The surface.

Always the surface.

My family had spent forty years perfecting an exterior — the yacht club, the pearls, my father’s spotless professional reputation, the whole glittering performance of a successful, respectable clan — and the entire interior of it had been rotten with a bookkeeping that priced children and a favoritism written in black ink.

My mother did not fix her pearls because she was vain.

She fixed them because the surface was the thing she actually believed in, the thing she had given her life to maintaining, and even now, even arriving in disgrace to beg from the daughter she’d exposed, the reflex to present well was stronger than the reflex to be honest.

I think that was the moment, watching her through the glass, that I stopped being afraid of them.

Because I saw, finally, how little was actually there.

Behind the pearls and the reputation and the forty years of performance was not some formidable power I had to appease.

It was two frightened people running out of runway, and a necklace, and a lie they could no longer afford.

Rowan was in his room with cartoons.