Chapter 4 - The House of Three Sons
The interior of the townhouse didn't smell like wood or iron. It smelled like nothing—the kind of clean that only comes when three people spend all day scrubbing things that are already clean. The floor was made of black marble with white veins that looked like lightning frozen under the polish. In the center of the hall, a grand staircase went up three floors, its railing made of dark, heavy bronze shaped like vines.
Arthur, the bald man, was already standing near a large oak table in the center of the hall. My red, white, and blue bag was sitting on top of the dark wood, looking like a piece of garbage someone had left behind after a party.
"Leave the bag there, Arthur," Julian said, taking off his coat and handing it to a woman in a black dress who had appeared from a side door without making a sound. "Get Dr. Vance up from the basement laboratory. Tell him we need the short-tandem-repeat panel done within ninety minutes."
"Julian," Christopher said, walking over to a small mirror on the wall and examining his teeth with his index finger. "I've got a table at Le Bernardin at nine. Can we skip the whole 'legal custodian' speech tonight? She looks like she’s going to faint on the rug anyway."
"Nobody is fainting," I said. I walked over to the oak table and picked up my bag by the handles. The plastic gave that same dry rustle, and for a second, I felt like I was back at the bus station, waiting for the 6:40 departure. "You don't want me here. I don't want to be here. My mother told me to find you because she thought... she thought you'd want to know she was gone."
The three of them stopped.
Adrian had his screen out again, but his thumb had frozen over the glass. Christopher turned around from the mirror, his beige scarf still half-untied around his neck. Julian stood by the staircase, his hand resting on the bronze bronze vine of the railing, his face completely flat.
"She thought we'd want to know?" Julian asked. His voice was very quiet now—the kind of quiet that makes you look around for the exit. "She spent twenty-four years hiding you in a town with one stoplight, Autumn. She took twenty-five percent of our father’s corporate liquidity in the settlement, and she left three boys under the age of ten with a man who used a leather belt to teach us how to read the financial times."
He walked toward me, his oxfords clicking against the black marble until he was standing so close I could see the tiny silver hairs at his temples.
"You think you’re the only one who had a hard winter?" he asked, looking down at my hoodie. "Our father died in a room four floors above us, surrounded by five lawyers and a priest he didn't know, signing papers that ensured none of us could touch a dollar of the core fund unless we stayed within fifty miles of the exchange. We didn't get a mother who made us tomatoes, Autumn. We got a trust agreement and a board of directors."
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"She didn't want to leave you," I whispered. My hand went to the notebook paper in my pocket, the ink from her dying hand still clear through the cotton fabric. "She told me they had lawyers. She told me they said she'd lose the baby if she stayed."
"She did lose the baby," Adrian said from the back of the hall. He didn't look angry; he looked old—older than twenty-two, older than any gamer I had ever seen on the computer screen. "She lost three of them. Come on, Julian. Let the doctor take the blood so I can get back to the lobby. My team has a match with Seoul at midnight."
