SCARLETT
The house was ours for the first time.
Not stolen hours or locked study doors or two minutes in a kitchen counting footsteps from upstairs. Not Monaco with its borrowed privacy and borrowed time. The house itself, all of it, the long hallways and cold beautiful rooms and the garden and the fountain and the enormous kitchen where everything had started, all of it ours without performance or management or anyone to hide from.
It felt strange.
I came downstairs the first morning after mom left and found Simon already in the kitchen, coffee made, reading glasses on, newspaper open. Completely ordinary. Except there was no performance layered over it, no careful distance maintained for an audience that wasn't there.
He looked up when I came in.
"Morning," he said.
"Morning," I
