Chapter 1
He Said My Dead Father’s Name
The gates take ninety seconds to open.
I count them. I count because the alternative is looking at my mother’s face, at the way she’s holding her hands folded in her lap like a woman auditioning for a part she’s already been given, and I don’t want to see her happy. That’s an ugly thing to admit. I admit it anyway, privately, in the back of a car that costs more than the apartment I grew up in.
“Elle.” She reaches over. Her ring catches the light and throws a fleck of it across the leather. “Say something.”
“It’s big.”
“That’s it? That’s your something?”
“It’s very big.”
She laughs, and God help me, it’s a good laugh. It’s the laugh she didn’t have for six years. I remember the exact texture of the sound she made instead — the flat little exhale through her nose when the electricity bill came, when the landlord knocked, when the word settlement stopped meaning rescue and started meaning silence. I’d trade a lot to never hear that sound again.
Apparently what I’m trading is my entire life.
The house — the estate, Denise Marchetti keeps correcting me, my mother who three years ago clipped coupons with a bread knife because we couldn’t find the scissors — rises out of the fog at the end of a drive so long it has its own weather. Grey stone. Windows like watching eyes. Ravenscourt, carved into the pillar at the turn, letters worn soft by two centuries of rain.
I’ve seen it in photographs. Photographs lie. In photographs it looks like a place. In person it looks like a verdict.
“Gideon’s so eager for you two to know each other,” my mother says. “Callum and Seraphine. You’ll have—”
“Siblings,” I say. “I’ll have siblings.”
“Don’t say it like that.”
“How am I saying it?”
“Like a diagnosis.”
Fair. I fold my hands the way she has hers, mock-serene, and she swats my knee and I let her, and for one second we’re just us again, two women in a car with a bad joke between them, and then the car stops and the door opens and the second is over.
Staff. There is staff. A line of them, four people in charcoal grey, and a woman at the front with iron-coloured hair and a face that gives up nothing, and behind them the door of the house standing open onto a hall the size of a church.
And on the steps, one hand in his pocket, one shoulder against the stone, a boy watching me like I’m a delivery he didn’t order.
• • •
He doesn’t come down.
That’s the first thing. My mother goes up, and Gideon Rothbury comes out to meet her, and there’s kissing and there’s darling and there’s the particular loud warmth of a man performing generosity for an audience, and the whole time his son does not move from the step. He just watches me get out of the car, watches me stand there in my four-year-old coat with my duffel bag in my hand because I refused to let anyone else carry it, and he tilts his head about three degrees.
Like I’ve done something interesting.
Like I’m the first thing all week that hasn’t bored him.
He’s — fine, all right, I have eyes. He’s beautiful in the way expensive things are beautiful, which is to say deliberately. Dark hair that someone was paid to make look accidental. A jaw like an argument. He’s wearing a black jumper with the sleeves pushed to the elbow and the cold doesn’t seem to have registered with him, and there’s a signet ring on his little finger that he turns, once, slowly, while he looks at me.
“Five foot four,” he says. “Five three. I had you taller.”
His voice carries. It’s built to.
“You had me?”
“I read the file my father’s office put together. There’s a height on it and it’s wrong by an inch and a half.” He tilts his head. “It’s the only thing on there that is.”
Somewhere to my left, the iron-haired woman makes a sound she converts into a cough.
The boy on the steps smiles. It doesn’t reach anything. “Callum,” he says. “You’ll be next door to me. East wing. Try not to make it weird.”
“I wasn’t planning to.”
“Everyone says that.” He straightens off the stone, unhurried, and comes down two steps — not to greet me. To get a better angle. “Marchetti. That’s your father’s name?”
The cold gets in, suddenly, under the coat.
“Yes.”
“Hm,” Callum Rothbury says.
That’s all. Hm. And then he turns and goes inside, and I stand in the drive of a house I don’t want, in a family I didn’t choose, with my dead father’s name sitting in the air where a stranger just left it.
I should have known then.
I want to be clear about that, later, when everything comes apart — I should have known from the first ninety seconds. Not because he was cruel. Cruel would have been easy. Cruel I’ve handled since I was thirteen and wearing the wrong shoes.
He said my father’s name like a man checking a fact he already knew.
• • •
My room is bigger than our old apartment.
I’m not being dramatic. I pace it out — twenty-two steps by nineteen — and then I sit down on a bed with four posts and no idea what to do with my hands. There’s a fireplace. There’s a window seat. There’s a walk-in closet that some optimist has half-filled with clothes in my size, tags still on, and I know without checking that Denise gave someone my measurements and that she thinks this is a kindness.
I hang my own things next to them. Three shirts. Two jeans. My father’s grey flannel that hasn’t smelled like him since I was fifteen and which I have never once considered throwing away.
Then I find the second door.
It’s set into the wall by the fireplace, painted the same soft green, easy to miss. I open it expecting a cupboard.
It’s a bathroom. Marble, deep tub, brass everything, warm underfoot.
And on the far side, another door.
I stand there for a long moment with my hand on the frame doing the arithmetic. East wing. You’ll be next door to me.
The far door opens.
Steam and heat come with it, and Callum comes with it, and he has a towel around his hips and water running off him in lines and he is not remotely surprised to see me, which is somehow the worst part, that he knew, that he timed it, that he has been standing on the other side of that door listening to me pace out my room in twenty-two steps.
I don’t look away. I want to. I don’t, because looking away is losing, and I have exactly one thing in this house and it isn’t money.
“Shared bath,” he says. “Didn’t they tell you?”
“They left it out.”
“There are nineteen rooms in this wing and four bathrooms. This is the only one that opens on two sides.” He says it like a man reading a plan. “They didn’t leave it out. They chose it.” He reaches past me — close enough that I feel the heat coming off his shoulder, close enough that I have to actively decide not to step back — and takes a bottle from the shelf by my hip. He doesn’t hurry it. “House rule. Knock twice.”
“And if I don’t?”
“Then I’ll assume you didn’t want me to stop.” He’s already turning away. Over his shoulder, mild as weather: “Welcome home, Elle.”
The door shuts.
I stand in the steam with my heart going like something trapped, and I think: I never told him my name.
• • •
Author’s Note:
Wait... how does he know her name? 👀
Callum is playing a dangerous game, but Elle isn’t going down without a fight. What do you think he’s hiding? Is he a total red flag or are you already sold? Let me know your theories in the comments!
If this opening hooked you, please hit that Heart/Vote button and Add to Library—it helps more readers find Ravenscourt! Next update dropping soon! ❤️
