HOLD ME CLOSER

Chapter 2: The Heir Apparent

Breakfast at the Sriwattana house was served at seven o’clock sharp, on white porcelain, in a dining room large enough to seat twenty and used, most mornings, by four. The chandelier above the table had been imported from Italy the year Narin turned ten, a fact he knew only because his father had mentioned its price at every dinner party for a full year afterward, as if the light it gave off were somehow superior for having cost so much.

“Good morning, Por,” he said, taking his seat across from his father.

His father did not look up from the folded newspaper beside his plate. “You are late.”

“It is six fifty-nine.”

“You should be early. Early means prepared.”

Sompong Sriwattana was a broad man going silver at the temples, and even in his own home, even eating soft boiled eggs off his own table, he carried himself like a man permanently in a boardroom, spine straight, eyes already three tasks ahead of the present moment, as though breakfast itself were merely an item on a schedule he had already reviewed and approved.

Narin’s mother, Wimon, poured tea for everyone without being asked, the way she had done for twenty-six years of marriage, her bracelets making the smallest sound as she moved, a soft gold chime that Narin had grown up associating entirely with the idea of being cared for without ever being asked what he needed.

His younger sister, Nira, slid into her seat a few minutes after Narin, hair still damp, and got only a raised eyebrow for it, because Sompong’s disappointment, Narin had noticed long ago, was rationed differently depending on which child received it. Nira had always been permitted a wider margin, though whether that was mercy or simple indifference, Narin had never quite decided. He suspected, some mornings, that it was neither, that his father simply expected less of a daughter he had never once imagined running the company, and so had less to be disappointed by.

“The building topped out on schedule,” Sompong said, finally setting the newspaper aside. “Which means we move into final phase within the month. I want you present for every walkthrough, Narin. Every vendor meeting. You need to understand how a project like this comes together if you are going to run this company.”

“Of course, Por.”

“And the Chatchawan dinner is Saturday. Their daughter will be there.”

“Wear the navy suit. Not the grey one, it photographs poorly.”

Narin kept his eyes on his tea. “I will be there.”

“Good.” Sompong stood, buttoning his jacket in one practiced motion.

“I have the Ratanakorn call in ten minutes. Wimon, remind Nira that the Anantasak family is coming for dinner next week. I want the house presentable.”

“Of course, dear.”

He left without saying goodbye to either of his children, as the front door closed. The silence he left behind had a texture to it, thick and familiar, like a room that had been smoked in for years, a residue you stopped noticing until you had been away from it long enough to smell it fresh again on your return. Narin had noticed, over the years, that the house seemed to exhale slightly whenever his father left it, the staff moving a little looser through the halls, his mother’s shoulders dropping by some small unmeasurable degree, as if the whole household ran, quietly, on the physics of his absence as much as his presence.

“The Anantasak family,” Nira repeated once the front door had shut, voice flat. “Is that the one with the son?”

“That is the one,” their mother said gently, not quite meeting her eyes either, busying herself instead with refilling a teacup that had not yet gone empty, a habit Narin recognized as his mother’s version of looking away.

Nira’s jaw tightened, just slightly, the way it always did now whenever the topic came up. She was twenty-two, three years younger than Narin, and had inherited their mother’s softness and their father’s stubbornness in a combination that made her either delightful or exhausting depending on the day. She said nothing else about it, just reached for the fruit plate and changed the subject to something about her university friends, a group project, an upcoming exam, and Narin let her, because he understood better than anyone the particular relief of being allowed to talk about something else, if only for the length of a breakfast.

Later, once their mother had drifted off to oversee the household staff and the dining room had emptied out to just the two of them, Nira set down her fork and looked at Narin properly for the first time that morning.

“Do you think he will actually go through with it,” she asked, quiet now, no performance left in her voice. “The Anantasak thing.”

Narin considered lying to make it easier. He decided against it. “I think he has already decided. I think the dinner next week is a formality, and the real conversation already happened between him and their father.”

“I have not even met him properly. One dinner, four years ago, when I was eighteen. I do not remember anything about him except that he seemed bored.”

“Maybe he was bored because he also did not want to be there.”

“That is supposed to make me feel better?”

“No,” Narin admitted. “I just think... misery shared is slightly lighter than misery alone.”

