16. Knox
— · —
Knox
I’ve developed a problem, and the problem is oranges.
Specifically, the fact that I now buy them without thinking.
I was at the market yesterday, a place I almost never go because that’s what staff is for, and I found myself standing in front of a crate of the small ones with the loose peel, turning one over in my hand, already calculating how many she’d go through in a week.
I put them down. Walked to the next aisle. Came back and bought a dozen.
Idris caught me restocking the bowl this morning and didn’t say a word, which is somehow worse than if he’d said every word. He just looked at the oranges, looked at me, and returned to his screen with the quiet satisfaction of a man adding evidence to a file he’s been building for weeks.
“Don’t,” I told him.
“I didn’t say anything, sir.”
“You were thinking it.”
“I was thinking about the quarterly projections.” He turned a page. “Though if you’d like to discuss the oranges, my schedule is open.”
“Your schedule is about to include unemployment.”
“Of course, sir. Shall I add that to the projections as well?”
This is my life now. Buying fruit for a woman I’m pretending to date while my assistant builds a case against me with his eyes.
The arrangement is working. That’s the thing I keep coming back to when the rest of it gets confusing.
Adriana is everywhere she needs to be, the company turnaround is gaining traction, and every room we walk into together tilts another degree in her favor.
Gerald’s back on board, two more old clients have returned, and the foundation’s spring portfolio looks stronger than it has in years.
All of it works.
The part that doesn’t work is the part where I’ve started thinking about her at odd hours for no operational reason.
The way her pen taps against her lip when she’s planning.
The sound she makes when she laughs without meaning to, the surprised one, as though she’s still getting used to being allowed.
The warmth of her shoulder against mine in the car, which I’ve started driving slower to keep for longer, a fact I will take to my grave.
It’s the role. The role requires attentiveness, and I’m attentive by nature, and the two have simply merged in a way that looks like caring but is actually professionalism.
I’m aware of how stupid that sounds. I choose not to examine it.
***
I’m fifteen minutes early to her building because somewhere in the last few weeks I started being early to things that involve her, which is another data point I’m refusing to process.
The lobby door is propped open in the afternoon sun, and I’m crossing the street toward it when I stop.
Adriana is on the sidewalk outside her building, and she isn’t alone.
A man stands with her. Tall, lean, tanned in a way that suggests he hasn’t been in this city for a long time. His sleeves are rolled to the elbows and his posture is loose, unhurried, the body language of someone who has never once worried about being late to anything.
She’s laughing.
Not the polished laugh, the social one she deploys at galas and client dinners.
The real one, the one that comes out before she can catch it, head tipped back, her hand on his arm.
He says something else and she shoves his shoulder, still laughing, and he catches her hand and pulls her into a hug that she falls into with the ease of a woman who’s been hugged by this person a thousand times before.
My feet stop moving.
The feeling arrives before the thought does, fast and physical, a heat that climbs through my chest and tightens around my ribs.
My jaw clenches. My hands, which were reaching for my phone, go still at my sides, and I stand on the sidewalk across from her building watching a woman I have no claim on pressed against a man who holds her the way I haven’t.
Who is that?
The question burns through me, ugly and irrational, and I know it’s irrational, I know I have no ground to stand on, and the knowing does absolutely nothing to stop the feeling from setting up camp in my sternum and refusing to leave.
She pulls back from the hug and the man holds her at arm’s length, looking at her face, saying something I can’t hear that makes her smile go soft and unguarded in a way I’ve only seen a handful of times.
His thumb brushes her cheek, a gesture so tender and so familiar that my back teeth grind together before I’ve given them permission.
This isn’t the deal. The deal doesn’t include this feeling. The deal is a set of terms I helped write, boundaries she drew, a clean transaction between two people who know exactly what the other is.
Nothing in those terms explains why my blood is running hot over a hug.
I force myself to move. I cross the street, and the man sees me coming first. He turns, hand still on Adriana’s shoulder, and studies me with open curiosity and zero concern, the look of someone who has already decided he’s not threatened.
