6. Chapter 6
Jade
The air in the Linden Lake diner smells like stale grease and the kind of judgment you can only find in a town with one stoplight.
I keep my head down, focusing on the menu as if the price of a stack of pancakes is the most fascinating thing I've encountered all week.
It isn't. The most fascinating thing I've encountered all week is currently sitting in a half-renovated lake house, probably staring at a spreadsheet and brooding hard enough to lower the local temperature.
"Can I get you more coffee, sugar?"
I look up. The waitress isn't the one speaking. It's the woman in the booth next to me, a bird-like creature with a permanent squint and a visor that says World's Best Grandma in fading glitter. She's leaning so far over the vinyl divider she's practically in my lap.
"I'm fine, thank you," I say, offering my best professional-nanny smile.
"You're the girl up at the Whitlock place, aren't you? Well, the Sterling place now, I suppose."
She doesn't wait for an answer. Her eyes dart over my cardigan, my hair, my notebook.
"Awful business about poor Chloe. And that man, the way he just blew back into town like he owns the sunrise. Is it true he's got armed guards in the foyer?"
"Mr. Sterling is very focused on his daughter's privacy. He's a grieving father doing his best."
"He's a man with a lot of secrets, if you ask me," she counters, dropping to a conspiratorial hiss.
"They say he was a real terror back in the day.
Arrests. Drugs. The Whitlocks are such good people, you know.
Pillars. It must break their hearts to see that little girl being raised by, well, a man like that.
What's he really like when the cameras aren't on? "
A slow heat crawls up my neck. Not shame. The sharp edge of my own temper.
I think about Graham sitting on the bed in the dark, his hand on Iris's blanket as he guided her back from a nightmare.
"He's a client. I don't gossip about the families I serve. Bad for business."
"Oh, I didn't mean anything by it," she says, pulling back with a huff of fake indignation. "Just being neighborly. People around here talk, honey. You'd do well to remember which side your bread is buttered on."
I don't respond. I slide out of the booth, my appetite gone. The bell above the door jingles an accusation as I step out into the crisp morning air.
I walk toward the lake. I need to make the call. I've been putting it off ever since I saw the final notice on my mother's kitchen table.
I reach into my bag for the small plastic case where my morning routine lives: vitamins, the iron supplement I started taking after my mom’s anemia spooked me into getting bloodwork, and the pill I have taken at 7:00 a.m. every morning since I was nineteen.
I almost left the case on the bathroom counter at the cottage.
I remembered at the last second because Iris had a meltdown about her owl barrettes at six-fifty and I had to backtrack twice to get out the door.
I drove her to school with my hair half-dry and my coffee in a travel mug, and the only thing I grabbed on the way back through was the case.
I check my phone. It's almost ten. Three hours late.
It's the second time this week. Tuesday, Pierce called Graham at four in the morning and the whole house was up by five. I took it a few hours late that night. Late, but within the window.
I'll take it now. I tip the small white tablet into my palm and swallow it dry. I make a note in my phone the way I make notes about Iris's snack preferences and Graham's coffee order, with the same brisk professional efficiency. Pill 10:02. Set new alarm. Buy backup case for purse.
I tell myself this is just chaos. Pierce's call. The new house. An unfamiliar bathroom counter. I do not let myself name the other possibility, that some part of me has stopped fighting quite as hard to keep my old life intact. I will name it eventually. Not today.
My body is just another household to manage.
I tuck the case back into my bag. I find a quiet spot near a cluster of birches and dial.
"Jade?"
My mother's voice is thin. She sounds like she's speaking through a layer of gauze.
"Is everything okay? You shouldn't be calling during work hours."
"I'm on a break, Ma. How are you feeling? Did you take the iron supplements?"
"I'm fine, mija. Just a little tired. The doctor says it's just the anemia acting up again. The new prescription should help once it kicks in."
She pauses. I hear the rattle of a pill bottle.
"The landlord stopped by. He was polite. But he said he can't wait another month."
I close my eyes. I can see her small apartment, the way she keeps it spotless even when she's too weak to stand for more than ten minutes.
"Don't worry about the landlord. I got the job. The one with the billionaire. He's paying me four times what the Hendersons paid, Ma. Four times. I'm sending the first check tonight, enough for back rent and two months ahead."
"Jade."
My mother's tone shifts. The thinness is still there, but there's iron underneath it. The register she used when she'd come home from cleaning the Sterling estate and still made dinner for me and my brother before she let herself sit down.
"Listen to me. I worked in that family's house for fifteen years. Two weeks' pay in an envelope, slid under the door of the service quarters. No conversation. No goodbye."
She pauses. I hear the pill bottle rattle again.
"Fifteen years in that house, mija. I scrubbed their floors and I polished their silver and I learned every door in that place by the sound it made closing.
The day I left, the old Mr. Sterling did not look up from his paper.
Your abuela said I came home that month thinner than she had ever seen me.
