Page 85 of Queen of Nothing

The sheet music is too obviously mine. Even without a piano, I just love to read the music and listen to the melody in my mind.

Serena doesn’t play.

She doesn’t yearn for the smell of the paper or sometimes even parchment, or the glide of the keys beneath her fingertips.

Oliver is looking for something that proves I live in that loft.

And he found it.

Serena is smoother than I would be.

Her shrug is silk. “It must have gotten mixed in with my things when we packed—and separated.”

I can hear the humour in Oliver’s voice as he echoes, “Oh, you separated?”

“You got too close to us once.”

For a heartbeat, Serena holds his stare—and there’s a message in that look.

‘I know you let Olivia go. I know you gave her the watch. And I will tell everyone here what you did.’

Then she turns her stare to my father. “I’m alone.”

Father hasn’t budged from the window, hasn’t torn his steady gaze from the lane below. But he’s furthest away from the phone camera, so the image of him shifts every other moment into a blurry-grainy picture.

For a second there, it looked like he did move, maybe nodded his head at someone down in the lane, but then the image clears, and he’s still just a statue sprouted in the corner of the room.

He doesn’t acknowledge that Serena spoke to him, doesn’t seem to want to acknowledge her existence at all.

Mr Younge is the one who speaks, “We have reason to believe Olivia is with you, and that you have a child in your care.”

Serena is quiet for a moment—and it’s a weighted moment.

I can almost feel the cold panic spreading through her chest.

But her voice comes practiced, smooth, and she lies, “There is no child, and Olivia went her own way. I don’t know where she is—”

A crash crinkles the speakers.

Serena whirls around, her slippers scuffing over the floorboards.

She backs up two steps—until her spine digs into the hard benchtop of the kitchen trolley.

Oliver steps into view.

I watch my brother advance on her, as slowly as all the times Dray would corner me.

I watch a man who should be so familiar to my eyes—but seems so much like a stranger instead.

He stops an arm’s reach away from her. “We are not here for you. It is in your best interest to give her up, Serena.”

“I don’t know where she is—”

Mr Younge cuts her off, stern, “Let us save time, Miss Vasile. I have a letter from your father.”

She shifts her watery gaze to him.

Mr Younge lures the letter out from an inner pocket of his suit jacket. Then he expertly frisbees the envelope through the room.