Chapter 4
Dinner was a silent, agonizing ritual. The clinking of porcelain plates and silver forks sounded abnormally loud in the brightly lit dining room. Elena sat at the head of the table, dressed impeccably in her green dress, occasionally offering polite, small smiles to Clara. The eerie dissonance of her behavior made Mark’s skin crawl. Throughout the meal, Clara kept her head bowed, staring fixedly at her plate of untouched chicken and rice, her small fingers clutching her lap where she had managed to sneak her stuffed rabbit under the edge of the tablecloth.
Mark pushed his food around his plate, his mind racing through Clara’s unfinished sentence from the living room. Something in her desk. Elena kept a mahogany roll-top desk in the corner of the den—a room she strictly regarded as her private workspace, off-limits to both Mark and Clara under the guise of managing household accounts and freelance graphic design.
"You aren't eating, Mark," Elena noted softly, her dark eyes fixing on him across the candlelit center. There was no warmth in her gaze, only a sharp, analytical probing, as if she were trying to calculate how much he currently knew.
"I'm not very hungry," Mark replied evenly, setting his fork down with deliberate slowness. "My stomach has been knotted up since I saw Clara crying on the floor. I keep thinking about what she told me."
Elena’s expression didn't crack. She took a slow sip of water, her fingers steady against the glass rim. "Children have vivid imaginations, Mark. It is dangerous to encourage them to invent narratives that undermine the peace of this household. You should know better than to take a frightened toddler's word over your wife's."
"She is seven, Elena, not a toddler," Mark corrected, his voice dropping into a dangerous, quiet register. "And bruises on her lower back don't come from tripping over landscape edging. They come from blunt force."
Elena set her glass down with a soft, deliberate clink. The silence that followed was heavy and electric. For a fleeting second, a flash of genuine cold hostility crossed Elena’s features, stripping away her polished veneer before she quickly masked it with a pitying sigh.
May you like
"Believe what you wish, Mark," Elena said smoothly, standing up from the table. "If you are going to interrogate me in my own home, I will leave you to it."
She walked out of the room with quiet grace, her green dress swaying slightly. As soon as the front door clicked shut—Elena driving off to clear her head, as she often did when frustrated—Mark stood up. He didn't waste a second. He scooped Clara into his arms, grabbed her stuffed rabbit, and strode straight into the dark, silent den toward the locked mahogany desk.