“Knox.” Adriana spots me, and the brightness in her face when she turns is a whole separate problem I’m not equipped for. “You’re early.”
“I’m always early.” I’m not. She knows I’m not. I straighten my jacket and extend my hand to the stranger with a smile I’ve spent years perfecting for men I immediately dislike. “Knox Beaufort.”
“I know who you are.” The man takes my hand and shakes it, firm, easy, amused. “You’re shorter than the photos suggest.”
“And you are?”
“Thaddeus.” He grins, and the grin rearranges his whole face into a thing I suddenly recognize, because I’ve been looking at a version of it for weeks.
The same jaw. The same bone structure. Different eyes, lighter, more reckless, but the family is right there once you see it.
“The other Rosewood brother. The one who had the sense to leave.”
Brother.
The relief hits me so fast and so hard that I nearly laugh out loud with it, and the near-laugh is so damning that I have to turn it into a cough and press my fist to my mouth while the whole stupid jealous edifice I built in the last ninety seconds collapses inside my chest.
Her brother. Of course it’s her brother. The tall, tanned, easy man who holds her the way family holds you, whose thumb on her cheek was affection and not desire, who looked at me without concern because he isn’t competing with me for anything.
“The prodigal Rosewood,” I manage, recovering. “Adriana’s mentioned you.”
“She’s mentioned you too.” Thaddeus crosses his arms, and the amusement doesn’t leave his face. “Quite a bit, actually. For a woman who keeps insisting it’s nothing serious, she talks about you a disproportionate amount.”
“Thad.” Adriana’s voice carries a warning.
“I’m being welcoming.” He spreads his hands. “This is me being welcoming. Ask Conrad, I’m the welcoming one.”
Adriana presses two fingers to the bridge of her nose in the universal gesture of a sibling being tested, and I find myself grinning despite everything, because the dynamic between them is instantly readable. He needles. She endures. They adore each other.
We end up at a place around the corner, the kind of small restaurant that doesn’t try too hard, and Thaddeus talks the way he moves, loose and expansive, filling the room without crowding it.
He’s been overseas for years. Singapore, then Hong Kong, then a stretch in Cape Town he describes with the fondness of a man who found himself somewhere far from home and decided to stay.
“The family thought I was running away,” he says, tilting his beer.
“And I was. At first. But once you’ve been somewhere long enough, the running turns into building.
I’ve got a venture out there now, a development firm, small but growing.
The kind of work where you can see what you’ve made at the end of the day. ”
Thaddeus and I, two men cut from adjacent cloth. I recognize things in him. The restlessness, the allergy to being managed, the way he found his shape by putting distance between himself and the box his family built for him. The difference is that he actually left. I just stayed and misbehaved.
“You came back to check on her,” I say. Not a question.
“I came back because my sister blew up her marriage on a projector screen in front of the whole city and nobody in our family thought to call me about it.” The amusement drops, and what’s underneath it is steady and older than his years.
“Conrad’s been keeping me posted. Leon doesn’t call, but that’s Leon.
And our mother…” He glances at Adriana, who is studying her glass very carefully. “Our mother is our mother.”
The sentence carries more weight than its words, and I catch the edge of a thing I’ve been piecing together since Asher’s. The spill. The brace. The way Adriana expects punishment from a woman’s hands and doesn’t know what to do with warmth.
Thaddeus turns back to me, and the testing begins. It’s different from Conrad’s. Conrad was gentle, curious, sizing me up without menace. Thaddeus is peer-level, direct, the questions arriving wrapped in ease but pointed underneath.
“So. The man dating my sister.” He leans back, crossing an ankle over his knee. “What’s your plan, Beaufort?”
“My plan?”
“With her. The arrangement, the public thing, the whole production. What’s it building toward?”
“That’s between me and Adriana.”
“Except it isn’t, because she’s my sister and I flew eleven hours to sit in this chair.” The grin stays but the eyes don’t match it. “I’m not Conrad. He’ll give you the benefit of the doubt because that’s who he is. I’ll give you the benefit of a straight question and expect a straight answer.”
