Abi In Wonderland

Half A Step

The day after some Rain passed in a strange, careful quiet—Zev softer than usual, like he was still making up for the door he'd closed too gently that night, Abi quieter too, still turning over the things she'd said and hadn't fully forgiven herself for. They hadn't spoken about the fight directly again, but something in the house had eased, just slightly, enough that Abi let herself stop bracing for a second blow-up that never came.

By Thursday, it almost felt normal again.

The knock came a little past eleven that night, three sharp raps that didn't sound like anyone who belonged there.

Abi heard it from the top of the stairs, where she'd been sitting with a mug of tea gone lukewarm in her hands, halfway through convincing herself to go find Zev and actually apologize for the rain-soaked night that still sat unresolved between them. He'd only been home an hour, later than usual even for him. The knock changed her mind about going down. Something about the rhythm of it—too even, too deliberate—made her stay exactly where she was, tucked just out of sight behind the banister.

Mrs. Margarita answered. Abi couldn't hear the words, only the shape of them—clipped, formal, the kind of voice used by people who didn't expect to be kept waiting at this hour and didn't care that they were. A moment later, Zev's study door opened down the hall, and his footsteps crossed the marble at a pace she didn't recognize. Controlled. Careful. Like a man deciding how much of himself to show before he'd even seen who was asking.

There were three of them. Dark coats, the kind that cost more than they looked like they should, and the particular stillness of people used to being obeyed. One of them—older, silver at the temples, unbothered by the late hour—spoke first, voice low enough that Abi had to lean forward to catch fragments of it.

"...didn't think you'd make us come to you, Zevier."

"You didn't need to." Zev's voice was flat, controlled in a way that made the hair on Abi's arms rise. "We could've done this anywhere else."

"Could have. Didn't." The silver-haired man tilted his head, something almost amused flickering across his face. "Funny thing, though. I thought you'd never walk in your old man's steps. You hate him so damn much."

The silence that followed had weight to it, thick enough that Abi felt it from the stairs.

"Careful," Zev said, voice gone even flatter, "or I'll start asking why a man your age is still running errands instead of retiring somewhere quiet. Must be embarrassing."

The insult landed somewhere Abi couldn't see, but she saw the flicker of it anyway—the silver-haired man's jaw tightening, the younger two exchanging a glance.

It was in that pause, that half-second of tension stretching too long, that Abi shifted her weight against the banister—and her elbow caught the edge of a side table she hadn't accounted for. It wasn't loud. It didn't need to be. Four heads turned at once, and in her scramble to catch her balance, she stumbled a full step into view, one hand slapping against the railing to keep from pitching forward down the stairs entirely.

For a moment nobody moved.

Zev's eyes found her first, and what crossed his face wasn't anger, exactly—it was worse than anger. A kind of disbelief, sharp and disgusted, the look of someone watching another person walk directly into traffic.

*You f*****g i***t,* his expression said, plain as if he'd spoken it aloud.

That was when the silver-haired man's gaze moved too, slow and deliberate, past Zev's shoulder—up the staircase. He found her, and unlike Zev's flash of fury, his attention lingered. His eyes held there, tracing over her the way someone studies a painting they're trying to place—too long, too thorough, cataloguing something. Abi's pulse climbed with every second his attention stayed fixed on her, frozen on the stairs with nowhere to actually hide.

"Who's that?" he asked, finally, not quietly enough.

"No one that concerns you," Zev said, and the words came out fast, sharper than anything she'd heard from him before—not loud, but final, a door slamming shut in the shape of a sentence. His eyes flicked back to her for one more instant, cold, unreadable, before he added, quieter, "Go back to your room, Abi."

She went. She didn't have it in her to argue, not with that look still burned behind her eyes, her face hot with the particular shame of having been seen when she wasn't supposed to be. She didn't look back to see if he watched her go.

The man's eyes lingered on the empty stairwell a beat longer before sliding back to Zev, something calculating behind them. Then, to her relief—heard through her half-closed door—he let it go. A small shrug, almost lazy. "Fine. We're not here for domestic curiosities."

"Then let's go," Zev said, and a minute later the front door closed behind all four of them, and the house exhaled into a silence so complete Abi could hear her own pulse in her ears.

---

He didn't come back that night.

Abi lay awake long past midnight, then past one, then past two, listening for footsteps that never came. The house held its breath around her, unfamiliar in the absence of him, the silence different from the silence of their fight—less charged, more hollow, like something had been removed from the air itself rather than just withheld.

She barely thought about the silver-haired man at all, strangely—not his eyes lingering too long, not the strange comment about Zev's father that had made the air go tight. What kept circling instead, relentless, was that half-second on the stairs. The stumble, the sound, four faces turning toward her all at once, and worst of all, Zev's face before he'd caught himself—that flash of something close to disgust, close to fear, close to fury she didn't have a name for.

*Was that wrong?* she thought. *Was tripping over my own feet actually wrong, or was it just being seen at all?*

It shouldn't have been. She knew that, somewhere logical and separate from the part of her replaying his face over and over. But logic didn't erase the way his expression had looked at her—like she'd broken something without knowing the rule existed, like existing on that staircase at that hour was its own kind of transgression.

Exhaustion won somewhere past three, dragging her under before she found an answer.

---

Morning came grey and quiet, and Zev's side of the bed was still empty.

Abi lay there a long while before she made herself get up, turning the night over and over until it had worn smooth in her mind, softened into something she could almost make sense of. He'd been embarrassed. Startled. Protective, maybe, in the worst possible way—the kind of protective that came out looking like anger because he didn't have better words for fear.

She wanted to fix it. Whatever *it* even was.

She spent the morning rehearsing what she might say, discarding one version after another—too much, too little, too much like an apology for something she wasn't sure was her fault. Maybe she'd start with tea, the way he liked it, waiting on his desk when he finally walked back through the door. Maybe she'd just say his name the way he'd said hers last night, quiet, and let him decide what happened next.

She didn't know what time he'd come home, or if he would at all before evening. But she found herself listening for the sound of the front door anyway, all morning, the same way she used to listen for it before she'd learned to stop hoping quite so hard.

*I'll make it right,* she told herself, though she still wasn't entirely sure what *right* looked like anymore, only that the quiet of an empty house felt worse now than it ever had before she'd had something to lose in it.