THE BLACKSTONE'S RECKONING

Elizabeth Blackstone hummed while she polished the same silver spoon for the third time. She did not remember why the tune felt familiar. She did not remember much of anything before five years ago, only fragments that came and went like weather, a smell of smoke that made her hands shake, a man's laugh she couldn't place, a lullaby with no name attached to it. The doctor had called it trauma-induced amnesia and told the Blackstone family, the ones who employed her, that it might never come back. She had stopped waiting for it to. "Elizabeth." Mrs. Patricia Blackstone's voice cut through the kitchen like a blade wrapped in silk. "That spoon was clean an hour ago." "Yes, ma'am." Elizabeth set it down and picked up another, and if her smile trembled at the edges, no one in that house was looking closely enough to notice. Wendy noticed. She always noticed, standing in the doorway with a tray of untouched breakfast dishes balanced on one hip, watching her mother apologize for a spoon that had never needed apologizing for. Something twisted low in her stomach, something that didn't have a name yet, either, just a low, simmering wrongness that had been living under her skin for as long as she could remember. Which, conveniently, was not very long at all. Wendy Blackstone was twenty-one years old, and she remembered exactly five years of her life with any clarity. Before that, there was a version of herself she'd been told about secondhand, a girl with a father and a house that wasn't this one, a girl who apparently used to laugh more. She didn't trust the secondhand version. She'd built herself out of the last five years instead, brick by brick, because at least those bricks were hers. "You're doing the face again," Sofia said, appearing at her elbow with the specific stealth of someone who had spent a decade sneaking snacks past three older brothers. "The one where you look like you're planning a murder." "I'm planning several." "Anyone I know?" "Everyone, you know." Wendy nodded toward the dining room, where Richard Blackstone's voice boomed through the walls about a merger, a number, a percentage, always a number, always a percentage, as if the whole world could be filed under profit and loss. "Starting with him." "Careful." Sofia took the tray out of her hands before Wendy could snap the handle in half from gripping it too hard, an actual concern given the state of the last one. "Man owns this house. Owns the company your mama used to work for before, apparently, according to legend, back when dinosaurs roamed the earth and you had a personality that wasn't feral." "I have a personality." "You have a resting glare and a to-do list. That's not a personality. That's a spreadsheet." Wendy almost laughed. Almost. The sound got caught somewhere behind her ribs the way it usually did, because laughing too freely in this house felt like leaving a door unlocked, and she had learned a long time ago, in the specific way you learn things without anyone teaching them to you, that doors in this house did not stay unlocked for long. "Wendy." Patricia's voice again, sharper now. "Your mother needs help with the linens. And do try not to loiter. It's unbecoming." "Yes, ma'am." The words came out smooth, practised, five years of practice, and underneath them something else entirely, something with teeth. She found her mother in the hallway outside the east wing, arms full of folded sheets, humming that same unplaceable tune. "Mama." Wendy took half the stack without being asked. "You don't have to keep doing that, you know. Humming things you can't remember the words to." Elizabeth blinked the way she always did when someone pointed at the fog directly instead of walking politely around it. "Was I humming?" "You're always humming. Same one." Wendy studied her mother's face, the lines that had come too early, the exhaustion that lived permanently under her eyes now. Sixty years old in every way that mattered except the calendar, worn down by other people's houses, other people's linens, other people's children who were not, in fact, better than Wendy, no matter how many times Patricia implied it with a look. "Where'd you learn it?" "I don't know, sweetheart." The answer came the way it always did, soft and a little sad and utterly, infuriatingly final. "I don't remember." Something hot climbed up the back of Wendy's throat. Five years of I don't remember. Five years of watching her mother scrub floors she used to own, if the rumors whispered by the older staff were even half true, five years of watching Richard Blackstone sign his name to buildings that apparently should have belonged to somebody else, five years of a wrongness Wendy could feel in her teeth but couldn't put a single fact underneath. She was going to change that. She'd been changing it, quietly, in rooms this family didn't know existed, in a world with its own numbers and its own percentages, one that made Richard Blackstone's merger money look like pocket change. Twenty per cent of the way there. Maybe less. But growing. "Wendy." Elizabeth's hand found her wrist, sudden, tight. Her eyes had gone somewhere else, somewhere far away and frightened. "Do you smell that?" "Smell what, Mama?" "Smoke." The word came out thin, cracked down the middle. "Somebody's burning something." Wendy's stomach dropped. There was no smoke. No fire, no kitchen accident, nothing but clean hallway air, and the distant sound of Richard's voice still going on about numbers. But her mother's face had gone the colour of old paper, and her hands, God, her hands were shaking so hard the linens nearly slipped. "There's no fire, Mama. Look at me." Wendy set the sheets down and took both her mother's hands, the way she'd done a hundred times before when this happened, this specific unraveling that came from nowhere and meant nothing anyone could explain. "You're okay. We're okay." Elizabeth's breathing slowed, eventually, the way it always did. The colour came back. The fear folded itself away behind her eyes like it had never happened at all, and she picked the linens back up like a woman embarrassed by her own weather. But Wendy stood there a moment longer, in the hallway, in the too-quiet air, and felt the same question she'd been swallowing for five years climb back up her throat. Why smoke. Why always, only, exactly smoke. She didn't have an answer. She had a feeling instead, cold and old and patient, that the answer was going to cost her something before this was over. That evening, a car she didn't recognize pulled through the front gate, sleek and black and entirely too confident for a Tuesday. Sofia appeared at the window beside her like she'd been shot out of a cannon. "Okay, who is that," Sofia breathed, "and can I marry him from here?" Wendy leaned closer to the glass despite herself. A man stepped out of the car, tall, dark-suited, moving like someone who had never once in his life questioned whether a room would let him in. He looked up. For one unbearable second, across the whole width of the front lawn, his eyes found the window. Found her. "Wendy." Sofia's voice had dropped an octave, gone dead serious. "Why is he looking at you like he already knows you?" Wendy didn't answer. She couldn't. Because some small, buried, five-years-silent part of her was asking the exact same thing.