The Mercer dining room looked different in daylight — less like a stage set, more like a place actual people were supposed to live.
Victoria wore cream linen and ordered for both of us without asking what I wanted. Emily sat at the far end of the table, present but silent, a placeholder more than a person, exactly as she’d been at dinner three days earlier.
Richard wasn’t home — golf, Victoria explained, though she said it the way people mention weather, a fact offered to fill space rather than answer anything. Without him at the table, the house felt smaller somehow, as if the whole performance had been built around an audience of one husband who mostly wasn’t watching anyway.
“I’m so glad we’re doing this,” Victoria said, pouring iced tea I hadn’t asked for. “I want us to understand each other before the wedding.”
“So do I,” I said.
We talked about venues. About Daniel as a boy. About a charity gala Victoria chaired every spring. She was good at this — good enough that for twenty minutes I almost forgot why I’d come, until she excused herself to take a call, and Emily’s chair scraped back the second the door closed.
“Bathroom,” Emily said. “Come with me. Girls do that.”
We locked ourselves in the powder room off the hall. She turned on the faucet, full blast, before she spoke.
“You have the pills,” she whispered. “And the paper.”
“Maya — my colleague — confirmed the case number’s real. Filed six weeks ago. Before anything Daniel described to me had even started.”
Emily nodded like this matched something she already knew but had never had confirmed out loud. “It happened to Grace, too.”
“Who’s Grace?”
“My half-sister. Older. My dad’s daughter from before he married Mom.” Emily’s eyes went to the door, then back to me. “She had a trust from her mother’s side. When she turned twenty-five, things got strange. Doctors. Papers. She started saying she couldn’t remember conversations she knew she’d had.”
“What happened to her?”
“She left. One night, just — gone. Mom said she’d had a breakdown and moved to Oregon to ‘find herself.’ We haven’t spoken in six years. Every birthday card I send comes back unopened.”
The faucet ran on, filling the small room with white noise.
“Emily, I need her last name. Her married name, anything.”
