The podcast smells like eucalyptus candles and old money — a taste you can buy but only from family. Sophia Voss sits cross-legged in her favorite egg-shaped chair, a bright ring light casting a glow around her face, waiting for the red light to turn off. I’m now beginning to record. It’s been a year since she learned how to tilt her chin so the light hit her cheekbones, and how long to pause before sharing a “hard truth” so it sounded vulnerable rather than rehearsed.
Outside the light, Selene poured her fourth vodka soda of the day into a mug that said WORLD’S OKAYEST SISTER, a gift from a fan. She raised it in a pretend toast and mouthed one word to her sister. Sophia didn’t blink. She felt nothing. This word in a long time. Before, it was part of the family business.
They made their show with a small apartment and a ring light. Unwaxed started with two women, used equipment, and forty listeners — polite sorority sisters. That's the story they tell — the simple beginnings version that sounds good in articles. But the actual story was that their dad gave them a studio and a publicist’s number. They moved back home.
Forty listeners grew to forty thousand in a month because algorithms love a famous last name, even when they pretend. She smiled — not her podcast smile, but a real one, thinner and colder. Luckily, we’re good at hiding things.
The Voss estate sat above Coldwater Canyon, a low, modern spread of glass and steel that architecture blogs once called "transparent." Every wall that mattered was a window — the kitchen, the pool deck, the home theater where Roman Voss had once screened his own films for studio executives who no longer returned his calls.
Visible, save for concealed matters.
The wine cellar, for instance. It sat below the west wing, accessible by a door with a keypad that she had seen no one use except Scarlet, and only ever alone, and only ever at night.
When she inquired, Scarlet once stated, “It’s a storage.” Eighteen years old and already better at deflection than most adults twice her age. "Dad's old stuff. Boxes. Nothing interesting."
Sophia hasn't pushed. In the Voss house, nothing interesting was a password everyone understood; it meant don't.
She stood at the kitchen window that evening, watching the pool lights flicker on as the sun dropped behind the hills, and thought — not for the first time — that a house built of glass was, paradoxically, the easiest place in the world to hide something. You had to convince people that everything visible couldn't be a secret.
Their father made it their way on purpose, an architect friend had t tell her once at a dinner party, half-joking. “He doesn't trust walls,” the man had said, swirling his wine. *He likes to see everything coming. Sophia had laughed along. Now, older, she wondered if it wasn't the opposite — if a man who'd spent decades being watched by cameras had simply built himself a house that watched back, so that nothing could ever surprise him in his own home.
Except it had. She was almost certain of that now — certain in the particular, cold way she was certain of things she didn't want to look at directly. Something had changed in Scarlet over the past year. Something had key pad door, and it wasn't boxes.