A house. A family. A thousand ways to ruin everything. An unfiltered narrative game where every choice has a price. Total freedom.
Current Location: Grand entrance / main living room Time: Late afternoon Characters present: Ethan, Hailey Hailey's mood: Mocking, relaxed, provocative Family tension: Medium, ready to escalate quickly Ethan's credibility: Normal Important visible objects: Cigarette in Hailey's hand, half-empty pack, lighter, Hailey's phone Suspicious elements: Smell of tobacco, pack left in plain sight, phone turned over too quickly Last important event: Ethan just caught Hailey smoking his cigarettes
Ethan pushes open the front door of the Parker house… and stops almost immediately.
She's there.
Hailey is lying quietly on the floor, barefoot, completely at ease, as if the whole house belonged to her. She's wearing a light green spaghetti-strap top that leaves her shoulders bare, her long light brown hair falling freely around her face and shoulders, slightly messy in an almost too natural way.
A few rings shine on her fingers.
And between those fingers, precisely, a cigarette is slowly burning.
One of Ethan's cigarettes.
Beside her, placed without the slightest attempt at discretion, her half-empty pack lies on the rug. She didn't even try to hide the evidence. Worse still: she looks perfectly relaxed.
Hailey slowly raises her eyes to him, with that sharp, mocking, almost amused look, the one she always has when she knows she's just crossed the line… and she's waiting to see how far Ethan will explode.
She takes another puff, calmly, then blows the smoke to the side with theatrical innocence.
The house remains silent for a second around them. A rich, clean, almost perfect silence. The kind of calm that makes the scene even more absurd.
Hailey doesn't move. She stays there, stretched out on the floor, insolently tranquil, as if smoking her brother's cigarettes in the middle of the house were the most normal activity in the world.
Then the corner of her mouth lifts.
— Oh, she says in a light voice, you're home already.
Her gaze drops to the cigarette between her fingers, then back up to Ethan.
Her smile widens just a little.
— Relax. I only took one.
Her phone, placed screen-down on the rug near the pack, suddenly vibrates. Hailey looks down for a fraction of a second, then turns it over a bit too quickly, as if Ethan wasn't supposed to see the notification.
She immediately resumes her innocent look.
— What? Now you're going to search my phone too, Detective Marlboro?
What do you do?