YARA Beau catches my eye across the hallway before the guests arrive, just for a second, and there it is again, that same flicker of disappointment he wore walking out of the boardroom ten days ago.
He doesn’t say anything.
He doesn’t have to.
I still haven’t found a way to tell him what I found in the file history without setting the whole house on fire, and every time he looks at me like that, the silence gets a little heavier.
Tonight of all nights, Nola’s cousins are coming through Savannah, the twice-yearly visit that demands a dinner grand enough to prove the St.
Claires are still exactly who everyone remembers them to be.
I don’t want to sit through it.
I go anyway, because not going would be its own kind of confession, and I’ve had enough people in this family deciding what my absence means without my permission.
I’m coming down the hall to the second-floor bathroom to fix my hair before the guests arrive when I find the door standing open and Yasmin already inside, alone, unaware anyone’s watching.
She’s not fixing her lipstick.
She’s not checking her dress.
She’s standing perfectly still in front of the mirror, studying her own reflection the way you’d study an opponent, head tilted slightly, eyes narrowed, something calculating and cold moving behind her face that has nothing to do with vanity at all.
It’s the same face I saw through the crack in her bedroom door the night of the phone call.
Flat.
Assessing.
A woman running numbers, not admiring a dress.
I don’t move.
I don’t make a sound.
But some instinct in her must catch it anyway, because her eyes flick to the mirror and find mine reflected there, and for one half second the coldness holds, unmoving, unhidden.
Then it’s gone.
The mask slides back into place so fast and so completely that I could almost believe I imagined the whole thing, and she turns from the mirror smiling, warm, delighted to see me.
Something sweet rolls off her as she turns, thick and sudden, like a window thrown open onto a bakery, and it’s so far removed from the coldness I just saw that my stomach turns over in confusion before I can even name what changed.
“There you are!
I was just fixing my face.” She reaches for my hand, squeezes it.
“You look lovely tonight.
Truly.” I say something back, I don’t even know what, and I go fix my hair in my own room instead.
Dinner is exactly what I expected.
Nola’s cousin Judith holds court at one end of the table with her husband Grady nodding along beside her, and the conversation moves the way it always does at these dinners, careful, performed, everyone saying the version of things that sounds best out loud.
It’s over dessert that Yasmin brings up the horses.
“Do you remember, Yara, when we were girls, and you locked me in the tack room?” She says it lightly, laughing, already turning to Judith to bring her into the story.
“We couldn’t have been more than eight.
I’d taken her favorite ribbon, I think, some silly thing, and she was so angry she shut the door and wouldn’t let me out for almost an hour.
I screamed myself hoarse.” I stare at her.
“That never happened.” “Oh, Yara.” She laughs again, soft, indulgent, the laugh of someone humoring a child.
“You don’t remember?
You always got so jealous when anyone paid attention to me instead of you.
Mama used to worry so much about it.” She turns back to Judith, her voice dropping into something gentler, more confiding.
“It’s not her fault.
I think it’s just always been hard for her, being the one people worry about instead of the one people adore.” The air around the table changes.
I feel it happen the way I felt the tea party change around Caroline, gradual and total, and this time I recognize it, the same thick sweetness I caught rolling off Yasmin in the bathroom not an hour ago, except now it isn’t aimed at just me.
It’s filling the whole room, wrapping itself around every person at that table except me.
Judith’s face softens with sympathy.
Grady nods slowly, like something’s finally been explained to him.
Even Rhett, down at the far end, gets a careful, considering look on his face, like he’s turning old memories over and finding them fit differently now.
“I never locked you in the tack room,” I say again, louder this time, and I can hear how it sounds, defensive, sharp, exactly like a girl protesting too much.
“Of course you don’t remember it that way.” Yasmin reaches over and pats my hand, gentle, patient, performing comfort so convincingly that even I feel the pull of it for one disorienting second.
“I’m not angry, sweetheart.
I forgave you years ago.” Nobody at that table looks at me like I’m telling the truth.
I watch it happen in real time, watch Judith’s eyes soften with pity instead of doubt, watch Grady’s mouth press into the particular line men make when they’ve decided a woman is being dramatic, watch even Beau’s jaw tighten, not in my defense, but in the tired, weary way of a man bracing for a scene he’s watched play out a hundred times before.
I say nothing else for the rest of dinner.
I sit with my hands in my lap and eat nothing, the china cold under my fingertips, the conversation moving around me like I’m already gone.
Judith and Grady take their leave with warm goodbyes, warmer for Yasmin than for me, and the house empties back into its usual quiet.
I find Yasmin in the hallway outside the parlor, straightening a picture frame that was never crooked.
“That story wasn’t true,” I say.
“You know it wasn’t true.” She turns to look at me, and for one full second, her face goes completely blank.
Not sad.
Not concerned.
Not even annoyed.
Empty, the way a room is empty after everyone’s left it, and behind that emptiness something moving, quick and cold, calculating, the same look I caught in the bathroom mirror before dinner even started.
Then the mask slides back into place, soft and immediate, like a door easing shut.
“I’m just worried about you, Yara.” Her voice is warm again, gentle, sisterly, every trace of that blankness gone like it was never there at all.
“We all are.” The air between us tastes wrong, sweet and burnt at once, sugar gone to ash on the back of my tongue, and I don’t have a word for what I’m sensing, not yet.
But my body knows exactly what it just witnessed, even if the rest of me is still catching up.
Give me more motivation!