Chapter 1: Something in the walls
Jess · 6:14 pm · The house
She heard the train before she saw it and ran anyway, bag swinging off her shoulder, blazer half-on, the cold November air doing something unpleasant to the back of her neck where her hair had come loose from the tie. She made it. Just. The doors closed behind her with the specific indifference of Chicago transit and she stood in the aisle breathing harder than she would ever admit, silver bracelet cool against her wrist, the heel of her sneaker damp from a puddle she hadn't seen in time.
An hour later she was walking the last ten minutes home through Lincoln Park with her tote cutting into her shoulder and her phone already at eleven percent. The November light was doing that thing it did in this city — going copper and then going out, like someone turning a dial — and the trees along the street had given up their last leaves weeks ago. She liked it, actually. The stripped-back version of things.
The house was lit from inside when she turned the corner. It always was, this time of day — warm light through the tall windows, the kind that looked deliberately staged from the street but was just what happened when people actually lived somewhere. Jess had spent her whole life walking toward that lit-up greystone and it still did something to her chest every time. Something quiet and involuntary.
She took the front steps two at a time, pushed through the door, and immediately caught the edge of the rug.
Her bag went first. Then, in a kind of slow, horrible sequence she couldn't stop, everything inside it followed — lip balm skittering across marble, her phone landing screen-down with a sound that turned her stomach, her pencil case splitting open and scattering across the foyer floor. The book she'd been carrying loose slid in a clean arc all the way to the bottom of the staircase and stopped there, splayed open, like it was waiting to be read.
She stood in the middle of it all for a moment, blazer still half-on, bag strap still around one wrist.
"Perfect," she said to no one.
She picked up the phone first — screen intact, thank god — then crouched to gather everything else, shoving things back into the bag without ceremony. The pencils she left. She'd deal with them in a minute. She hooked the tote over her shoulder, retrieved the book from the stairs, and was already moving down the hallway toward the kitchen when she caught it.
Voices. Low. Her mother's study.
Not unusual, exactly. Diana took calls in there at all hours and Josie drifted in and out with the specific purposefulness of someone who knew where everything was. But it was the stopping that made Jess's feet slow. The way the conversation simply — ceased. Like a switch. Like the house had held its breath.
She stood in the hallway for exactly one second before she changed course.
The study door was open — just. She pushed it wider with two fingers and leaned her head in, and found exactly the tableau she would have described if she'd had to guess and didn't want to be right.
Diana was behind her desk, mid-sentence interrupted, with the particular smile she deployed when she was being patient. Perfectly composed, as always — hair neat, glasses straight, both hands visible on the desk in the way that should have looked natural and somehow didn't quite. The one framed photograph caught the lamplight behind her. Jess didn't look at it.
Josie was by the shelf on the far wall. Still. Not casually still — the deliberate stillness of someone who had decided not to move and was committed to that decision. She was holding a glass of scotch that she wasn't drinking.
Neither of them said anything.
Jess looked at her mother behind the desk. Then at Josie by the shelf. Then back.
"Hey," she said.
"You're late," Diana said. Pleasantly.
"Train."
"Mm."
She pushed off the doorframe and came into the room properly, dropping her tote onto the floor beside the armchair across the desk from Diana and folding herself into it — legs over one arm, back against the other, the posture she'd been using in this chair since she was twelve and hadn't adjusted since. She let her head tip back and looked at the ceiling for a moment.
The room smelled like old books and whatever Diana used on the desk. Lemon oil, maybe. Something that meant this room specifically, in the way that rooms collected their own particular scent over years until it became inseparable from the memory of being in them.
She dropped her chin and looked at them both.
Josie still hadn't moved. Still hadn't drunk the scotch.
"So," Jess said. She let it sit there, unhurried, the way she'd learned to let things sit. She had her mother's patience in her own way — a different kind, less controlled, more deliberate. "What did I walk into?"
Diana's smile didn't change.
"Nothing," she said. "You walked into your mother's office. Which is not unusual."
"You both stopped talking the second I came in."
"We were finishing a thought."
Jess looked at Josie. Josie's expression was the particular one she wore when she was staying out of something, which was its own kind of answer — Josie's face was not built for neutrality, and the effort of it always showed.
"You're holding that like a prop," Jess said, nodding at the glass.
Something shifted in Josie's face. Almost a smile.
"Long day," Josie said.
"Sure."
Jess turned back to Diana, who was watching her with the blue-eyed calm that had never once fooled her, not in eighteen years of trying. She knew that look. She'd been on the receiving end of it for every conversation Diana wanted to control the temperature of, and she had long since stopped being disarmed by it. What she was, instead, was curious — in the quiet, unhurried way that lived just behind her eyes and stayed there, patient, until it had something to work with.
