Turn 9 of 11

Ask Marchetti what she's planning to write

You watch her hand, the one hovering near the marker. It's not reaching. It's just there, the way a hand rests near a phone when you're waiting for a call. You know this moment. You had it yourself, twenty minutes ago, standing right where she's standing, with the same itch in your fingers and the same certainty that whatever gets written next changes the shape of everything.

"What are you going to write?"

Marchetti doesn't look at you. She looks at the board — the whole board, top to bottom, the way someone surveys a landscape before deciding where to build. Her jaw is set. Her fingers twitch once, and the marker swings on its string.

"I haven't decided yet."

"You came downstairs to write something."

"I came downstairs to see what you wrote." She turns her head just enough to catch you in her peripheral vision.

"And now I've seen it."

There it is again — that careful, measured quality in everything she does. Like she's playing a game of chess where she can see three moves ahead but isn't sure which colour she's playing. She pulls her hand back from the marker and tucks it into the sleeve of the jumper, and the gesture looks like surrender but you don't believe it for a second.

"Marchetti, what does the host actually do? You wrote the rule. You must have had something in mind."

"I had something in mind," she says, and her voice has gone quiet — not soft, not gentle, but reduced, like a volume knob being turned down. "It didn't work. The board took the rule and left me with nothing. And now you've written your name and you're standing there asking me what happens next, which means it didn't work for you either."

She's right. She's absolutely right, and the fact that she knows it before you've said it makes the back of your neck go cold. You wrote PRIYA IS THE HOST and the board accepted it — Jake believes it, Dermot believes it, the flat believes it — but you can't feel it. There's no power, no sense of authority, no warm rush of being in charge. Just a title on a whiteboard and a girl standing in a kitchen pretending she knows what she's doing.

"So what now?" you say.

Marchetti looks at the marker. Looks at you. Her eyes are dark and tired and calculating, and she says nothing, and the silence fills the kitchen like smoke.