Chapter 1
“Let’s play. But I play for keeps.”
Winifred stopped smiling.
That interested me.
Thaddeus remained folded into the padded banquet chair, one hand pressed against his chest while pastries lay scattered near his shoes.
Behind me, Dashiell gripped the discarded blindfold.
I did not look away from Winifred.
“Phone.”
She tightened her fingers around it.
“It’s nothing.”
I almost smiled.
“You just used it as an argument.”
Silence.
“Now it’s nothing?”
Thaddeus pushed himself upright.
“Aurelia, leave it.”
Wrong sentence.
I held out my hand.
Winifred did not move.
Then Dashiell whispered:
“Grandma recorded me.”
Every face in the nearest circle changed.
I turned slightly.
“Recorded what?”
He looked frightened.
“My guesses.”
Winifred snapped:
“He doesn’t understand.”
I faced her again.
“Then explain it better than a five-year-old.”
She finally gave me the phone.
Not willingly.
Because thirty people were watching and nobody was laughing anymore.
The screen showed twenty-three audio files.
ROUND 1.
ROUND 2.
ROUND 3.
My jaw tightened.
I opened the most recent.
Dashiell’s frightened voice filled the speaker.
“Uncle Thaddeus?”
A slap.
Then Winifred:
“Wrong.”
Another voice.
“Mr. Vale?”
Another slap.
“Wrong again.”
My son had not been playing a guessing game.
He had been drilled.
I scrolled farther.
One file was dated eleven months earlier.
The night my husband, Julian Bramwell, died.
I stopped breathing.
The filename read:
DASHIELL — VOICE MEMORY.
Thaddeus went pale.
That was enough.
I looked at him.
“What was my son supposed to recognize?”
No answer.
So I pressed play.
A man’s voice came through the phone.
Distorted by distance.
Angry.
But unmistakable.
Julian.
Then a second male voice.
Dashiell whispered from behind me:
“That’s the man Grandma keeps asking about.”
Winifred closed her eyes.
May you like
The game had never been about guessing people at a party.
They were trying to find out whether my son remembered who had been with his father the night he died.