Adriana shifts beside me. “Thad, leave it.”
“I’m not attacking him. I’m asking.” His eyes stay on me. “A man sits across from me dating my sister, I get to ask what the plan is. It’s a basic courtesy.”
Fair enough. I meet his gaze and give him the version that’s true enough to survive scrutiny.
“The plan is to be useful to her,” I say.
“She’s fighting for a company, a name, and a life that people keep trying to take from her.
I’m making sure the rooms she needs to be in stay open, and I’m making sure the man who wrecked her life regrets it every time he opens a newspaper.
” I pause. “Beyond that, I’m following her lead.
She’s smarter than me. She’ll decide where it goes. ”
Thaddeus studies me for a long moment. Then something in his face eases, not all the way, but enough.
“All right.” He nods once, the testing folding away for now. “She is smarter than you. Good that you know it.”
Adriana exhales beside me, and I can feel her relief in the way her shoulder drops a fraction against mine.
The conversation loosens after that. Thaddeus tells a story about getting lost in a Cape Town market that has Adriana laughing until she has to put her glass down, and I sit back and let the two of them fill the space between them with the years of distance they’re closing in real time.
Then, almost offhand, Thaddeus turns to his sister.
“You should come see it,” he says. “What I’ve built out there. I’ve got room for a partner, and honestly, the operation could use someone with your instincts.”
Adriana blinks. “You’re offering me a job?”
“I’m offering you an option.” He shrugs, but the casual is deliberate.
“You’ve spent your whole life inside this family’s walls, fighting for a seat at a table someone else built.
I’m telling you there’s a whole world outside those walls where you could build your own table.
No family name attached, no legacy to carry. Just you.”
The words land on her differently than they land on me. I can see it in the way her hands still around her glass, the way her eyes go somewhere far and quiet for a second, reaching for a version of herself she hasn’t met yet.
“Think about it,” Thaddeus says. “No rush. Just… think about it.”
She nods slowly. “I’ll think about it.”
And I sit with my beer and my easy smile while a feeling I can’t name settles into the pit of my stomach. Because what Thaddeus just offered her isn’t a job. It’s a door. A whole future on the other side of the world, away from the family, the scandal, the company, the arrangement.
Away from me.
Which shouldn’t matter, because the arrangement has an expiration date, and I’ve always known that. We both have. The deal ends when the revenge is done and the inheritance is settled, and then she goes her way and I go mine, and that’s the clean, logical, watertight conclusion I signed up for.
So I can’t explain why the thought of her on the other side of the world makes the beer taste wrong in my mouth.
Thaddeus leaves first, hugging Adriana long and hard on the sidewalk, the same hug that burned through me an hour ago and now just makes my chest ache in a different way. He shakes my hand and holds it a beat.
“Take care of her, Beaufort.” Quiet, just for me. “And if you can’t, have the decency to let her go before she has to be the one who walks.”
He goes. Adriana watches him disappear down the block, and when she turns back to me, her eyes are bright and full and she’s holding it all behind a smile that isn’t quite steady.
“I liked him,” I say. “He’s got the same instinct you have. Knows where the exits are.”
“He’s the one who taught me to look for them.” She wraps her arms around herself. “He’s always known when to leave. I’ve never been good at that part.”
We stand on the sidewalk in the fading light, and I should say the thing that sits behind my teeth, the thing the jealousy tried to tell me and the relief confirmed.
Instead, I offer her my arm, and she takes it, and we walk to the car in a quiet that’s heavier than either of us is ready to name.
I open her door. She pauses before getting in, turning to look at me with an expression I can’t read, and for a second I think she’s going to say the thing too.
She doesn’t. She gets in, and I close the door, and I stand in the street and let the truth I’ve been outrunning for weeks catch up to me in the falling dark.
The jealousy wasn’t the arrangement talking.
That was me. Just me.
And I have no idea what to do with that.