She settled deeper into the armchair.
She wasn't going anywhere.
Josie moved first.
She set the scotch down on the shelf behind her — carefully, like she was placing something down that she intended to come back to — and crossed the room with the unhurried efficiency that was just how she moved, always, like she'd calculated the shortest line between two points and saw no reason to deviate from it. She stopped at the armchair. Looked down at Jess's legs draped over the side of it.
"Sit properly," she said, and lifted them off by the ankles without ceremony, depositing them on the floor.
"I was comfortable," Jess said to the ceiling.
"You were horizontal."
"Those aren't mutually exclusive."
Josie's hands came down onto her shoulders from behind — warm, heavy, settled there with the specific pressure that meant nothing was required in return. Not conversation. Not straightening up. Just the weight of it. Jess felt something in her neck unknot that she hadn't realised was knotted.
Her head dropped forward, then rolled back against the chair, slow and boneless, the way it did at the end of a day that had gone on longer than it should have. She closed her eyes for exactly one moment.
The study was quiet. The lamplight was warm. Outside, Chicago was doing whatever Chicago did at six in the evening in November — getting darker, getting colder, minding its own considerable business.
Above her head, she didn't see it.
Diana's gaze had moved — just barely, just a fraction — from Jess's face to Josie's right arm. A look with a destination. The kind that travelled a specific distance and landed on a specific thing and didn't waver once it arrived.
Josie caught it the way she caught most things Diana directed at her without words: immediately, and with a fluency that came from twenty-two years of the same language. She followed the line of it down to her own cuff. Her sleeve had ridden up at some point — the walk across the room, maybe, or the shift of reaching down to move Jess's legs — and there it was. Dark against the pale fabric. Small but not small enough. A splotch, drying at the edges, at the cuff of her shirt.
Her jaw didn't move. Her hands on Jess's shoulders didn't change their pressure by a fraction.
She brought her right hand up — an easy motion, the gesture of someone adjusting a sleeve — and rolled the cuff once, twice, until the fabric covered what it needed to cover. Then her hand went back to Jess's shoulder like it had never left.
Diana's eyes returned to her daughter's face.
Four seconds. Maybe less. Jess's eyes had been closed for all of it.
This was the agreement — unwritten, unspoken, never once needing to be said aloud because they had both understood it from the beginning with the complete and wordless certainty of people who had decided something at the same moment without consulting each other. The work did not come home. Not the mood of it, not the conversation of it, not the residue of it on a shirt cuff. Whatever the day had held, whatever Josie had walked through to get back here, it stopped at the front door. It had always stopped at the front door. That was not a rule they had ever come close to breaking.
Or close enough that Jess had noticed.
Diana picked up the pen she'd set down when Jess walked in. Turned it once between her fingers. Set it down again.
"There's food," she said. Evenly. Like the last thirty seconds hadn't happened, because for the person in this room who mattered, they hadn't. "Josie made something earlier."
"What kind of something," Jess said, eyes still closed, voice gone soft at the edges the way it did when the tension in her shoulders was leaving and taking the rest of her alertness with it.
"The kind you'll eat," Josie said, from directly above her.
A beat.
"Pasta?"
"Go find out."
Jess opened her eyes. Looked up at the ceiling. Then, because the weight of Josie's hands had shifted into the specific pressure that meant she was about to be gently propelled whether she wanted to be or not, she gathered herself — bag from the floor, blazer pulled back onto her shoulders, the particular reconstruction of a person getting back to vertical after they'd let themselves go briefly horizontal.
She paused at the door.
Looked back at them — Diana at her desk, pen in hand again, the picture of someone interrupted mid-work and now resuming it. Josie returned to the shelf, scotch back in hand, her right sleeve rolled to the middle of her forearm in a way that Jess registered for one half-second without knowing why it registered.
She filed it. The way she filed most things — quietly, without conclusion, into the part of her mind she left open for things that didn't have a shape yet.
"You're both being weird," she said. Not an accusation. An observation, offered plainly and left where it landed.
Diana's eyes came up from the desk. Her expression was the one Jess could never fully read — composed all the way down, warm at the surface, and something underneath that that had no name she'd found for it yet.
"Goodnight, Jess," Diana said.
Jess looked at her for one beat longer than was necessary.
Then she turned and went to find the pasta.
It was pasta.
Rigatoni, specifically, with the sauce Josie made from scratch and refused to give the recipe for on the grounds that it didn't have one, which Jess had spent three years not quite believing and was now starting to accept might actually be true. She ate two helpings without meaning to, elbows on the table in the way that Diana had long since given up correcting, and told them about the train she'd nearly missed and the girl in her art class who had submitted a project so catastrophically bad that the teacher had struggled visibly to find something kind to say about it.
