Chapter 514: The Loudest House

The estate had never been this loud.

Every light in the house was on, and half the ones in the garden besides — paper lanterns strung between the oaks, the terrace doors thrown wide so the noise could pour out across the lawn and lose itself in the dark. Eleven years old today, both of them. Somewhere under the music a caterer was losing an argument with a chafing dish, and no one cared.

Lily and Leo held the long table, taller every time Arianne looked away and back, with Kyle on one side and Nicholas on the other. The four of them moved as one thing now, finishing each other’s sentences, peeling off in a pack and reassembling somewhere across the lawn. Leo talked. Not much, never much, but he talked, and the other boys leaned in when he did because he made them wait for it.

She had them all counted without meaning to. Old habit. It did not mean what it used to.

The scream came from the dessert table.

Not a hurt scream. Arianne knew the difference now the way she knew her own pulse. She turned in time to catch Lexx at the top of it — five years old, one sneaker on a chair and the other on the table’s edge, both hands sunk to the wrist in the bottom tier of a cake that had, until that second, been whole.

"Lexx." Gilbert reached him first, going for his collar. "What did we say about—"

"He was checking it." Lily appeared between them, smooth as glass. "For Louis. Louis can’t have the kind with nuts. Lexx was checking."

"With his hands," Gilbert said.

"He forgot the spoon." Leo, flat, from her other side. "He’s five."

Gilbert looked at the two of them, then at the wrecked cake, then at the boy frozen mid-crime with frosting to his elbows, and the fight went out of him the way it always did. The twins had been getting Lexx out of trouble since before he could walk. They were good at it. They liked it.

Lexx took the opening and ran straight to Arianne, arms up, frosting and all.

"Mommy."

"You’ve made a mess." She lifted him anyway, onto her hip where he could ruin her dress along with everything else. He went boneless against her, cheek to her shoulder, an angel now that the one person he answered to had hold of him. He would be a terror again the second she set him down. She knew it. She held him anyway.

She set him down eventually. He went straight for Louis, who had drifted too near the terrace steps, and hauled him back by the strap of his overalls with a five-year-old’s outrage. "No. Bad. Steps." He planted himself between his brother and the drop and would not move until Louis gave up and toddled the other way. The same hands that had destroyed the cake. He stood over the baby’s pram the same way whenever a guest leaned in too loud, small and furious in front of Liah like a dog that had decided on its person.

Franz came across the lawn with the baby. Liah rode in the crook of his arm, a year old and personally offended by the concept of bedtime, one fist knotted in his collar. Louis walked at his knee, three years old, and God help them all, Franz’s face poured into a smaller mold. Same brow. Same mouth that went serious before it went anywhere else. The mothers at the school gate had stopped asking whose boy he was.

"He got the cake," Franz said.

"He got the cake."

"Both hands?"

"To the elbow."

One corner of Franz’s mouth went, and he let it.

Across the terrace, Gilbert had given up his dignity and his chair both. Audrey sat with their daughter asleep against her chest through all of it. Leia, four months old, named for a woman the twins knew by heart from a wall of photographs and hours of old video, and both had insisted on all the same. Leia Marie. Layla with the letters moved around, Audrey said, so the girl could be her own person and belong to them too.

Gio stood at the rail with Sam under his arm and a ring on her hand three weeks old. Sam had glanced at it twice already tonight, like checking a card she could not believe she had drawn. Eight years of him holding the door shut. Three years of letting her through it once he finally opened it. Then a wedding so small it fit in the back room of Nate’s bar with the lights low and no press within a mile of it.

Nate had the grill, a beer, and a running argument with Kyle over whether eleven was old enough to be trusted with tongs.

Everyone who had stayed. And the ones they had made since.

It got later. The cake was mourned and cut around. The little ones started to fade, and the older four collapsed into a single heap of limbs on the lawn over something on Kyle’s phone. Sam found her by the doors, Louis gone heavy and asleep on her shoulder, Liah finally down in Franz’s arms a few feet off.

"You never told anyone." Sam kept it under the music. "Where the name came from. Athaliah. It’s not on either family tree. I looked."

"It is now."

Franz’s arm came against hers. He knew. He was the only one who ever had.

"It was mine first," Arianne said. "Before it was hers."

Sam waited.

"My mother picked it before I was born. She wrote that it was meant to belong to no one else. Mine alone." The music took the edge off the words, which was the only reason she could lay them down flat. "My father waited until she couldn’t stop him and put another name on me instead. She never got to call me the one she chose."

Sam looked to where Franz had the baby’s head tucked beneath his chin.

"So you gave it to her."

"Athaliah Ysabelle Rochefort." Arianne said all of it, one name at a time. "Athaliah for the name my mother wanted. Ysabelle for my mother."

A name a man had taken from a woman thirty years ago, worn now by a girl he would never reach.

"He didn’t get to keep it," Arianne said. "It came back around anyway."

She had not planned to say that part out loud. She let it stand.

Louis and Liah had come close together — fifteen months, closer than she and Franz had meant, close enough that it had frightened her while she carried the second. She could not find the fear now if she went looking. It had gone the way the rest of it went.

A chair went over somewhere behind them and Lexx’s laugh tore across the garden, then Louis’s, then the thunder of two eleven-year-olds deciding to give chase. Franz tipped his head to the sound and made no move to stop any of it. Neither did she.

Athaliah stirred against him and went back down. The loudest house Arianne had ever lived in, lit end to end, and not one sound in it she had to be afraid of.