[a/n]: content warning for implied child abuse
***
THE HADLEYS ARE CARDBOARD CUT-OUTS OF PERFECTION, glazed over with a patina of old money and champagne parties, so filthily rich it's almost impossible to imagine them as flawed. Their children are smiling, their house is large and their furniture is nearly as shiny as they are.
Their perfection is cardboard for a reason. It's flimsy, papery, a thin veneer to hide the fact that whatever bond they share in front of others disappears behind closed doors.
Hadley knows this. He hates it.
He pokes the lamb roast on his plate. The incident at the shop sits in the back of his mind like an unwanted guest. At best, it's slightly annoying and at worst, it's a little creepy.
Across him, Philippa is subtly flirting with one of the dinner guests—the son of some broker who's sitting right next to him—in the way of glances and sly smiles that makes bile rise in Hadley's throat.
They catch each other's eye. Philippa quirks one perfectly stenciled brow: What are you looking at?
Hadley inclines his head ever so slightly in the direction of the guy next to him: Seriously?
Philippa shrugs her shoulders: I take what I can get.
She goes back to flirting. Hadley goes back to poking at his lamb roast.
Philippa and Hadley look eerily similar in the way that only fraternal twins can, but Philippa tends to have more luck in her love-life than Hadley. Though he isn't sure whether 'love-life' is the right term for what she does with men. Philippa goes through boyfriends in the same way most people would go through underwear. Ever changing, ever present, but always hidden.
At least she has something to distract herself with. Hadley's stuck with staring at the exquisitely roasted lamb, served with pea purée.
"Honey, are you alright?" his mother asks. Her voice is laced with worry. "You're looking a little peaky."
Hadley looks at his mother. Her face is regal and cool, an indifferent marble statue with only the slight crease in her brow that show any hint of concern.
Her concern is as genuine as the paste jewels she wears around her neck. It's meant for show, really, to keep up the fiction of the Hadleys being a perfectly happy family where mothers don't hit their sons and where fathers don't look on with coolness. It's a fiction Hadley is perfectly content with keeping up.
"Oh, I'm fine," he says. "Just not hungry."
"Well," she says, "do try and eat something. Marzia worked so hard on this. It is exquisite, don't you agree, Jack?"
The broker nods.
Hadley's father sits at the corner of the table, aloof and distant, as always. He has a lopsided smile on his face and he gazes expansively at the table, like an absent-minded king. Everything about him suggests blurriness—his face is forgettable, his voice is bland, he never speaks until necessary. Hadley sometimes has trouble recalling his father's face.
He doesn't know how someone like his father could've ended up with his mother. It's entirely possible that his mother may have reproduced via mitosis—no father required—and pushed out two green-eyed, brown-haired clones of herself.
Hadley stabs his roast.
The broker starts talking to him. "I've heard you played against my son."
