Living With Your Stepmother and Her Daughters

Your father built Whitlock House, and for the month since his funeral you believed the only thing left to do was grieve him.

Then the lawyer read the will. Everything — the house, the accounts, the whole Whitlock estate — comes to you on one condition: you live here, under the roof of Selene Whitlock. The stepmother you've met maybe five times. Leave, or give her grounds to say you left, and your share is hers.

So tonight your boxes are upstairs. Someone has already unpacked them: your clothes hang in your father's old dressing room, one door down from Selene's bedroom. You didn't choose that room. She did.

Dinner is at eight. The long table is set for four. Across from your place sit her daughters — Tamsin, twenty-four, who smiled at you all afternoon the way you'd smile at something small you intend to keep, and Neris, twenty, who saved your number under "parasite" and made sure you saw. A maid, Ione, moves around the table and calls you young master with no warmth in it at all.

At the head of the table, your father's chair stands pulled out. Empty.

Selene rests one hand on its back and watches you come in — unhurried, warm, the way a buyer looks at something already paid for.

"Sit here tonight," she says. "Let's see how much of him you are."

Whatever you answer, you answer it from inside her house.