The Watcher in the Glass
The light woke me before the alarm did, spilling gold through gauze curtains my mother had chosen fifteen years ago and no one had thought to replace. I lay still for a moment, watching dust motes drift through the sunbeam like something suspended in amber, and let myself remember, briefly, that this room had once belonged to a smaller version of me—one who believed the world outside these walls was as soft and forgiving as the sheets I slept in.
The Lauren estate did not so much wake as unfold. Somewhere below, I could hear Marta setting the table with the particular clink of good porcelain, and further off, muffled by three closed doors and a hallway lined with oil paintings of ancestors I'd never met, my father's voice, already sharp with the day's first irritation, directed at someone on the phone about numbers that meant nothing to me. Money had its own language in this house. I had never bothered to learn it fluently, though I understood enough to know when a deal was going badly by the register of his tone alone.
I dressed slowly, without hurry, because hurry was not a feeling I often had reason to summon. A cream sweater, jeans soft from wear, the kind of effortless…