Chapter 1 - The Rules of the House
The house had rules now.
Nora knew all of them.
Rule one: shoes off at the door, lined up heel to heel, like little soldiers waiting for inspection.
Rule two: no fingerprints on the glass table in the hallway.
Rule three: don't speak until spoken to, especially at dinner.
Nobody had ever written the rules down.
Emma didn't need paper for that.
She had a voice that did it instead, flat and precise, like a ruler laid across a page.
Nora. Elbows off the table.
Nora. Not so loud.
Nora. Look what you've done now.
Eight years old, and Nora already knew the sound of her own name the way some kids knew a siren.
---
The kitchen was beautiful.
Everyone said so. The marble floor was grey and cold and always shining, because Emma had someone come twice a week just to make it shine. The cabinets were the color of wet stone. There was a window over the sink that looked out onto a garden nobody used.
Nora used to think beautiful things were supposed to feel warm.
She didn't think that anymore.
---
Biscuit was the only warm thing in the house.
He was a Golden Retriever, gold like syrup, gold like something you wanted to put your whole face into. He'd been her mother's dog first. Before. When there had still been a before.
He slept outside Nora's door now, most nights.
Emma said it was unsanitary, a dog upstairs, a dog near the bedrooms, but she never actually did anything about it, because Biscuit was old and slow and Emma mostly forgot he existed unless he was in her way.
Nora never forgot he existed.
He was the one thing in the house that still looked at her like she mattered.
---
That night, dinner was chicken.
Nora could smell it from the stairs — rosemary, garlic, the good kind of butter — and her stomach folded in on itself, because she'd only had crackers at lunch and half an apple, and Emma had been the one who packed her lunch.
She sat down at the table like she was supposed to.
Emma set two plates down. One in front of her own chair.
None in front of Nora's.
---
"Where's mine?" Nora asked.
She didn't mean for it to come out small. It came out small anyway.
Emma didn't even look up from cutting her chicken.
"You didn't finish your breakfast this morning."
"I ate the toast—"
"You left the eggs."
"I don't like eggs—"
"That's not the point, Nora." Emma set her knife down with a small, deliberate click against the plate. "The point is you waste what you're given. And people who waste what they're given don't get more."
---
Nora looked at the empty space in front of her.
No placemat. No fork. Nothing.
Her hands sat in her lap, and she pressed her thumbnail into the pad of her index finger, hard, the way she did when she needed somewhere else to put a feeling.
"I'm hungry," she said.
"I'm sure you are."
Emma took a bite. Chewed. Swallowed.
She didn't look sorry. She didn't look anything.
---
Under the table, something nudged Nora's knee.
Biscuit. He'd come in from the hallway, nails clicking softly on the marble, and now he sat beside her chair with his chin resting near her leg, tail giving one slow sweep against the floor.
His bowl was by the back door, the stainless steel one, half full from that morning.
Nora looked at it.
She told herself not to.
She looked at it anyway.
---
"Can I have a plate, please?"
Her voice cracked in the middle of the word please, like it had a hinge that hadn't been oiled in a while.
Emma finally looked at her. Really looked, the way she did when she was deciding something.
"No," she said. Simple as that. "Not tonight."
"But I'm hungry."
"Then I suggest," Emma said, standing, gathering her own plate, "you think about that the next time you decide to waste food in this house."
---
She walked out of the kitchen.
Not to punish further. Not with any drama in her step. She walked out the way a person walks away from a chore they've finished.
That was somehow worse than if she'd yelled.
Yelling would have meant Nora mattered enough to be yelled at.
---
The kitchen went quiet except for the hum of the refrigerator and the tick of the clock shaped like a sunburst on the wall, a wedding gift, something Emma had picked out herself for a wedding Nora hadn't wanted to go to.
Biscuit's tail thumped again.
He looked at Nora. Then he looked at his bowl. Then back at her, the way dogs do when they think you haven't noticed something obvious.
---
Nora slid off her chair.
Her knees hit the marble, cold even through her leggings.
She crawled the three feet to the bowl the way you'd crawl toward something you were ashamed of wanting, slow, like maybe if she moved slow enough it wouldn't really be happening.
She knelt in front of it.
Kibble mixed with a little wet food, browned and glistening, the smell not so different from what had been on Emma's plate five minutes ago.
Her stomach twisted, hunger and humiliation arriving at exactly the same time, like two guests who hated each other showing up to the same party.
---
She looked at the door Emma had walked through.
Empty.
She looked at Biscuit.
He didn't seem to mind sharing. He never minded anything, that was the thing about him, the thing that made him safe in a house where almost nothing else was.
---
Nora reached out one hand.
Her fingers closed around a small clump of food.
She brought it to her mouth.
It tasted like salt and metal and something underneath that she refused to name, because naming it would have made it true in a way she wasn't ready for.
She ate another handful.
And another.
---
Somewhere above her, Biscuit made a low, soft sound, not quite a whine, more like the sound a house makes when it settles at night — small, involuntary, meaning nothing and everything.
Nora didn't cry.
She'd learned that crying only made things last longer.
She just knelt there on the cold marble, in her mother's dog's spot, eating what she'd been given, and somewhere behind her, footsteps returned.
Emma had come back for her wine glass.
She stood in the doorway for a long moment.
She said nothing at all.
That was the part Nora would remember longest — not the food, not the floor, not even the hunger.
May you like
The nothing.
---
