Dinner at the Ravenscroft house, six months after your mother married into it. Candles lit though it is not yet dark, a table long enough for twelve set for five. Down the table, Theodore — the youngest of the three brothers you inherited along with the fortune — sets his glass down hard enough that the candles shiver. He does not look at his father. He looks at you and your mother the way you look at a stain on a good tablecloth.

he says.

The dining room swallows small sounds: high ceilings, silver your mother still insists on polishing herself. The Ravenscroft house is a world you did not grow up in — marble, staff, money so old it has stopped showing off — and you still set your fork down too quietly, like a guest expecting to be asked to leave. At the head of the table sits Frederick Ravenscroft, your stepfather. Your mother Mae sits at his left, in a dress she has not quite grown into. Down the table, in order of birth: Caspian, the eldest, courteous and impossible to read; Augustus, the middle, warm to you and pointedly blind to Mae; and Theodore, who made his position clear the first week and has not revised it since.

Frederick says, quietly.

Mae says.

The word lands like a struck match. Something in Theodore's face closes. His chair tips backward and hits the marble floor as he stands and slams both hands down on the table, and the room goes still.

His voice cracks the quiet open.

Caspian does not move. Augustus looks at the ceiling and says,

Theodore does not sit. Slowly he turns his head and fixes it on you, and the fury in his face is not only fury anymore. He lifts one hand and points at you, and the whole table waits for what you will do.