Chapter Two #2
“Did you.” It wasn’t a question so much as an invitation to correct herself, and when she didn’t take it, something in his expression settled into an almost patient amusement, as though he found her attempted composure more charming than convincing.
He crossed the room slowly, close enough now that she could see the fine grain of the leather up close, close enough that some part of her brain kept insisting she should step back and didn’t.
“There’s food in the kitchen. I’d rather you eat than starve yourself over paperwork, however dedicated that is of you. ”
“I’m fine.”
“You’re lying,” he said, without heat, “which is your right, but I’d ask you to at least be better at it if you intend to keep doing it in this house.
” He straightened, nodding toward the hallway, and something about the shift in his posture told her the moment of proximity, whatever it had been, was deliberately over now, folded away like something he’d decided not to spend yet.
“Come. Walk with me. You’ve been sitting long enough to have earned the air. ”
She didn’t want to walk with him. She wanted, badly, to go back to her room and sit with the image of that photograph until it stopped feeling like something lodged sideways in her chest. But refusing felt riskier than complying, some animal calculation telling her that whatever she’d found, the safest place to be right now was exactly where he could see her, not hiding somewhere he’d have to come looking.
So she walked.
The gardens, up close, were even wilder than they’d looked from her window — hedges gone shapeless, a fountain gone dry and cracked at its base, roses climbing a trellis that had half-collapsed under their weight years ago and never been repaired.
It should have looked neglected. Instead it looked deliberate, like a man who’d decided that letting something fall apart was its own kind of statement.
“You used to keep gardeners,” she said, before she could stop herself.
“I did.” He didn’t look at her, eyes fixed instead on the ruined fountain like it held something worth studying. “I stopped needing things to look presentable for people I no longer let inside.”
They walked in silence for a while after that, gravel crunching under their feet, the cold pressing close enough that Sienna could see her own breath fogging in front of her.
She found herself stealing glances at him sideways, at the parts of his profile the mask didn’t cover — the set of his jaw, the faint lines at the corner of his uncovered eye that suggested he’d once smiled a great deal more than he seemed to now.
It was a strange thing, cataloguing a stranger’s face one visible fragment at a time, like assembling a photograph from torn pieces and hoping the picture made sense before all the pieces were found.
“You’re staring,” he said, without turning his head.
“I didn’t think you could tell.”
“I can always tell.” Something in his voice suggested this wasn’t a boast so much as a simple, tired fact, the kind a man arrived at after years of being watched himself and learning, out of necessity, to watch back twice as carefully.
“It’s alright. I’d be more concerned if you weren’t curious.
Curiosity, in moderation, tells me you’re paying attention.
I only worry when it stops being moderate. ”
“And now you’re letting me inside.”
That got his attention. He turned, and for a moment the mask did nothing to hide the intensity underneath it, dark eyes fixed on her with an focus that felt less like scrutiny and more like hunger held carefully, deliberately, on a very short leash.
“Yes,” he said simply. “I am. I’ve been asking myself why for several months now, and I still don’t have an answer that satisfies me.”
“Several months?” The words came out before she could weigh them. “We only met yesterday.”
Something flickered across what she could see of his face — not quite regret, not quite amusement, something caught uncomfortably between the two.
“We met yesterday,” he agreed, in a tone that made the sentence feel like a technicality rather than a fact.
“Walk faster, Miss Cole. It’s colder out here than it looks, and I’d rather not be responsible for you catching a chill on your first day. ”
He didn’t explain the months. She didn’t ask again, though the question sat lodged behind her teeth the entire walk back to the house, keeping company with the newspaper clipping and the light in the west wing window and every other piece of a puzzle she was beginning to suspect she’d agreed to live inside of without ever seeing the full picture.
Dinner that evening was solitary, a tray left outside her door by Mrs. Voss with no explanation and no company to share it with, and Sienna found she didn’t mind the silence as much as she’d expected to.
It gave her time to think, to lay the day out in front of her like the correspondence she’d spent the morning sorting — this piece here, that piece there, looking for the order that would make the whole thing make sense.
A masquerade in three weeks. A man who hadn’t left this house in years, by the look of the overgrown gardens and the closed-up rooms, suddenly deciding to attend one.
A newspaper clipping with his face in it, unscarred, from some fire that had apparently taken someone else’s life and reshaped his.
A housekeeper offering warnings dressed up as reassurances.
And underneath all of it, unmistakable now that she let herself sit with it, the plain fact that he’d known things about her — her mother’s illness, her financial history, the roommates who didn’t know where she’d gone — long before any interview could have supplied them.
I have a reason to leave this house that outweighs my reasons for staying in it.
She turned the sentence over and over as she got ready for bed, certain there was a second meaning buried beneath the first one, certain that whatever he’d meant by several months wasn’t an accident of phrasing.
Some quieter, more honest part of her understood, even without proof, that she hadn’t stumbled onto this house by luck alone.
That the listing she’d found, the salary that made no sense for the work described, the clothes already waiting in her wardrobe in her exact size — none of it had been chance.
All of it had been built, patiently, deliberately, around the shape of her.
It should have terrified her more than it did.
Instead, standing at the window with the curtains still open, watching the dark bulk of the west wing across the ruined garden, she found herself wondering less about why he’d chosen her and more about how long he’d been watching before he’d finally decided to.
That night, she found a second note on her desk, same slanted hand, same economy of words.
You found something today you weren’t meant to find yet. I won’t pretend otherwise, and I won’t insult you by asking you to forget it. Ask me tomorrow, if you still want to know. I may even tell you the truth. — D.A.
Sienna sat with the note for a long time before she finally set it down, and when she looked up toward the window, toward the dark shape of the west wing across the ruined garden, she found herself hoping — despite every reasonable instinct telling her not to — that tomorrow would come quickly.
She fell asleep, eventually, with the curtains still open and the lamp still burning, and if anyone stood watching from across the garden that night, she was too far into her own dreaming to notice, or to care.