Chapter 3
For the first time in the conversation, her smile faltered. Not because she had made a mistake, not yet, but because I had looked up at her in a way she had not seen from me before, without the management of expression I had been using since she arrived. I let her see what was underneath the management.
"What did you say?" I said.
"I said sign."
"No," I said, and my voice was shaking but it was clear, and the camera was hearing it clearly. "You said I wouldn't be needed anymore."
The man by the hallway shifted. Victoria's eyes went sharp with the specific sharpness of a woman recalculating.
"Careful, Emily," she said.
The iron hissed. Steam curled into the kitchen air, warm and metallic.
Then a car door slammed outside.
The sound was unmistakable in the specific way that sounds are unmistakable when they arrive at the exact moment where your body has been tensed toward something without knowing what it was waiting for. Victoria turned toward the back door. The two men turned. The iron lowered a fraction, not intentionally, just the automatic response of bodies redirecting their attention.
Then boots on the porch.
Heavy. Fast. The particular weight and pace of someone who has been moving toward something for a long time and has just arrived at the last distance.
My son kicked under my ribs.
May you like
Victoria turned toward the back door with an expression that had nothing left of the controlled smile in it, just the underneath of it, the actual face, the face that had been operating the smile as a tool.
The door opened hard enough to shake the cabinet handles.
