Page 50 of Ruthless Claim

I spent the second part of my childhood in this house.

My parents died in February, and by March I was in a bedroom on the third floor with the window that looked out over the back garden, trying to learn the geography of a house that wasn’t mine and a family that was learning the same thing about me.

I lived here until I was eighteen, when Connor told me it was time for me to learn my own way within the family business.

I know every room, every creak in the stairs, and which radiator knocks in winter.

I have never once thought of it as home. It has always been Connor’s house. I’ve lived inside his life like a guest who stayed too long and everyone was too polite to mention.

In the car Valentina fidgets with her purse, opening and closing it. She’s working up the courage to say something.

“Is Emma’s absence going to be obvious?” she asks.

“Yes,” I say.

She nods and looks back out the window.

The house looks exactly as it always has.

That’s the thing about the Brennan house—it doesn’t change.

Inside it’s the same heavy sofas that belonged to Connor’s mother, the low lamps, the photographs on the mantelpiece going back three generations.

It smells like woodsmoke and something that is just itself, a smell I’ve known since I was a teenager.

Walking into it has always produced the same thing in my chest: the specific combination of familiar and not-mine.

What I notice first is where Emma isn’t.

There’s a gap on the side table by the window.

A silver frame used to sit there, covered imperfectly now by a vase that was never there before.

I know the photograph that was in it.

Emma at six years old, sitting on the back steps of this house in a yellow raincoat with her arms wrapped around her knees, grinning at whoever had the camera.

For whatever reason, I remember six-year-old Emma very well. I was nineteen and used to trip over her constantly when I was home from wherever Connor had sent me that week.

She’d appear at my elbow with some pressing question about dinosaurs or why the sky was blue or whether I thought her stuffed rabbit was happy, and I’d stand in the kitchen doorway trying to remember if I’d eaten and find myself thirty minutes deep in a conversation about the relative merits of different types of dinosaurs with a six year old who had very strong opinions.

I was thirty-one when she left for Sarah Lawrence. She hugged me goodbye and told me not to let Connor turn me into a robot while she was gone.

I said I’d do my best, and I watched the car pull away.

I remember thinking that the house was going to be very quiet.

It was. It has been, ever since. Now it’s a different kind of quiet.

Valentina sees the gap too.

She goes still for half a second before she smooths it. Her hand finds my elbow briefly, just a moment of pressure, then she lets go without making it anything.

Teresa comes in from the hallway.

For the first time, I notice just how small my aunt is, like she’s spent a lifetime making sure she doesn’t inconvenience anyone by existing in a room.

She’s always had kind eyes that are warm and a little worried, even when there’s nothing to worry about.