SAY MY NAME

CHAPTER THREE

The Smith house smelled like garlic and butter, which meant her mother was making the good pasta, which meant it had been a long week for everyone and Linda Smith had decided the only fix was carbs and a full table.

Val let herself in the back door the way she had her whole life, dropped her bag by the stairs, and found her whole family exactly where she expected them — her mother at the stove, her father at the kitchen table with the accounting books open in front of him and his reading glasses pushed up into his gray hair, her brother Ethan raiding the fridge like he hadn't just eaten an hour ago, and Sophie sprawled sideways in a chair with her laptop, half doing homework and half not.

"There she is," Linda said, not turning from the stove. "The miracle worker. Evelyn Wood called your father today, did you know that? Called the house phone. Nobody calls the house phone anymore."

"She what?" Val stopped in the doorway.

"Wanted to say how impressed she was. Said something about a singer falling through and you saving the whole night." Linda finally turned around, wooden spoon in hand, beaming in the specific way she'd been beaming at Val since she was six years old and brought home a gold star. "I didn't even know what she was talking about, and I still cried a little."

"It wasn't that big a deal."

"It was a twelve-million-dollar gala," Ethan said around a mouthful of leftover garlic bread, dropping into the chair across from their father. "Val. That is a big deal."

"Language like that around your food," Linda said automatically, though nobody had sworn, which was just a reflex left over from when Ethan was seventeen and mouthier.

Val sat down at the table, and for a second — just a second — she let herself feel good about it. Twelve million dollars. A gala that would have gone sideways in front of half the city's press if she hadn't kept her head. It was, if she was honest, the best night her family's company had had in years, and there was something warm and unfamiliar sitting in her chest that she was pretty sure was pride.

"They want us back for spring," she said. "Full budget. Evelyn told me herself, right before I left."

Sophie looked up from her laptop. "Wait, spring, like the actual spring gala? The one that's always in the society pages?"

"That one."

"Val, that's — that's huge. That's the kind of thing that puts us on the map for real." Sophie's whole face had lit up, the way it did when she got excited about something, which was often and always genuine. "Dad, did you hear that?"

Val looked toward her father, expecting the same warmth on his face that was on everyone else's.

Instead, Robert Smith had gone very still.

He wasn't looking at any of them. He was looking down at the account book open in front of him, at nothing in particular, his jaw tight in a way Val recognized from exactly one other context — the anniversary of the year the company nearly folded, the one week a year her father got quiet and short-tempered and wouldn't explain why, no matter how many times she or Ethan had asked growing up.

"Dad?"

"That's good," Robert said, too evenly, in a voice that didn't match the words at all. "That's — that's very good, Valerie."

"You don't look like it's good."

"I'm tired. That's all." He closed the account book with more force than the moment required, took his glasses off, and rubbed his eyes with the heel of his hand. "Whose name was on the contract?"

It was such a strange question that the whole table went quiet. Ethan stopped chewing. Linda's spoon paused mid-stir.

"The Wood Group Foundation," Val said slowly. "Same as the gala itself. Why?"

"Just curious." Robert stood up, gathered the account book against his chest like it was something worth protecting, and offered a smile that didn't reach his eyes at all. "I'm proud of you, sweetheart. I mean that. I'm going to go lie down before dinner, I've got a headache."

He left the kitchen without waiting for anyone to answer.

The silence he left behind lasted a long moment.

"That was weird," Sophie said finally, looking at Val like she might have an explanation. She didn't.

"He's just stressed about money," Ethan said, though he didn't sound entirely convinced of it either. "You know how he gets this time of year. Taxes, the lease renewal on the office—"

"He asked whose name was on the contract," Val said. "That's not a stress-about-money question, Ethan. That's a specific question."

Linda had gone quiet at the stove, stirring the same pot of sauce longer than it needed, and Val watched her mother's shoulders in the particular way you watch someone who knows more than they're saying and has decided, for reasons of their own, not to say it.

"Mom."

"It's nothing, honey." Linda didn't turn around. "Your father's had a hard relationship with the word 'Wood' for a long time. Long before you were born, practically. It's old history. It doesn't mean anything about your contract."

"What old history?"

"Ask your father," Linda said, echoing, without knowing it, almost the exact words Margaret Wood had said to her own grandson four hours earlier and forty blocks away. "It's not my story to tell."

Val looked at her mother's back, at the tight set of her shoulders, and felt something cold slide under the good, warm pride she'd walked in the door with twenty minutes ago.

"Mom, I signed the contract already. It's done. If there's something I need to know before we're stuck working with these people for the next six months—"

"There's nothing you need to know," Linda said, a little too fast, a little too final, in the tone she'd used Val's whole childhood to end a conversation without actually answering the question inside it. "It's old, and it's over, and it has nothing to do with you or with whether you should be proud of what you did last night. Because you should be. You should be very proud."

She turned around then, and there were tears standing in her eyes that had nothing to do with the onions on the cutting board, and Val understood, with a sudden, sinking certainty, that whatever this was, it was bigger than a headache and older than she was.

Her phone buzzed on the table.

An email. Wood Group Foundation letterhead, subject line 'Spring Gala — Contract Confirmation & Welcome Package', sent eleven minutes ago.

Val opened it out of habit more than curiosity, and found, near the bottom of the standard welcome letter, a single handwritten line that had clearly been added after the fact, in ink dark enough to have been signed personally rather than typed by an assistant.

'Looking forward to working with the Smith family again. — L.W.'

Val read it three times.

'Again.'

She looked up, ready to ask her mother what that word could possibly mean, and found the kitchen empty. Linda had slipped out after her father, the sauce left simmering on its own, and somewhere upstairs, Val could hear the low, careful murmur of her parents' voices behind a closed door — a conversation, she understood without needing to hear the words, that was entirely about her.