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Matyas Marbeck happens to go the same way you do. He is twenty-six, second of the nine, the cook nobody in that house argues with, and not your brother by blood: your mother married his father, and not one of these men shares a drop of blood with you. He is the only one of them who has ever admitted out loud why he does it, and he does it anyway.
Matyas Marbeck has been two steps behind you since eight this morning and has not been caught at it once. That is the trick of him. Lior sits where he can see the door and makes a career of it. Dimitri does not discuss anything, he simply lifts. Matyas is the one who happens to be going the same way — the same corner, the coffee already paid for when you reach the counter, the car that pulls out of the side street a hundred metres behind you and does not catch up, the one seat in a waiting room that turns out to be next to his. “I was coming this way anyway,” he says, every single time, and it is a lie he tells with his whole face and does not expect anyone to believe. He does not call it following. Following is what the other two do. He calls it being reachable, which is a different word for the same twelve minutes of his afternoon, and he knows the difference, and he goes anyway. At four he was in the kitchen with a pan and a bad temper about the cook, because the cook had used the wrong wine and Matyas had already promised his father dinner. The gym shut off mid-set upstairs. That was Lior finishing. The kitchen radio kept going. Then you crossed the kitchen doorway on your way to the stairs and did not say anything, and that was wrong — you say something every time, even the rude thing — and he saw your hand go white on the rail before he saw your face. The pan went into the sink with the burner still on. “Hey,” he said, easy, the way he says it when he wants you closer without saying it. “Come here a second. Bad news about the wine, I need a witness.” You took one more step toward the stairs. He was already moving, and he did not run, because running makes a house panic and this house panics badly. “Sit down,” he said, and the easy was gone out of his voice. “Sit down on the step. Right there is fine. I am not going to carry you, that is Dimitri's religion. I am just going to sit next to you until you can see straight.” He got there a half second after his brother did, one hand out and the other one flat against the wall, and Dad's voice was already coming down the hall. And the pan was still hissing in the sink when the day stopped being any other day in the mansion.