2. Chapter 2
Jade
By Thursday evening, three hours after I first set foot in this house, I have learned two things about Graham Sterling.
He runs on black coffee and control. He's rapidly running out of both.
I observe him the way a bomb squad might study a ticking suitcase. He is currently vibrating at a frequency that suggests explosion or structural collapse.
He stands by the window of the half-finished living room, his silhouette sharp against the gray light of Linden Lake. He looks expensive, dangerous, and like he hasn't slept since the turn of the century.
"The agency said you were the best," he says, his back to me. His voice is a low rumble that vibrates in the floorboards. "They didn't mention you'd be bringing a bright green monster to a business meeting."
I set my bag on a crate of Italian marble tiles and tuck Barnaby safely inside. "Technically, it wasn't a meeting. It was a rescue mission. Your daughter was barricaded in a bathroom and you were trying to use logic on a six-year-old. That's like trying to teach a cat to file taxes."
He turns.
His eyes are the color of a storm over the Atlantic.
Cold, deep, and fixed on me with enough intensity to make a lesser woman check her pulse.
I just raise an eyebrow. I'm twenty-seven years old, and I grew up watching my mother scrub the floors of his father's estate.
I know exactly what lies beneath the Sterling polish.
"I don't appreciate being told how to handle my daughter in my own home," he says, stepping into the center of the room.
He's taller than he looked on the news. He carries himself with the kind of authority that expects the world to tilt on its axis just for him.
"Then handle her," I counter, crossing my arms. "Because right now, Iris isn't being handled.
She's being managed like a PR crisis. This house is a construction zone, the town thinks you're a New York vulture, and you look like you're one bad headline away from a total meltdown. If I'm staying, things change."
He closes the distance in three strides. Stops just inside my personal space. Close enough that I can smell him.
Expensive sandalwood, cold lake air, and the faint bitter scent of black coffee.
He's trying to intimidate me. A classic Sterling move. The problem is, I know what these men look like when no one is polishing them.
"What things?" he asks, his voice dropping.
He's so close I can see the faint flecks of gold in his irises. The shape of his jaw. The way his shoulders fill that charcoal blazer.
Purely professional observation.
"Rule one," I say, not moving an inch. "I'm in charge of Iris's schedule.
No more shuffling her between assistants.
Rule two, you eat dinner with her. No phones.
No mergers. Just chicken nuggets and conversation.
And rule three, you stop looking at me like I'm an intruder you're about to have escorted off the premises. "
"You're awfully sure of yourself for someone who took a city bus to her job interview, Ms. Alvarez."
I keep my face flat. I do not let him see that he found a nerve.
"Public transit is character-building. You should try it sometime."
A small, humorless smile tugs at the corner of his mouth. "And if I refuse?"
"Then go back to negotiating with the bathroom door. I'm sure you'll reach a settlement by morning." I tilt my head. "But you can't afford that. Not with the court investigator coming, and not with those in-laws sharpening their knives."
The air shifts.
The mention of the custody battle hits him like a physical blow. He doesn't flinch. He just goes still. A terrifying kind of quiet. He looks out the window, and for a second the mask of the CEO slips. He looks like a father who is terrified of losing the only thing he has left.
"Fine," he says. "The carriage house is ready. Move in tonight. But if I see that puppet near a business call, it's going in the lake."
"Barnaby is a very strong swimmer," I mutter as he walks away.
He doesn't turn back. I see his hand flex at his side. A man who wants to punch the world into submission, finding out that grief doesn't play by his rules.
I spend the afternoon exploring the lake house. The construction crew has cleared out for the day. No power tools in use, no voices. Just the hollow echo of a building still figuring out what it wants to be. It smells of sawdust and expensive despair.
Iris is in her room, curled up with her stuffed owl, looking tiny in the middle of a humongous bed.
I don't push. I sit on the floor nearby and start humming a song my mother used to sing while she worked. Slow, steady, grounding.
After a while, Iris slides off the bed and pads over to me, holding out her stuffed owl.
"This is Judge."
"Hi, Judge."
"He's grey and gold."
"I can see that. He's very handsome."
She turns him in her hands and points to one glass eye. The corner of it has a small chip in it, the gold paint worn down to something duller underneath.
"He has a chip."
"He does. How did that happen?"
"He had a fight."
"A fight."
"With the corner of the nightstand."
"Who won?"
She considers the question with the gravity of a small judge herself. "The nightstand."
"That's a tough loss."
"Yes."
"Well." I tip my head to study Judge more carefully. "I think the chip proves he's a survivor."
