Chapter 5 What the Rag Remembers

 POV: Damian

I found Nate in the garage, wiping down his car for no reason at all. He did that sometimes when something was eating at him. Our father used to say idle hands meant a guilty mind, and I think Nate spent half his life trying to prove the old man wrong by keeping his hands busy.

The garage smelled like leather cleaner and gasoline. Nate's car was already spotless. He kept wiping the same spot on the hood anyway, over and over, like the motion itself was the point.

I pulled the rag out of my pocket and held it up without a word.

Nate's hand froze mid wipe.

"You still have that?" he asked, too casual, the same tone he used earlier when he told me it probably belonged to an old groundskeeper.

"I've been carrying it around all day," I said. "Can't stop thinking about it."

"It's just an old rag, Damian."

"Then why do you look like I'm holding a loaded gun?"

His jaw worked. For a second I watched him search for something easy to say, the way he always did when he wanted to smooth over a rough patch in a conversation. This time, nothing easy came.

"I don't know what you want me to tell you," he said. "I don't know whose initials those are."

"You didn't even look at them."

"I don't need to look. It's a rag from a boathouse nobody has cleaned properly in years."

I studied my brother's face the way I used to study contracts before signing them, looking for the fine print people hoped I would miss. Nate had always been easy to read, even as a kid. He could bluff at cards but never at anything that actually mattered.

Right now, he looked like a man standing at the edge of something he was terrified to fall into.

"Nate."

"What."

"Look at me and tell me you don't know anything about this rag, and I'll drop it. I promise."

He looked at me. For one full second, I thought he might actually do it, might actually meet my eyes and lie clean through his teeth the way our mother could without blinking.

Instead his gaze slid sideways, toward the garage door, toward anywhere that wasn't my face.

"I have a meeting," he said. "With the vineyard supplier. I'm late."

He was not late. He had told me twenty minutes ago that his whole afternoon was free, that he was hoping I would come play pool with him before dinner, something we hadn't done since before the accident.

"Nate."

"I have to go, Damian." His voice cracked slightly on my name, just enough for me to hear it. He grabbed his keys off the workbench and walked past me fast, shoulders tight, like he was trying to outrun the conversation itself.

I let him go.

I stood alone in the garage for a long moment, turning the rag over in my hands one more time. Grease stains, soft fabric, two small initials stitched with more care than skill. Whoever made this had not been a professional seamstress. They had been someone who loved the person these initials belonged to enough to try anyway, sitting with a needle and thread even though their stitches came out slightly crooked.

I thought about Ivy's hands, steady and quick, folding linens in the hallway two days ago. I thought about the way she had gone very still when I mentioned the scar on my palm at breakfast, like she already knew exactly how I got it and was choosing every word carefully to avoid saying so.

I did not let myself finish that thought. It felt too big, too strange, standing alone in a garage with grease on my hands and a piece of fabric I could not explain.

A car door slammed somewhere near the main house. Vanessa's driver, probably, or one of the caterers Margaret had hired for the party planning. Ashford House never stayed quiet for long these days. There was always some new voice in some new room, discussing flowers or seating charts or fabric samples for a wedding I still could not make myself feel anything about.

I liked quiet. I remembered that much clearly, even if I remembered little else. I liked the sound of an engine coming apart under my own hands, liked strong black coffee with nothing added to it, liked the particular kind of silence that came from being somewhere nobody expected anything of me.

None of that silence existed in this house anymore.

Margaret's voice came from the doorway, sharp enough to make me turn.

"There you are," she said. "Vanessa has been asking for you for twenty minutes. What on earth are you doing out here?"

"Thinking," I said.

Her eyes dropped to the rag in my hand, and for just a moment, something flickered across her face. Recognition, maybe. Or fear. It was gone before I could name it, smoothed back into the same composed mask she wore for every occasion, the mask I was starting to understand she never fully took off, even alone.

"What is that?" she asked, too lightly, the exact same tone Nate had used minutes earlier.

Two people. Same careful, practiced casualness. Same fast subject change waiting just behind their eyes.

"Nothing," I said, echoing my own words from days ago, because apparently that was the family motto now. "Just something I found in the boathouse."

"Throw it away," she said. "It's filthy. I don't want you tracking grease through the house before the party."

"I'll clean it," I said, and slid it back into my jacket pocket instead of handing it over.

Something in her expression shifted, quick and controlled, but I caught it this time. She did not like that answer. She did not like it at all.

"Damian." Her voice hardened just slightly. "Give me the rag."

I looked at my own mother, standing in the doorway of a garage she rarely bothered to visit, asking me to hand over a piece of dirty fabric like it mattered more than it should.

"No," I said.

The word surprised even me. I had never told my mother no about anything so small in my entire life, not that I could remember, and I definitely could not remember much these days.

Margaret's mouth tightened. For one long second, we simply stared at each other, and I understood, with sudden and complete certainty, that this rag was not nothing to either of them.

It was something worth lying about.

And I intended to find out exactly what, whatever it cost me to keep pulling this thread.