She managed a small, humorless laugh at that, and reached over to squeeze his hand once before excusing herself, leaving Narin alone at the enormous table with the last of his tea going cold, the chandelier throwing small fractured points of light across the white tablecloth that he had, over the years, learned entirely to ignore.

Their mother found Narin in the hallway a short while later, a clipboard of household menus tucked under one arm, the particular brisk energy she carried whenever there was a dinner to plan, a house to arrange, an image to maintain.

“The Anantasak dinner,” she said, falling into step beside him. “I want the good china out, and tell the kitchen no shellfish; their mother has an allergy I only just remembered.”

“I will let them know.”

She paused at the base of the stairs, studying him with the particular attentiveness she reserved for moments when she suspected something beneath the surface of her children’s lives that she could not quite name. “You seem tired.”

“I am fine, Mae.”

“You are always fine.” She said it without accusation, more a quiet observation of a pattern she had watched play out for years.

“Your father asks a great deal of you. More than he ever had to give, I think, when it was his turn.”

Narin considered that, unsure what to do with the small unexpected honesty of it. His mother rarely spoke about his father directly, had spent nearly three decades smoothing over the edges of his demands so thoroughly that Narin sometimes forgot she noticed them at all, had come to think of her, unfairly perhaps, as a kind of permanent weather in the house rather than a woman with her own private accounting of what marriage to Sompong Sriwattana had actually cost her.

“Does it get easier?” he asked, before he could think better of it. “Carrying what he asks?”

Something shifted in her face, brief and careful. “You learn which parts to carry and which parts to set down quietly where he will not notice. That is the whole art of this family, luk. Looking whole from the outside.” She reached up and straightened his collar, a small motherly gesture that had nothing to do with the collar actually needing straightening. “I only wish, sometimes, that you did not have to learn it so young.”

She did not wait for a response, moving on toward the kitchen with her clipboard and her list of allergies and her endless quiet work of keeping the family’s surface smooth, and Narin stood a moment at the bottom of the stairs, turning her words over, before continuing up toward the small locked room on the third floor.

He went instead to the smallest, least used room on the third floor of the house, a former guest room that his mother had quietly let him convert years ago into something else entirely. Inside sat an upright piano, slightly out of tune, and three canvases stacked face to the wall, one half finished, still smelling faintly of turpentine from a session weeks ago that he had not found the courage or the time to return to since. Narin sat at the piano bench for a long moment without playing anything, hands resting on closed keys, just breathing in the particular quiet of a room his father had never once set foot in.

He thought, as he often did in this room, of the first time he had understood that this quiet was something he had to protect, back when he was sixteen and his father had walked in unannounced to find him at an easel instead of at his desk with his university preparation books open. Sompong had not shouted, that was the strange part, the part that had stayed with Narin longer than shouting ever could have. He had simply looked at the canvas, looked at his son, and said, in a voice utterly without inflection, that art was a hobby for people who could afford to fail at something, and that Narin could not.

Four sentences. Narin had counted them at the time, obsessively, the way you count the steps to a place you never want to visit again but know you will. He had never fully stopped hearing them since, had carried them the way some people carry an old injury, a joint that aches only in certain weather, except that his weather was any room with a canvas in it, any hour spent with his hands doing something his father had decided did not count.

He opened the lid and played something slow, something he had been working out from memory for weeks, imperfect and unpolished and entirely his own, the one thing in his life that belonged to no one’s expectations but his own. The melody wandered, uncertain in places, confident in others, rising and falling with no particular destination in mind, which was, Narin had come to think, exactly the point of it. For twenty minutes the house above and around him ceased to exist entirely, the walkthroughs and the vendor meetings and the navy suit and the Chatchawan daughter all fading into something distant and manageable, small enough to fit back into its proper drawer once the twenty minutes ended.

Then he closed the lid gently, turned the canvases further to the wall, and locked the door behind him on his way out, the way he always did, the key small and cool in his palm before he slid it back into the lining of his jacket pocket where it lived, unremarked upon, every day of his life.

He straightened his tie in the hallway mirror, checked that no trace of turpentine lingered on his hands, rubbing his thumb once across his knuckles just to be certain, and went to find his driver, already rehearsing in his head the version of himself he would need to be for the rest of the day: composed, capable, utterly unremarkable in his wants, the son his father had built a company large enough to hand down to, and nothing more complicated than that.