"Mum," Aine said sharply as she stepped inside.
Hilda turned from where she stood in the entrance hall, her silk robe catching the light, her expression arranged into something that was almost welcoming. Almost.
"Welcome home, Aine."
Aine's eyes narrowed. The warmth of the evening, the restaurant, the elevator, the kiss, all of it evaporated the moment she crossed this threshold. It always did.
"Why did you make them stand outside?"
Hilda moved closer, unhurried, the kind of woman who had learned long ago that taking up space was its own form of power. "They told you, right?"
"There was no sense in doing that, Mum." Aine stepped forward until the air between them had no room left to breathe. Her voice was quiet. Controlled. Which was somehow more dangerous than if she had shouted. "None."
Hilda's gaze drifted over her, slow and assessing. "You find whatever I do offensive."
"It's not even an offense." Aine's voice dropped to a whisper that cut cleaner than any raised tone could. "It's an abuse. Because you pay them to work. That doesn't mean you've bought them."
Hilda's lips parted. A flush crept down her neck. "That's part of the work. That's the reason I pay them."
"The money isn't even yours." The words landed one by one, deliberate and precise. "It's my father's money and you are simply perching here." Aine held her gaze without flinching. "Tell me the work you do in your life. Absolutely nothing. You exist for ceremonies in the name of Mendoza's wife and nothing else. Never treat them like that again."
Hilda straightened, something flickering behind her eyes that wanted very badly to be authority. "Is that how you treat your mother?"
The silence that followed was the kind that has teeth.
When Aine spoke again her voice was stripped of everything except the truth, clean and final and impossible to take back.
"That is exactly why you are not my mother," she said. "And you can never be her. Because she would never treat anyone the way you just did. Don't ever compare yourself to her." Her eyes held Hilda's without mercy. "In terms of qualities, in terms of character, in terms of everything that actually matters, you fall so far behind her there is no comparison worth making."
She turned and walked away before Hilda could find a single word to put in the space she left behind.
On the stairs she met Tesni.
They looked at each other for one suspended moment. Tesni's expression said everything. She had heard. Every word. "Did you fight with mum again?",Tesni asked.
Aine looked at her steadily, said nothing, and walked into her room, pulling the door shut behind her with a quiet, definitive click.
Down the hall, Tesni's door closed too, softer, almost uncertain. She threw herself onto her bed and stared up at the ceiling, the house settling into its nighttime silence around her.
She turned it over in her mind the way she always did when the two of them collided, which was often, which was exhausting, which never seemed to get any easier no matter how many times it happened.
Why can't Mum and Aine just get along? The question sat in her chest like a stone she had been carrying for longer than she could remember. It's not like Mum maltreats her. They can't even be in the same room for a minute without it becoming something.
She pressed her face into her pillow.
I need to address this tomorrow, she decided. Someone has to.
She just wasn't entirely sure, if she was being honest with herself in the dark where no one could see, whose side she would be standing on when she did.
The next morning came the way mornings do after difficult nights, quietly, without apology, the house pretending nothing had happened.
Tesni padded downstairs in her usual unhurried way, her hair still settling around her shoulders, the smell of the kitchen reaching her before she turned the corner.
Hilda was already there, moving with the practiced ease of someone who had claimed this space as entirely her own.
"Good morning, Mum," Tesni said, dropping into the familiar warmth of the kitchen like slipping on a well worn coat.
Hilda looked up with a warm smile, the kind she reserved for Tesni alone, uncomplicated and genuine. "Good morning, sweetheart."
Tesni glanced around the kitchen, then toward the hallway, then back again. The house had a particular quality of silence that meant only one thing.
"Where's Aine?"
"She left already," Hilda replied, turning back to the counter.
Tesni exhaled slowly. "I didn't meet her." She leaned against the counter, something between disappointment and mild frustration settling on her face. "She was gone before I even got down." A pause. "I wanted to tell her something."
"You can tell her when you go to school for the inspection," Hilda offered, reaching over and slinging Tesni's bag smoothly onto her shoulder with the automatic efficiency of a woman who had been doing small things like this for years.
Tesni straightened, already moving. "How about breakfast?" Hilda called after her.
"Pack it for me," Tesni said over her shoulder, her feet already carrying her toward the door with the cheerful momentum that was entirely and exclusively hers. "Yesbye, Mum!"
The door swung behind her before the words had fully landed.
Hilda stood in the quiet kitchen for a moment, the smile still sitting on her lips, small and private. She shook her head gently.
"Ok," she murmured to no one in particular, and reached for the container.
The house settled back into its morning silence.
Mendoza's phone buzzed against the polished surface of his desk, a small sound that somehow filled the entire room.
He answered it. And then his grip tightened, just slightly, the kind of tightening a man does when he recognises a voice he has been hoping not to hear.
"Mr. Mendoza." The voice on the other end was measured and cold, the kind of cold that had never needed to raise itself to be felt. "What were you saying again?"
Mendoza cleared his throat. "I said I'm facing some crisis in my business right now." He kept his voice level with the effort of a man who had been keeping things level for a very long time. "So I will pay you later. I just need to extend the time. That's all."
A brief pause.
The kind of pause that is not uncertainty. The kind that is deliberate.
"Mr. Mendoza." The voice returned without warmth, without hurry. "You have been owing me for the past ten years."
"But I've been paying you in bits every time," Mendoza said quickly, his voice dropping half a register despite himself. "Please. Understand me."
Another silence. Longer this time. The weight of it pressing through the line like something physical.
Then, finally.
"I'm giving you just a week to pay my money."
Mendoza exhaled, the breath leaving him slowly, carefully, like a man releasing pressure he could not afford to show. "Thank you very much."
"Just a week," the man repeated. Firm. Immovable. A wall dressed in quiet words.
"Thank you," Mendoza said again.
"You can leave."
The line went dead.
The man set his phone down with the unhurried ease of someone for whom this conversation had been a minor inconvenience in an otherwise ordinary afternoon. He did not look troubled. He did not look angry.
He simply looked toward his secretary, who stood waiting at the appropriate distance with the practiced stillness of someone trained never to exist until called upon.
"Come here."
The secretary stepped forward. "Sir?"
The man's eyes did not move from some middle distance only he could see. When he spoke his voice was quiet. Conversational, almost.
"Follow him to Singapore," he said. "Observe everything about his family."
A beat.
"Yes, sir."
No further instruction was given. None was needed.
The secretary withdrew. The room returned to its silence. And the man sat with the particular stillness of someone who has already decided how a story ends and is simply waiting, without urgency, for the rest of the world to catch up.