The Last Monroe

TWELVE NAMES

Damian escorts her to the car. The night has turned cold. He talks about the board meeting coming up later in the week and mentions he'll send her a brief. She nods and asks him about the people he introduced her to at the gallery, the ones who'd mentioned her mother.

"Two of them are board members," he says. "They've worked closely with Victoria for years."

"They seemed to really know her."

"They did."

Michael is waiting. Damian walks her to the car, and she slides into the back seat, feeling the exhaustion that comes from being present in a room full of people for hours; Her social battery has run out. She's tired in a way that goes beyond fatigue. The kind of tire that comes from holding yourself together in public.

The drive home passes quietly. Michael doesn't ask how it went. He just drives, and Elara watches the city move past the window until the city gives way to her neighborhood.

Inside the house, she opens another bottle of wine. Doesn't bother with a glass for very long. The bath is hot enough that it borders on too hot, and she sits in it with the wine bottle beside the tub, drinking and not thinking about anything in particular.

The vulnerability arrives without announcement. Just the fact of being alone in the house, in hot water, with wine makes everything feel slightly less managed. The weight of Victoria on the walls. The weight of not understanding. The weight of people in a gallery talking about her mother like Victoria was someone worth knowing, worth remembering.

She falls asleep in the bath and wakes up when the water goes cold.

At 3 AM, the house doesn't feel like hers.

She's tried sleeping. Tried lying in her childhood bed. But the house feels different at 3 AM. Bigger. Emptier. Like it's holding its breath.

She gets up.

The study is on the second floor, a room she's been avoiding. Victoria's workspace. The room where her mother did, whatever it was that her mother actually did beyond making the house run smoothly and keeping her daughter alive.

The desk is dark wood. Expensive but not ostentatious. A chair that looks worn from use. The surface is clear except for a pen and a small lamp. Elara sits in the chair for the first time. It still has the shape of Victoria's body in it. The indentation in the seat. The way the back curves. She puts her hands on the desk and doesn't move for a while.

The drawer opens easily.

Inside are papers. Bills. And a book. Small. Cloth-bound. She pulls it out.

On the spine, there are twelve names. Written small. Written in Victoria's handwriting. Names she doesn't recognize. The letters after each name suggest something—a system, a code—but the meaning isn't obvious.

She stares at them.

M. Locke. E. Chen. R. Hartford. P. Avery. S. Rousseau. J. Brennan. L. Whitmore. D. Westfield. A. Voss. C. Vale. N. Reyes. V. Monroe.

Twelve names. Victoria included herself. Noah is on the list. She knows what N. Reyes means.

The others are strangers.

She opens the book but it's empty. The names are only on the spine. She traces her finger over them, trying to understand what system would produce this particular list of initials and surnames.

Her mother left clues. That much is clear. But Elara doesn't yet know how to read them.

She sits at Victoria's desk with the wine bottle beside her and looks at twelve names written in a code she can't yet break. She doesn't cry. She doesn't think in complete sentences. She just sits with the weight of it—the fact of her mother's secrets, the fact that she lived in a house with this woman and never once understood what Victoria actually knew or did or protected.

She pours more wine and says out loud: "I miss you, Victoria."

The sound of her own voice in the study is strange. It doesn't change anything.

She takes the book with her when she goes to her mother's room. Leave it on the nightstand. Takes the storybook from underneath the pillow—the same place Victoria kept it every night.

She gets into Victoria's bed. The sheets are clean. Michael must have changed them after Victoria died. But the pillows still smell like her mother. Like the cedar and lavender oil Victoria used on her hands.

She opens the storybook. The pages are soft for handling. The illustrations are as she remembers them—darker than she thought, more complicated than a children's book should be. The story itself is familiar and strange at the same time, like revisiting a place where you lived once but don't remember clearly.

She reads aloud. Her own voice in the quiet house. The words of the story—old words, told her when she was eight years old, were read by Victoria every night for two years until Elara asked for something else.

Victoria had kept it anyway.

Somewhere in the middle of the story, Elara falls asleep.

She wakes up briefly at dawn, realizes she's in her mother's bed, and stays there. The room is gray with early light. The storybook is open beside her. The book with twelve names is on the nightstand where she left it.

She closes her eyes. When she wakes again, it's nearly noon.