They had it all figured out for her. A suitable college, a respectable degree, a career in architecture or business. Something that looked good on paper and kept Iris firmly within the family’s orbit. The fact that such a path would slowly strangle every creative impulse she possessed was beside the point. In the Bell household, appearances always came first.
But Iris had her own plans now, and the recordings were the key to all of them.
The tapes weren’t just proof of other people’s sins. They were freedom, specifically the financial kind. With the right leverage applied to the right people, she could go anywhere and do anything she pleased. She’d been careful about it, too, sorting through the material with a methodical patience that would have surprised anyone who thought they knew her. She’d cataloged which secrets had real value and which were merely interesting, which indiscretions could be leveraged and which were better kept in reserve.
Take Mr. Wilson’s slurred confession of tax fraud during her father’s poker night, for instance. That one was gold. Or Mrs. Peterson’s anxious admission, muttered in a hushed tone over tea, that they’d hired a tutor to rewrite her son’s entire collegeapplication essay. Or Principal Winters’ tearful breakdown after three too many mimosas at last week’s brunch.
All valuable, and all damning in the right context.
Not blackmail, Iris told herself. Negotiations. Consequences for actions that had previously gone unpunished. There was a difference, even if other people couldn’t see it. One could even describe it as a form of justice, the kind that nobody else seemed willing to deliver.
She tapped her finger against the recorder in her pocket, its sharp corners grounding her. She would need to be smart and patient about the next steps, but she’d always been those things, even when people mistook her for reckless.
She glanced at her watch as she reached the middle of the staircase. Six minutes had passed since she’d slipped away from the bonfire, and she needed to move. The recorder in her parents’ bedroom had been running since this morning, and she wanted to check the tape before anyone noticed she was gone.
Those tapes were her power, her insurance policy against a future dictated by people who didn’t know the first thing about what she needed. With them, she’d secure her independence and maybe, just maybe, drag a little honesty into the Bell family’s carefully constructed lie of a life.
She reached the top landing and came to a dead stop.
Her bedroom door was open, and someone was stepping out of her room. Someone who had absolutely no business being there.
Time seemed to stall as their eyes met. Her fingers tightened instinctively around the tape recorder, its edges biting into her palm. The figure stood frozen in her doorway with one hand still on the knob and the other clutching something small that caught the light from the hallway sconce.
One of her cassette tapes.
The grandfather clock chimed once from the foyer below, the single note rising through the stairwell and shattering the fragile silence between them. The sound seemed to break whatever spell had held them both in place, and the figure surged forward with alarming speed, arm outstretched, fingers splayed like talons.
“Where is it? Give it to me! Now!”
Iris took an instinctive step backward, her boot heel teetering on the lip of the top step for a sickening half-second before she caught her balance. She forced her chin up and met the person’s eyes with a defiance she didn’t entirely feel. Her heart was hammering against her ribs hard enough that she was certain it could be heard over the demand.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Iris said, and the lie landed flat between them, unconvincing even to her own ears. “And you have no right to go into my room.”
“I know you’ve been recording everyone. All of us. It stops now!” The words came out shaking with fury. “And you should be ashamed of yourself!”
Ashamed?
How dare those words be thrown in her face?
How dare anyone point a finger at her methods while ignoring the sins she’d uncovered?
“If anyone should be ashamed, it’s you,” Iris shot back, and her voice came out stronger this time, sharpened by seventeen years of accumulated resentments. “Do you think I don’t know what goes on in this house? In this neighborhood? What all of you do when you think nobody’s watching? The tapes don’t lie.”
The fear that had momentarily gripped her gave way to something colder. This was her territory. These were her secrets to collect, to catalog, to wield, and nobody had the right to take that from her.
“You’re just a child,” the person said, quieter now but no less dangerous. “Playing with things you don’t understand. Things that could hurt real people, Iris.”
“Real people who deserve it,” Iris fired back, the bitterness coating her tongue. “Real people who lie and cheat and smile at each other’s faces while the whole thing rots from the inside out.”
The gap between them shrank.
Five feet, then four.
The figure advanced with a slow, deliberate certainty that made Iris’s skin prickle, as though her personal space were nothing more than tissue paper being pushed aside.
“You have no right,” the person insisted, taking another step forward. “No right to judge. No right to play God with other people’s lives.”
Iris moved back without thinking, a reflex born of self-preservation rather than conscious thought. Her boot heel met empty air where she was certain there had still been solid ground, and her stomach lurched with a sudden, sickening realization that she was about to fall.
