Chapter 6
After Hours
“When he touches you like you’re a precious thing — and everyone notices”
RHYS
I couldn’t sleep because my hands smelled like cinnamon.
I’d washed them four times — soap, water, the aggressive scrubbing of a man trying to remove evidence — and still, when I raised them to my face in the darkness, there it was.
Cinnamon. Brown sugar. The ghost of a pie I’d made from a memory I shouldn’t have kept, for a woman I had no business remembering this clearly.
The rational part of my brain understood: scent memory, hippocampus, olfactory input.
Biology. Nothing to lose sleep over. The irrational part — the part that had staged a hostile takeover around week two — kept replaying the moment Sloane bit into that pie and her face did something I’d never seen it do.
Not Camera 2. Not the Queen’s composure.
A wall cracked open, and what was behind it was real and undefended and I’d done that with flour and butter and a recipe she didn’t know I’d been carrying like contraband for three weeks.
If my engineering professor could see me now, he’d recommend demolition.
The cracks were showing, the kind that didn’t respond to reinforcement, and the worst part — the part that had me staring at the ceiling at midnight as if I’d discovered my entire thesis was built on feelings — was that I didn’t want to repair the damage.
I wanted to see how far the whole thing could lean before it fell.
I got up, pulled on a hoodie, and went to the garden.
Not because I’d noticed she came here every night between 11:45 and midnight and sat on the same bench near the jasmine for exactly forty-five minutes.
I went because I couldn’t sleep. That was the story, and I was committed to it, even though the only person I was telling it to was myself.
She was already there.
Of course she was, sitting on the wrought-iron bench with her shoes kicked off and her knees pulled up, wearing an oversized cardigan that swallowed her frame and made her look unthreatening — a lie of the highest order.
Sloane Mitchell in a cardigan was more dangerous than Sloane in full Queen regalia, because the Queen was a performance I could analyze and dismiss.
The woman in the oversized sweater with bare feet and mascara slightly smudged under her left eye was a problem I hadn’t designed a solution for.
“Stalking is frowned upon by most legal systems,” she said without looking up. Her voice had that particular texture it got late at night when the producer’s earpiece was out — softer, lower. The voice equivalent of taking off armor.
“I’m not stalking. I’m conducting a site inspection.
” I sat at the opposite end of the bench, maintaining what I estimated was a safe distance — three feet, though my spatial awareness had become unreliable near her, an embarrassment for a man who measured things for a living. “The railing has an issue.”
“You came out here at midnight to check the railing.”
“I have a professional obligation to notice deficiencies.”
“And a personal obligation to avoid admitting why you’re actually here?”
As often, the corner of her mouth curved — the version she used when she’d caught someone in a lie and was enjoying the squirm.
Asymmetric, more pronounced on the left side, disarmingly effective.
That I’d developed a taxonomy for her smiles in three weeks was information I was choosing not to share with my therapist. Or anyone. Or myself.
“The pie was good,” she said, after a pause long enough to constitute its own statement.
“It was adequate.”
“It made me cry on national television.”
“That was unintentional.” True. Making the Queen weep into baked goods in front of thirty crew members had not been part of my plan.
My plan had been simpler: make the pie, demonstrate competency, avoid examining why her grandmother’s recipe had lodged itself in my memory — a load I couldn’t set down without losing my balance.
The crying had been collateral damage I’d replayed fourteen times since this afternoon.
Not that I was counting. I was counting.
“Can I tell you a weird thing?” She was looking at the jasmine now, the blooms that had overwhelmed the trellis, and her voice had dropped into a register that made me want to do reckless things. “You’re going to tell me regardless of my answer.”
“I watch true crime to fall asleep.” She said it how people confess embarrassing medical conditions — quickly, already bracing for judgment.
“Murder documentaries. Serial killers. Cold cases where they find the body twenty years later. That’s my bedtime routine. Chamomile tea and forensic pathology.”
Of all the things she could have chosen to tell me in the dark — her dreams, her fears, her hopes for the show — she’d chosen this.
