The candles at Ravensworth House had been burning for eleven minutes before anyone said out loud what all five of them were thinking, and it was Marco, of course, who said it.
"He's not coming, is he."
It wasn't a question. Marco Varelli didn't ask questions when statements would do more damage, and this one landed exactly where he'd aimed it — at the head of the table, at the chair with the good light behind it, at eighteen inches of empty air where their father should have been sitting.
Sebastian didn't look up from his wine. "He's late."
"He's never late." Marco reached for the bread before the first course had even been cleared for the second, which earned him a look from Elena that could have stripped paint. "Late is a thing that happens to other people's fathers. Lucian Varelli does not misplace an hour. He misplaces entire countries, sometimes, but never an hour."
"That's not funny," Elena said.
"I wasn't being funny. I was being accurate. There's a difference, though I understand it's been a while since you've laughed at anything so you might have forgotten the distinction."
"Both of you," Sebastian said, in the voice he used when he wanted the table to believe he was still the one holding it together, "stop."
Sofia, at the far end near the windows, said nothing at all. She had noticed three things in the last eleven minutes that no one else at the table had noticed, and she was in no hurry to share any of them. First: Giles, their father's driver of nineteen years, had not come in to take a plate for himself in the kitchen the way he always did when Lucian ran late from a meeting — which meant Giles didn't know where Lucian was either, and Giles always knew. Second: her mother's hands, folded with their usual composure on the white tablecloth, were folded a fraction too tightly, the knuckles a shade paler than the rest of her. Third: the seventh place setting — the one nobody at this table ever spoke about, the one that was laid at every family dinner and never once used — had, tonight, been discreetly removed by the staff before the first course arrived. Someone had given an instruction. Someone had known, before dinner even started, that tonight was going to be different from every other Sunday of empty chairs and unspoken names.
Nico had his phone in his lap under the table, thumb moving in short economical bursts, and nobody bothered to tell him to put it away because nobody expected him to listen if they did.
"He texted me at four," Sebastian said, mostly to reassure himself. "Said he'd be here for the second course. Something about a call running long."
"A call with who?" Elena asked.
"He didn't say."
"Does he ever?"
Victoria Varelli set down her fork with the particular precision of a woman who had spent thirty-eight years learning exactly how much of a room she wanted to control at any given moment, and tonight, apparently, she wanted all of it.
"Your father," she said, "is entitled to a private conversation without an inquest at my dinner table."
"It's not an inquest, Mother," Marco said. "It's concern. Healthy, filial concern, which I understand is a foreign concept in this family, but I'm trying it out."
"Try it more quietly."
