CHAPTER 1: Chapter 2 - The Tablet

The room changed after that sentence. Not with shouting, not with movement, but with a quiet tightening, like a wire drawn across the air.
Sophia followed Maya's shaking finger to the tablet half hidden behind a vase of white roses. It wore a cracked purple case, the kind a child might cover with stickers. A charging cable dangled over the edge of the marble, unplugged in a hurry. On the dark glass, a small red dot pulsed before the screen slept again.
Leon smiled, but it arrived too late. "She's overwhelmed. The nanny has filled her head with nonsense about cameras and bad men."
Sophia did not answer him. She crossed the foyer and turned the tablet toward herself. The screen woke under her thumb. A password field appeared over a paused image of the very hallway they were standing in.
"Whose tablet is this?" Sophia asked.
"My granddaughter's," Leon said. "She makes little dance videos."
Maya lifted her wet face from Isabella's dress. "Bella said hide it when he gets mad."
Isabella closed her eyes for one second. When she opened them again, shame had been replaced by fear. "Maya," she whispered, "you don't have to say anything."
But Maya did. In a tiny voice, she gave Sophia the passcode. It was her mother's birthday, a date Leon had ordered everyone in the house to stop mentioning. The child remembered it anyway, as children remember the things grief makes sacred.
Leon took his first fast step forward.