Her most embarrassing comfort. Offered as a test: Are you going to make me feel weird about who I am?
I’d listened to enough 99% Invisible episodes about “defensive architecture” — benches with armrests designed to prevent sleeping, spikes on ledges — to recognize a structure built to keep people out.
She was testing whether I’d sit on the bench anyway.
I didn’t laugh. Didn’t make a joke about her sanity or the statistical improbability of being murdered by a stranger. Her shoulders had tensed — bracing for the reaction she always got, from people who used morbid as diagnosis.
“That makes sense,” I said.
She turned, and the surprise was genuine — not the performed surprise she used on camera but real startlement that made her forget to arrange her features. “It makes sense?”
“Monsters are predictable. They follow patterns. Motive, method, escalation — it’s all documentable, all ultimately comprehensible even when it’s horrifying.” I paused. “People in this house smile while they’re plotting elimination. That’s considerably harder to fall asleep to.”
She stared at me long enough that I began to wonder if I’d miscalculated — gone too clinical, too detached.
But then she settled into the bench in a way that was new, a posture that had stopped bracing for impact.
She drew her knees closer to her chest, tucking her feet under the cardigan, and the gesture was so unguarded — so completely at odds with the woman who’d eliminated three men on camera last week without flinching — that I had to look away briefly to manage what it did to my breathing.
“Most people just tell me I’m morbid,” she said quietly.
“Most people don’t pay attention to why you need what you need.”
She was quiet for a moment. Then: “That might be the nicest thing anyone’s said to me on this show.”
“It wasn’t meant to be nice. It was meant to be accurate.”
“With you, those seem to be the same thing.”
The silence that followed was weight-bearing — not empty but doing work that words couldn’t manage. The jasmine released its scent in waves, and somewhere inside the mansion a door closed and we were alone in a way that was starting to feel inevitable.
She winced. Small — a micro-flinch as she shifted, her feet flexing against the cold stone — but I saw it because I saw everything she did, a fact I was choosing not to examine.
Fourteen hours in those heels. I’d noticed.
I noticed things about her how I noticed cracks in foundations, compulsively, with a specificity that was becoming professionally embarrassing.
“Your left arch is compensating for your right,” I said before I could stop myself.
She looked at me with an expression I couldn’t immediately categorize. “Are you diagnosing my feet right now?”
“I’m making an observation about weight distribution. Occupational hazard.” A reasonable person would have stopped there. But my mouth, operating on a separate circuit from my survival instincts, had already formed the words: “Do you want me to?”
Her eyes widened. The offer hung between us, too specific to be casual.
“You don’t have to—”
“I know.” My voice came out lower than intended, rougher, and I recognized with distant alarm that this was what lived underneath the performance. “Do you want me to?”
She didn’t answer with words. She shifted on the bench, turning slightly, and extended her left foot toward me with the deliberate caution of a woman offering a hand grenade to a bomb disposal expert.
A fact about me, relevant here: I didn’t touch people.
Ever. The back-slapping and shoulder-gripping that other men seemed to find as natural as breathing.
Three weeks in this mansion and I hadn’t shaken a single hand I had any choice about shaking.
The producer had noted it in my file — I’d seen the clipboard.
Contestant displays touch-averse behavior.
Possible on-camera angle. They’d categorized my damage as content.
But here I was, reaching for her, and the reach felt like the most voluntary thing I’d done in thirty years.
I took her foot in my hands.
Her skin was cool from the night air and impossibly soft, and my hands were too warm, too calloused from years of site work, and the contrast between us felt aggressive in a way neither of us had consented to.
My thumb found the arch and pressed, and she made a sound — quiet, involuntary, somewhere between relief and surprise — and my brain executed a full system shutdown.
No metaphors left. No analysis. Just the bone of her ankle under my palm and a pulse I could feel beneath my thumb, rapid and steady, and the realization that I was in the process of ruining myself and I didn’t want to stop.
My hands were shaking.