“Mummy wasn’t moving. She was showing me how to be small. Quiet. To float like her.”
“Lucy said she wasn’t scared. It was so cold.”Francesca looks around, blinking innocently at everyone surrounding her. Like she’s telling a story. Then she shakes her head.“I didn’t let go. But the water took me.”Her chest heaves with each breath.“Lucy told me not to be scared. She held tight. I didn’t let go.”
The video cuts.
No one speaks.
Not for a long moment.
Henrik clears his throat and then says, “There’s more, though Sheffolk didn’t allow national syndication.”
But I don’twantmore. This singular video is more than enough. I try to assign a font to Francesca again, trying to box her into something explainable, anything to counteract this sudden emptiness inside me.
Baskerville. Garamond, maybe. Futura. Nothing sticks. No matter how hard I try, she’s not a name. Not a profile. She’s a little girl with bloodless lips and frozen hands that didn’t want to let go.
“Well,” I mutter, my mouth dry. “I think I’m officially depressed.”
Kai is the one who clicks a button next, minimising the screen and navigating to a new video. “Henrik said this one’s more recent. A charity gala in Lanorythe last winter. Aired briefly, or something.”
I tap Henrik’s shoulder, and he moves to retrieve my coffee before handing it to me. Kai is still struggling to find the video, and Henrik shoves him aside. “Have we not reached our invasive voyeur quota for the day? I’m feeling nauseous.”
Henrik’s already pressing play. The video opens smoothly; no microwave this time. I see a gilded ballroom with a vaulted ceiling and aesthetic shots alongside the low hum of a choir joining the background music. Francesca appears again, but it takes me a second to fully recognise her.
“Fuck,” Kai mutters, voice almost reverent. “She’s fit.”
“Don’t be disgusting,” Henrik retorts automatically.
She’s standing next to a ginger girl whose grin tells me she knows exactly how beautiful she is. Lady Persephone Marathid, I recall from the files. Beside her is a tall, dark-haired young man with the effortlessly privileged look of someone sent to international boarding schools. Lord Edmund Marathid, older brother to Persephone.
Francesca’s cousins, and one of them is Baked Bean’s suspect.
My gaze slips back to her. She’s wearing black. Of course she is; she’s in eternal mourning for something nobody will ever understand. High neckline, long sleeves with gloves that vanish into the fabric. Her hair’s in a complicated updo that probably took two servants and a spell. Gone is the drenched, shivering girl from the lake. She’s grown into something entirely else, something poised and almost devastating.
She’s talking to a reporter as the camera pans in.“You’ve stayed out of the public eye most of your life; what’s changed now in recent years?”
Momentarily, she freezes until Persephone touches her arm lightly. Providing support.“Responsibilities evolve,”she says with a grin.
What gets me is the way she speaks. Still so softly. Not shy. Not quiet. But delicate in the way that silk is—expensive. And yet… there’s still something buried there. A gap between the words. Like, part of her never returned from the lake.
“Are you nervous?”the reporter asks.
She gives a light laugh.“I always am.”
The video pauses on her face, telling me it was probably cut out from a longer interview Henrik found. I don’t realise how long I’ve been sitting watching the screen, my coffee cold in my hands, until Kai opens his big mouth, “You’re drooling. Can’t stop staring, can you?”
I scowl. “You shoved a laptop in my face. The fuck was I supposed to do, close my eyes?”
Henrik interrupts the building squabble by asking, “Have you assigned her a font yet?” The question calms me down a little, and I take a slow sip of my coffee. He knows me far too well. “And?”
“Not yet.”
“Impossible,” comes Kai’s voice. “You categorise everyone within ten seconds.”
I motion for them to take the laptop away, then shove past both of them to pace. Frustration rises in my throat at the reminder, and I set what’s left of my coffee down onto the table. “She doesn’t fit. There’s no category I can place her into.”
“Maybe you’ll have to create a new category for her, then,” he suggests, shifting to steal a slice of my toast. As though he hasn’t already been served a five-course meal for breakfast. “Or perhaps you’ve finally found somebody who defies the rules of your ridiculous typography kink.”
“Kairos, you have the critical eye of a moth and the attention span of a gnat. Please don’t weigh in on typefaces.”
