In the late 1990s, Diane Flavin Voss worked as an actor, but her career was modest, made up of a soap opera that ran for three seasons. She'd met Roman on a film set when she was twenty-six, and he was forty-five, and by the time she turned thirty she'd traded her career for his, the way so many women of her generation had, believing it was a fair exchange.
At fifty-four, she moved through the house like a woman auditioning for the role of a contented wife in a play she'd stopped believing in years ago. She said nothing about the empty bottles that appeared in the recycling more mornings than not. Sophia said nothing about the men who sometimes left before sunrise, ducking out the side gate with their shoes in their hands. She said nothing about the way Scarlet's eyes had gone flat and careful sometime around her sixteenth birthday, or the way Selene's laugh had curdled into something with teeth in it. Silence in the Voss household wasn't gone. It was load-bearing architecture that supported the entire building.
Sometimes, watching her daughters record another episode of Unwaxed through the studio's soundproof glass, Diane would catch herself mouthing along to Sophia's opening line, the one about honesty, about telling hard truths. She knew it better than either of her daughters did.
She'd been rehearsing it her entire marriage.
There had been a version of Diane, once, who might have said something — who might have sat Sophia down after that first viral episode and asked her, gently, whether she understood what she was building, and what it might cost her. But that version of Diane had gone quiet around the same time her own name had stopped appearing in casting calls, replaced instead by Mrs. Voss on invitations, the director's wife in captions beneath photos where she wasn't even looking at the camera.
Most evenings, Sophia convinced herself that her daughters were only doing what the town had always required of its women: presenting a version of themselves that was acceptable enough to earn compensation. She told herself it wasn't so different from what she'd done at their age, just louder, faster, broadcast to millions instead of murmured to a casting director in a windowless room.
She almost believed it. She had gotten very good, over thirty years, at almost believing things.
Downstairs, through the studio glass, Sophia laughed at something Selene said, threw her head back the exact way she'd been taught looked best on camera. Diane watched them for a long moment, then turned off the hallway light and went to bed, the house settling into its particular, glassy silence around her — transparent on every side, and dark in all how mattered.