Chapter 20
Fola was pacing the foyer.
This was important to note because Fola never paced.
She was always the calm sibling, the one with the iron-clad plan, the one who was unshakable even in the face of great peril. But right now, she was definitely shaken.
She’d decided that she needed distance from the chaos of the packed drawing room, where, from a quick head count she’d done, exactly eighty-nine guests were crammed.
This did not include herself, her siblings, or the staff (both the Manor staff and the yacht staff), and while eighty-nine seemed like such a small mathematical value in theory, it felt like hundreds when placed in the context of her home.
Her home whose walls were caving and closing in on her, making the space less and less the more anxious she felt.
Instead of focusing on the sheer number of people in here, Fola wandered the limited area of the foyer in deep sustained contemplation, something that was hard to do given the fact that she kept bumping into the chairs and tables that were stacked together in order to hold them all in place here like prisoners.
It all felt like bad feng shui. The physical manifestation of their cursed weekend.
Despite having sensed, known even, that something awful would happen last night, Fola could never have guessed that it would be something as twisted as this. Her father wasn’t young by any means, but he wasn’t ancient either.
Based on the average life expectancy in the United States—75.
9 years for the average man, 87.3 years for men of her father’s good fortune—and seeing as her dad is …
was in his early seventies, she had projected that he would live another solid fifteen years or so.
She’d hoped he’d surpass the average life expectancy altogether, hoped he’d surpass all human scientific capabilities and somehow live forever.
And that’s where she went wrong. Naively hoping for anything in the first place.
She stilled her trembling fingers, wrapping them around the cold metal of her thermos as she continued her uncharacteristic pacing, torturing herself with thoughts about whether there was some mathematical equation in the laws of physics that could have prevented any of this.
She knew that this was just wishful thinking though, and wishful thinking was of course akin to hope.
But she couldn’t help herself. Couldn’t help going over her steps, desperately retracing the spindle of time, hoping that on this occasion she might unravel a golden thread like Rumpelstiltskin.
Hoping that somehow this fruitless backpedaling through the events of the last twenty-four hours would, for once, prove to be useful.
In doing what, exactly? She wasn’t sure.
It wasn’t like she could resurrect her dad; she knew that.
She knew death was an inevitable state of permanence that once done could not be undone. She knew her father was gone forever. She knew. She knew. And yet—
Fola bumped into a solid figure, her open thermos of lukewarm coffee slipping out of her grip and splashing across the white cashmere exterior of the person in front of her.
“Shit! I’m so sorry!” a voice from above said.
Fola’s eyes widened in horror as she took in the stain that would definitely be impossible to remove, and then the face of her victim.
A boy. And not just any boy. The son of her father’s sworn enemy, who was now staring down at her, his blue-gray eyes wide like a deer trapped in headlights.
Though Fola didn’t know him well, he looked just like his father.
The only thing she could remember about him, other than the fact that he was Mr. Philips’s offspring, was that the boy had the strangest name …
like Thanos … or Thunderbird or some such.
“Are you … okay?” he asked her, staring at Fola with a concerned expression.
Fola raised an eyebrow, ignoring the slow terror building in her chest. “I’m fine,” she said. “I feel like I should be asking you if you’re okay. I can arrange for your clothes to be dry-cleaned or replaced right away—”
“No, no! It’s okay, it’s just a cardigan.” The boy was looking at her with this sad and almost pitying expression. Like he knew. But that wasn’t possible. No one knew that her father was dead. No one but them.
His eyes moved from her face to her fingers, which were now shaking as they gripped her half-emptied thermos. “Are you sure you’re good?” he asked, and Fola found herself frowning in annoyance.
She was clearly a hot mess and he could clearly see that, so why ask? Why ask unhelpful questions at all? She did not understand people’s reasoning. “I’m fine, Theodore. You don’t have to pretend to care about me.”
“It’s Thorin,” he corrected, looking apologetic for having to do so.
She refrained from rolling her eyes. What a truly ridiculous name, she thought.
“Okay, Thorin. I’m sorry for ruining your cardigan.
Again, I can and will replace it, just send a bill to the house.
If there is nothing else you need from me, I suggest you continue with your day and I with mine, and hopefully we can all be done with this soon,” she said, and then gave him a curt nod and moved to walk away to some other place where she could pace in peace.
But before she could get far, she heard his voice once again. “Fola, wait. There was actually something I wanted to ask,” Thorin said, and she heaved a sigh, before swiveling back on her heel and giving him an impatient look.
“Yes?”
“The, uh, reason I bumped into you … I was hoping you would know where Perdita is? She said she needed to get some fresh air in the gardens behind the drawing room, but it’s been a while and she wasn’t out there when I looked, so …”
Perdita? she thought. Why on earth was Thorin Philips looking for her sister? She wasn’t even aware that the two knew each other enough for him to be searching for her.
She narrowed her eyes at the tall, gangly boy.
He swallowed, looking away from her and then jolting with obvious relief at something in the distance.
“Never mind, I think I see her. Thank you!” he said, and then sped off, as if he didn’t have a giant stain across the front of his shirt—or at least wasn’t disturbed by it.
With the momentary distraction gone, Fola shivered. She glanced down at her trembling fingers and considered seriously for a moment that her tolerance for coffee had merely decreased in the last week. That was why she felt so awful inside. Why she was shaking so much.
Or maybe it’s because your father is dead and you cannot cope with the facts of this new reality, a voice in her mind crooned.
Fola pushed the voice away. It was nonsense. She could handle the reality of misfortune; she never once allowed herself to break down at the first sign of struggle. So that couldn’t be it.
Then again, it would explain the heaviness in her chest and the incessant urge to cry way more than a sudden bout of caffeine intolerance did.
The herd of guests squeezed into the rooms nearby, as well as the presence of several uniformed officers in her home, wasn’t helping the situation either.
Sure, the officers weren’t in the foyer with her right this moment, but she knew they were here …
lurking around … asking probing questions, like they had during her interview …
watching everyone, as officers tended to do.
And that made her feel sick to her stomach.
Before Fola could psychoanalyze herself further, a sudden crash nearby disrupted her thoughts. The sound came from the main entrance doors. She jumped back as glass smashed against the black-and-white tiling a few paces from her feet.
Followed by a resounding bang.