.” I don’t move.
I barely breathe.
Whoever’s on the other end of that call, I can’t hear them at all, just the rhythm of Yasmin’s voice rising and falling, giving orders like a woman twice her age, twice as certain of herself as the golden girl who came down the stairs late and sleepy just days ago, yawning behind her wrist like the whole world existed to be charmed by her.
Then, silence.
I realize a half second too late that the silence isn’t good.
It means she’s stopped talking.
It means she’s listening too.
The door opens before I can decide whether to run.
Yasmin stands in the frame, phone still in her hand, and for one full second, maybe less, I see her face exactly as it was on the call.
Flat.
Sharp.
Calculating, in a way that has nothing soft in it at all.
Then it’s gone, wiped clean like water off glass, and the sister I’ve known my whole life is standing there instead, wide-eyed, faintly surprised, already reaching for concern the way another person reaches for a light switch.
“Yara!
You scared me half to death,” she says, laughing, easy, bright, exactly the laugh I didn’t just hear through the door.
“What are you doing skulking around back here?” “I wasn’t skulking.
I was going down to the kitchen.” “Well, you looked like you were skulking.” She tucks the phone into the pocket of her robe, unhurried, like it’s nothing.
“Who were you eavesdropping on, hm?
Should I be worried?” The question lands light as a joke, but her eyes don’t move off mine.
She says it lightly, teasing, flipping the whole thing back onto me before I’ve even decided what to say, and that’s the moment I understand, really understand, that my sister is better at this than I will ever be.
“I wasn’t eavesdropping,” I say, which is half true.
I wasn’t trying to.
I just couldn’t make myself stop listening once I’d started.
“Mm.” She studies me a beat too long, and something behind her eyes moves, quick, assessing, gone before I can name it.
Then she smiles, warm as ever, and steps back to let her door swing wider.
“Well.
Since you’re already here, come keep me company while I get ready for bed.
I never see you anymore.” It isn’t really an invitation.
It’s a redirection, the same way Nola redirected me toward the caterers at the luncheon, the same way this whole family moves me around a room without ever once asking if I want to go.
But I follow her in anyway, because some part of me, the part that’s been collecting strange, wrong little moments since the morning I found that bird on the trail, wants to see what else is in this room besides my sister’s cold, borrowed calm.
Yasmin’s bedroom is exactly what you’d expect.
Soft light, a vanity crowded with perfume bottles, a canopy bed dressed in white and gold like something out of a bridal magazine.
She sits at the vanity and starts pulling pins from her hair, chattering about nothing, the garden party, a dress she’s having altered.
I let her talk, half listening, my eyes moving slowly around the room the way they moved around Beau’s desk that evening I first saw the keyhole.
That’s when I see it.
A chair by the window with a shawl draped over the back, careless, the way you’d toss something down without thinking.
Except it isn’t a shawl.
I see that as I get closer.
It’s a scarf, long and dark, silk by the look of the way the light catches it, and it isn’t the kind of thing Yasmin wears.
Too plain.
Too masculine.
No lace, no color, nothing that matches the rest of this room dressed up like a wedding cake.
“Yasmin,” I say, careful, keeping my voice as light as hers, “whose scarf is this?” She doesn’t turn around from the mirror.
“Hm?
Oh, nobody’s.
Found it in the garden ages ago.
I keep meaning to give it to the staff to sort out.” I pick it up before I can stop myself.
The scent hits me before I’ve even brought the fabric close, low and dark, nothing like any cologne I’ve smelled on a man in this house.
My pulse jumps, quick and hard, the same lurch it gave when I leaned into Colt’s letter in that drawer, that same sense of something pressed into the fibers that has no business being there.
This isn’t attraction.
It isn’t even really scent, not the way I usually understand the word.
It’s an ache underneath my ribs, sudden and specific, like a chord struck somewhere inside me I didn’t know could ring.
I press the scarf briefly to my face without meaning to, some part of me reaching for it before my mind agrees to, and for one strange second the whole room tilts.
I catch myself against the back of the chair.
Yasmin still hasn’t turned around.
I turn the scarf over in my hands, steadying myself, and that’s when I see it.
Stitched into the corner, small and neat, the kind of monogram you’d find on something expensive, something a man might have had made for him once, a long time ago, by somebody who loved him.
Two letters, worked in dark thread.
C.C.
My whole body goes cold before my mind catches up, some instinct arriving half a second ahead of thought, the same way it did over the dead bird, the same way it did with the letter in Beau’s drawer.
He’s dead, Nola.
The Callahan boy is dead.
My father’s voice, low and shaking, right behind my ear like he’s standing in the room with me.
My hand tightens around the silk without my permission.
I can’t make myself let go of it.
I can’t make myself put it down.