She didn't ask why. She just made me eat. "
"Ma."
"I want you to remember that the people who can afford to break things rarely fix them themselves. Men with that kind of money always have something in a pocket somewhere. The good ones forget it is there. The bad ones don't."
"And how do you tell the difference?"
"You watch what they do when they are tired. You watch what they do when they are losing. The bad ones reach for the pocket. The good ones reach for you."
I think about Graham's hand under mine on Iris's blanket, fingers trembling. The way he didn't pull away. The way he looked at me afterward, like a man who had been told he was allowed to put down something heavy for the first time in years.
"Ma."
"I am still listening, mija."
"He reached for me when he was tired. When he didn't know what to do."
She is quiet. Then a small, soft sound that might be a sigh, or the beginning of permission.
"Then he is not his father. Yet. We will see if he stays that way."
She pauses.
"But Jade. Listen to me."
"I'm listening."
"I made myself small for those people, mija.
For fifteen years. I bent over their floors and I bent over their dishes and I bent over their lives.
The only thing it bought me was a bad back and a daughter who feels like she has to rescue me.
Don't make my mistake. Don't think you have to be small to be safe. "
"You don't need rescuing. You're the strongest person I know."
"I do need rescuing. That is what mothers are for, eventually. And I am very lucky that my rescuer is you. But you are not allowed to disappear into that house, Jade. Do you understand me?"
"Yes, Mama."
"Good. Send me the check, mija. The landlord is a small man with a small heart."
"It will be there tomorrow. All of it."
"Te amo."
"Te amo, Mama."
I hang up and lean against the tree, the bark rough against my shoulder.
I push off the tree and head back toward the gravel lot to grab Iris's lunchbox from my car.
Graham's SUV is idling at the edge of the lot. The driver's window is cracked. He's on a call, elbow propped on the door, a man's voice coming through the speaker. Warm, easy. The kind of voice that makes you want to agree with whatever it says next.
"...pulled the Q3 numbers myself, sir. The Asia desk is soft, but nothing we can't reposition before the call. I'll have the deck on your desk by six."
"Run it by legal first."
"Already done. Mara signed off this morning."
"Good." Graham's voice is different on this call. Not warmer, exactly. Trusting. The way you sound when you've stopped second-guessing the person on the other end. "I owe you a steak when I'm back in the city, Christopher."
"Two steaks, sir. I caught the typo in the footnotes this time."
Graham almost laughs. Not quite, but close. "Send me the file."
He ends the call and looks up to find me standing six feet from his hood with Iris's owl lunchbox swinging from my hand. He doesn't look annoyed. Just caught.
"Christopher Harrington. Senior strategy. I pulled him out of a second-tier firm six years ago. He's been my right hand ever since."
"He sounds competent."
"He's the only person at the company I don't have to translate for." Graham shrugs, half embarrassed. "I'm grooming him for COO. Don't tell him."
"Your secret's safe with the help, Mr. Sterling."
His mouth twitches. Then his gaze shifts past my shoulder and the easy line of his jaw goes hard.
The busybody from the booth is still at the diner window, nose practically pressed to the glass.
Graham gets out of the SUV. Closes the distance in three strides. His hand settles on the small of my back. Firm, deliberate. Not romantic. Protective. Like he's drawing a line around me without saying a word.
I freeze. The heat of his palm through my cardigan doesn't move, and I feel every second of it.
"You've been crying.” Not a question.
"Allergies. The pollen in Linden Lake is aggressive."
"It's October, Jade. And you're a terrible liar."
I look up at him, jaw set. "Is there something else you need, Mr. Sterling? Or are you just here to audit my tear ducts?"
He stares at me for a long beat, his eyes tracking the movement of my throat as I swallow. He looks like he wants to say something that doesn't involve contracts or custody or legal strategy.
I know what he's doing with the hand at my back. It's instinct, not intention. I tell myself that as he steers me toward his SUV, his body a solid wall against my side.
I still lean into him. Just a fraction. Just enough.
"We should get back." His voice carries just enough for nearby ears. "I've got calls I can't push."
His hand stays at the base of my spine the whole walk. He smells like cedarwood and clean air and something I refuse to register this carefully.
I forget to keep my breathing even.
"You don't have to do that," I mutter as we reach the car. "I can handle small-town gossip."
He opens the door, hand lingering on the frame. "I don't like people looking at you like they're entitled to something."
The way he said you instead of what's mine.
"We're nothing to each other. They don't know that, but we do."
He leans in. Face inches from mine. His eyes drop to my mouth for one suspended second. The whole world goes quiet. My mother's rent, the court case, the noise of everything.
"Not yet," he says.
He pulls back and shuts the door.
I sit in the leather-scented silence and watch him walk around the front of the car. Unhurried. Certain. Like a man who already knows how the story ends.
He slides in, starts the engine, doesn't look at me.
He doesn't have to. The word is still sitting in the space between us, taking up all the air.
Not yet.