She goes very still. Studies the owl, then me.
"That's what my mom used to say."
"Yeah?"
"She said it about lots of things."
"She sounds like she was very smart."
Iris nods slowly and tucks Judge back under her chin. Then she turns her hazel eyes up to me, very serious.
"Are you going to live here?"
"In the small house behind the big one. Yes."
"For how long?"
The question comes out flat. The way a child asks something she has already learned the bad answer to.
I think about the contract on Graham's desk, the eleven weeks until a courtroom, the way she asked it like she's been keeping a list of people who said for a while.
"For as long as you want me to," I say.
She thinks about that. Then she puts Judge on the windowsill, very carefully, and turns him so he faces the lake.
"Okay," she says.
Outside, a duck works his way along the dock with the energy of a man who owns the place and resents visitors. He stops at a crust of bread near the dock cleat, considers it, and walks away.
"Who's that?" I ask, nodding toward the water.
Iris presses her face to the glass. "He lives here. He doesn't like people yet."
"Yet?"
She thinks about it. "He's working on it."
"Does he have a name?"
"He hasn't told me yet."
"Fair enough. I won't push him."
I make Iris a snack of apple slices. She eats half.
I make a note in my head about portion sizes for kids who have stopped trusting that food will keep showing up on schedule. I make a second note about how she watches the door every time the wind moves it.
By the time the sun starts to dip toward the water, turning the lake into a sheet of bruised purple, I head back down to the kitchen.
Graham is there, staring into the depths of a high-tech refrigerator as if it might offer him the secrets to fatherhood.
He's discarded his jacket. His white shirt sleeves are rolled to the elbow, revealing forearms that are far too muscular for a man who sits in boardrooms all day.
Faint scars. The ghost of a tan. His left ring finger is bare, but the skin is paler there than the rest. Recent enough to still show in September light.
I wonder what those hands look like when they aren't clenched into fists.
"I heard the people on the bus. The town is talking," I say, reaching past him to grab a carton of eggs. My arm brushes his. A brief spark of heat that makes the hair on my neck rise. He doesn't move away. He just watches me with that dark, unreadable gaze.
"The town is always talking," he says. "They think I'm here to pave over their history and build a resort. They want me to fail. They're waiting for the Sterling legacy to catch up with me."
"Maybe give them something else to talk about," I suggest, cracking an egg into a bowl. "Like being a person. It's a novel concept for a Sterling, I know, but it might just work."
He lets out a short bark of a laugh. The first real sound I've heard from him that wasn't a command. Rich and rough, like aged whiskey.
"You really aren't afraid of me, are you?"
I crack a second egg before I answer. "I grew up in the margins of your family, Graham. My mother came home from your father's house some nights and wouldn't tell me why she was quiet. I was seven years old and I already knew what the Sterling name cost the people who worked for it."
He turns his full attention on me.
The space between us feels charged. Heavy with something more than irritation. He takes a step closer. His eyes drop to my mouth for a split second before snapping back to mine.
I feel a sharp ache in my chest I shouldn't be feeling for a man like him.
The moment shatters.
A camera flash cuts through the dusk outside the kitchen window.
White and gone in less than a second. An SUV sits at the edge of the property, right where the gravel meets the public road.
The man with the telephoto lens leans against the driver's door and fires off two more shots without lowering the camera.
Graham's entire body goes rigid. The irritation is gone, replaced by something colder.
"Get away from the window."
I step back. He doesn't move.
"Who is that?"
"Press. Stringer, probably. Someone tipped them off you were coming."
"He's been there all day?"
"All day." His jaw works. "Iris doesn't go outside until I say so. Not the dock. Not the lawn. Not the carriage house. Are we clear?"
"We're clear."
He picks up his phone and dials a single number. Whoever answers does so on the first ring.
"Voss. He's still on the road. I want him gone in five minutes."
He listens for a beat.
"Then push harder. I want the source by morning."
He hangs up. Watches the SUV through the window.
The way he's standing tells me more about him than the last six hours have. He's positioned himself between me and the glass. His shoulder is angled to take any shot before it gets to me.
He doesn't know he's doing it.
"Why now?" I ask.
"Because someone wants the world to see you before I'm ready for them to."
The camera flashes one more time. Then the SUV rolls down the lane, slow and deliberate, making sure we know it was there all along.
Graham finally turns to me. His eyes are dark.
"Welcome to Linden Lake, Ms. Alvarez. This town has a long memory, and apparently it's already remembered me."