Behind the Keyhole

YARA

I find him a few evenings later, after supper, in the one room of the house that's always felt more like him than any other.

Yasmin wasn't at the table tonight. Nola made an excuse about a headache and a closed door, but nobody asked twice. It's a small thing. It shouldn't sit with me the way it does.

Beau's study sits at the back of the house, away from the parts of the estate meant to be seen. No tall windows, no careful arrangements of flowers. Just dark wood shelves heavy with law books nobody's cracked open in years, a leather chair worn soft in the shape of him, and the smell of pipe tobacco he doesn't smoke anymore but the room never quite let go of. It's the one place in this house that doesn't perform for anybody.

He's at his desk when I knock, glasses pushed up into his hair, a ledger open in front of him. He looks up and something in his face eases, the particular way it only does for me in rooms like this one, away from Nola's eyes and Yasmin's easy gravity.

"There's my girl," he says, waving me in. "Come sit. I could use the company more than I could use these numbers."

I take the chair across from him — the one that's technically for clients but has always just been mine. "Am I interrupting?"

"You're rescuing me." He closes the ledger, sets his glasses on top of it. "What's on your mind?"

I've practiced this conversation enough times that the words come easier than I expect. "I want to work at the bank. Not filing papers or answering telephones. I want to learn the actual business. Loans, trusts, how the numbers move. I want you to teach me."

Whatever he expected me to walk in here and say, it wasn't that. I watch it land on him, something shifting behind his eyes before he smooths it back into the calm, patient expression he wears for everyone.

"That's a serious thing to ask for," he says, careful.

"I'm serious about it."

He studies me a long moment, and there's something in the way he looks at me I've never quite been able to name, not in nineteen years of being looked at by him. It isn't the way he looks at Yasmin — warm and uncomplicated, the way you'd look at something you were sure of. When Beau looks at me, there's always a second thing underneath, tender and aching at once, like he's looking at two things and only one of them is actually in the room.

"You've got the mind for it," he says finally. "You always have. Sharper than half the men I've got working under me, and don't tell your mother I said that." A small smile that doesn't quite reach all the way up. "I'll talk to the board. Get you brought on properly. Not as a favor. As a hire."

"Thank you." I mean it more than the words can carry.

"Don't thank me yet." He picks his glasses back up, turns them over once without putting them on — a habit of his when he's thinking past what he's saying out loud. "The bank's not a kind place, Yara. Not to daughters who want more than their name. People will look for reasons not to take you seriously. Some of them will find reasons whether they're there or not."

"I know how to be looked at like that," I say. "I've had practice."

Something crosses his face, fast, and for a second I think he might actually say something real — about Nola, about Yasmin, about the particular shape of what it's like being me in this house. He doesn't. He just nods, slow, and looks down at the ledger like it might tell him what to do with his hands.

"You remind me of someone," he says instead, quiet, almost like he didn't mean to say it out loud.

"Who?"

"Someone I knew a long time ago." He shakes his head, and the moment closes as fast as it opened. "Ignore your father. He gets sentimental when the light's low."

I let it go, because that's what you do in this house. But I file it away with everything else.

We talk a while longer, about the trust department, about which of the senior men might object to a St. Claire daughter learning the actual books instead of decorating the lobby, and it's easy, comfortable, the kind of conversation I don't often get to have with anyone in this family.

I lean forward to make my point about the trust department, bracing my hand flat on the edge of his desk, and the lamp beside him throws new light across the wood right where my palm lands. That's when I see it properly for the first time in nineteen years of sitting in this room.

The bottom left drawer has a small brass keyhole set into it, old, worn smooth at the edges like it's been locked and unlocked a thousand times over. Every other drawer on this desk pulls open with a simple latch. This one is built to keep something out, and the lamplight is falling right into the gap of it, like it wants to be found tonight.

I don't mean to look. My eyes go to the keyhole the same way they went to the bird on the trail, pulled there before I've decided to, and through the small dark gap I catch the edge of something pale.

A photograph.

Just a sliver of it, the corner, but enough. A woman's face, dark hair falling loose around it, nothing like Nola's careful blond waves, nothing like anyone who's ever sat at our breakfast table. There's something in the set of her jaw, even in that small glimpse, that snags at me, familiar in a way I can't place and don't like.

"Yara."

Beau's voice has changed. I look up and he's already moving, his hand coming down flat and fast over the keyhole, as if he can undo what I've already seen just by blocking it now.

"That's private, sweetheart," he says, his voice gentle.

His hand isn't shaking, not exactly, but it's pressed harder against that wood than it needs to be, and his eyes, when I meet them, aren't gentle at all. They're afraid.

When I leave the study a few minutes later, the hallway is empty, but Yasmin's bedroom door is open a crack that wasn't open before, just enough for a sliver of lamplight to fall across the floor. I don't see her. But she knows I was in there.