"What was wrong with it?" Josie asked. She was doing the thing she did at dinner — half-eating, half-listening, fully present in the way that didn't require her to perform attention because it was just actually there.
"It looked like a crime scene," Jess said. "And not the interesting kind."
"There's an interesting kind?"
"In art, yes. This was not it."
Diana made a sound that was not quite a laugh but was adjacent to one — the version she produced when something landed and she didn't want to encourage it too visibly. She was on her second glass of wine, jacket folded over the back of her chair, glasses still on, which meant she hadn't fully left the day behind yet. She never fully left the day behind until the glasses came off. Jess had known this for years without ever articulating it.
The dining room was warm. The table was the old one — dark wood, seats six, used for three almost every night — and the overhead light was turned down low because Josie had discovered dimmers existed and treated them as a personal triumph. Outside the window, Lincoln Park was fully dark now, November doing what November did.
Diana's phone went face-up on the table beside her plate.
None of them acknowledged it. It was a known quantity — Diana's phone at dinner was a border negotiation that had reached its current terms through years of incremental compromise. It stayed face-down unless it didn't. Tonight it didn't.
When it lit up, Diana glanced at it the way she glanced at most things — briefly, completely, without appearing to have moved her attention at all. Something changed in the set of her mouth. Not visibly, not to anyone who hadn't spent eighteen years reading the particular grammar of her face.
Jess was in the middle of a sentence about the art class teacher.
"—and then she said, 'well, it's certainly bold,' which is what you say when you have absolutely nothing else—"
"One moment," Diana said, already standing, phone in hand, the smoothness of it so practised it barely registered as an interruption. "I need to take this."
She was out of the dining room before the sentence finished. Her wine glass stayed. Her napkin stayed, folded once at the edge of her plate.
Jess finished the sentence to the empty chair.
"—nothing else to say." She picked up her fork. Looked at Josie. "Rude."
"She'll be back," Josie said, which was both true and not the point, and both of them knew it, and neither of them said so.
They ate. The kitchen made its small noises. Somewhere in the house — the hallway, maybe, or the front room — Diana's voice moved through the walls at the low, level frequency she used for calls she didn't want carried.
Jess was reaching for the serving dish when Diana came back.
She came through the doorway and paused — just for a moment, just long enough to cross the room with her eyes before her feet. She looked at Josie.
That was all. One look, three seconds, the kind that carried more information than a paragraph and was designed to look like nothing.
Josie's chair scraped back.
She was standing before Jess had fully registered the movement, napkin set down, already turning toward the doorway with the particular quality of motion that meant the decision had already been made somewhere earlier in the evening and this was just the moment of its execution.
"Where are you going?" Jess said.
"Work thing," Josie said, not stopping.
Jess set down the serving spoon. "It's seven o'clock."
"I know."
"We're in the middle of dinner."
"I know, Jess." And there was something in it — not dismissal, not exactly, more like the particular tone of someone who agreed with every point being made and was leaving anyway, which was somehow worse. "It won't take long, it just needs—"
Jess pushed back from the table.
The chair legs caught on the rug and she had to shove it twice, which did nothing for the dignity of the exit she was making, but she was already committed. She stood up, picked up her plate — then put it back down, because she wasn't hungry anymore and carrying it upstairs felt like too much investment in a point she was making by leaving.
"Fine," she said. Flat. Not loud. The specific quiet of someone who had decided that engaging further was beneath them at this particular moment. "Dinner's over, I guess."
She was out of the dining room and on the stairs before anyone answered.
Her footsteps went up — unhurried, which was its own kind of statement — and then the second floor swallowed the sound of them.
In the dining room, the table sat with three plates and two people and the specific atmosphere of a room a third person had just left feeling a particular way about.
Josie exhaled. Not quite a sigh. The kind of breath that acknowledged a thing without dwelling on it.
She turned to reach for her jacket from the back of her chair and found Diana watching her. Diana, who had sat back down, one hand resting on the stem of her wine glass, her expression arranged into something that was almost nothing — almost entirely neutral — except for the very small thing happening at the corner of her mouth.
Not quite a smile. The suggestion of one. The version that had a direction and a meaning and was intended for a specific recipient and no one else.
It said: go. It said: I have this. It said all of that in the half-second before Diana picked up her wine glass and looked away, and Josie shrugged her jacket on and went.
The front door closed quietly behind her.
Diana sat alone in the warm dining room for a moment, the remains of dinner on the table, Josie's chair at an angle, Jess's napkin abandoned in a heap. She finished her wine. Set the glass down. Looked at the ceiling in the direction of the second floor.
Then she folded her own napkin, pushed back her chair, and went upstairs.