Chapter 3
Jace
My week was going well until Saturday.
Specifically until eleven forty-seven a.m. on Saturday, when a woman at the Wynwood Farmers Market collided with me from behind, drenched me in iced coffee, crashed her mouth into mine, got my hand onto her chest, and called me a pervert.
I left with a ruined linen shirt and the annoying detail that her lips tasted like vanilla.
I hadn’t wanted to be there in the first place.
Dr. Adler suggested it. Week seven of my exposure therapy program.
Thirty minutes in a crowded, uncontrolled environment.
Buy one item. Leave. Simple. I chose the Wynwood market because of the honey vendor on the east end.
Sealed jars. Airtight lids. Manageable. I had a route planned, a timeline, and an exit strategy.
I was nineteen minutes in, on schedule, pulse steady, when she hit me from behind like a caffeinated missile and blew the entire operation to pieces.
And now she was in my office.
The coffee-spilling, lip-crashing, chest-adjacent disaster from the farmers market was standing in my doorway.
My new assistant. In my office. The one space on earth that was entirely, controllably mine, where every surface was wiped twice daily and every object sat at a precise angle and nothing, nothing, happened that I hadn’t anticipated.
My brain did what it always did. Scanned without permission.
A sale-rack blazer with fraying cuffs. Shoes that were clean but scuffed at the toes.
The bag, structured but worn at the strap—purchased with intention, carried well past its prime.
Her hair was pulled back, dark curls fighting the restraint, a few of them already winning.
Olive skin, warm-toned, catching the office light along her jaw in a way that was entirely irrelevant to her job qualifications.
She was beautiful.
I noticed it the way I noticed structural details in buildings, involuntarily and with irritation that it registered at all.
High cheekbones. Full mouth. Dark brown eyes that looked directly at me without flinching, without the usual nervous glance-away that most people performed within three seconds of meeting me.
None of that mattered. What mattered was that she was a disruption installed in my controlled environment, and my brother had put her there.
"Absolutely not," I said. "Not her."
Miles’s smile didn’t waver. He looked at me, then at Anna, then back at me with calm patience.
"Anna, would you mind stepping out for just a sec?" he said. Like this was all perfectly normal.
She looked between us, nodded once, and stepped out. The door clicked shut behind her.
"What’s wrong with her?" Miles asked.
"It can’t be her."
"Because?"
I didn’t answer. The honest answer involved vanilla and a forty-eight-hour loop of replaying a stranger’s mouth against mine, and I would rather dissolve into the floor than say any of that out loud. So I said nothing, which Miles took as an invitation to keep talking.
He always did. It was his worst quality. One of many.
"She’s qualified. She’s sharp. She’s not going to quit after a week, which puts her ahead of the last four."
"I said no, Miles."
He went quiet. That was worse than the talking. Miles going quiet meant he was switching tactics, reaching for the thing he knew would work, the one card in his hand that I couldn’t argue against.
"Mom called this morning," he said.
I looked at him.
"They adjusted her medication again. Higher dose." He kept his voice casual, the way he always did when he was handling me.
Careful Miles. Diplomatic Miles. The version of my brother that made me want to throw something at his head.
"She asked about you. She asks about you every day, Jace. And every day I tell her you’re fine. That you’re eating, sleeping, functioning like a normal human being."
"I am functioning."
"You went through four assistants in six months. The last one quit crying." He said it like he was reading a weather report. "Mom doesn’t know that. She doesn’t know about the exposure therapy or the sessions with Dr. Adler or any of it. She thinks you’re managing.
I’d like to keep it that way, wouldn’t you? "
The thing about Miles was that he never said the quiet part out loud.
He never drew the line between my inability to keep an assistant and our mother’s stress cardiomyopathy, the condition she developed because of what happened to me when I was eight.
He didn’t have to. The arithmetic was simple enough for anyone who knew our family, and Miles knew it better than most.
Our mother worried. Every day since I was a boy, without fail, and her body carried the cost—the medication, the tremor in her hands she tried to hide by keeping them in her lap.
All of it tracing back to me, to something I still couldn't talk about without the walls closing in and my lungs forgetting how to work.
I hated being maneuvered. I hated that it worked. I hated that my brother could stand there with his purposeful smile and his warm voice and gut me with a sentence about our mother’s medication dosage.
"Fine," I said. "Bring her back."
Miles didn’t gloat. He was too smart for that, at least. He opened the door, gestured her in, and we signed the contract in silence. Standard terms.
"Try to be nice," Miles said on his way out, squeezing my shoulder. I didn’t flinch. I wanted to, but I didn’t.
Miles was one of three people on the planet who could touch me without warning and not send my nervous system into full revolt.
He knew it. He used it sparingly, which was the only reason I tolerated it.
The door closed. Just us.
"Quit," I said.
She blinked. "What?"
"You heard me. Quit. Walk out. Tell Miles it didn’t work out. I’ll give you a month’s severance for your trouble."
"No."
"No?"
"I need this job, Mr. Hunter. So no."
"Everyone needs a job. Not everyone needs this one."
"I do." She straightened—half an inch, barely visible, but I caught it. Her voice didn't waver. It landed flat, final, the same tone I used when delivering quarterly projections to a board I needed to stop questioning me. "So unless you’re firing me, I’ll be here until then."
"How do you know my brother?" I asked.
"College. We used to attend a course together."
"And he just happened to offer you a position."
"He happened to be eating at the diner where I work. Worked." She corrected herself. "He saw me and offered. That’s it."
"How much is he paying you?"
Her eyebrows went up. "Paying me? You mean my salary?"
"Beyond the salary. To be here. To watch me. Whatever arrangement you two have. Name the figure. I’ll multiply it by ten."
She stared at me. A long, measured look that I felt behind my ribs in a way I found deeply unwelcome. "Nobody is paying me to watch you. I promise you, Mr. Hunter, watching you is not a job I’d volunteer for."
"I find it very hard to believe, Ms. uhhh…"
"Anna… Anna Wilson and that is very much true."
I leaned back in my chair and studied her.
I'd spent over a decade reading people across boardroom tables and negotiation desks, parsing microexpressions and vocal inflections for weaknesses, and this woman wasn't performing bravery.
She was simply standing in my office, in her probably three-year-old blazer, telling me no.
Irritating. And, worse than that, interesting.
"Leave," I said. "Nothing for you for now."
"Fine."
She walked to the door and it closed behind her.
I sat with the silence for five seconds. Then I straightened the pen she’d nudged out of alignment when she signed the contract. Then the notepad. Then the edge of the laptop. Then I wiped down the section of desk where her hand had rested.
Routine. That’s all it was. Routine.
Later, after two conference calls and a meeting that should have been an email, I sat at my desk with my Rubik’s cube and pulled up her file.
Anna Wilson. Twenty-five. Photographer from Charlotte, North Carolina. Gap in her employment history that spanned months, a hole in the timeline with no explanation. Waitress at a diner in Wynwood. A résumé that went from ascending to nonexistent like someone had taken scissors to it.
I turned the cube.
Click, click, click.
The colors aligned, shifted, realigned. Eighteen seconds. Three off my average.
I looked at her badge photo on the screen. Dark curls. Brown eyes. That mouth.
I closed the file and wiped down the cube.
This just couldn't be happening.
The following Thursday, dinner at the family home in Coral Gables. A tradition I showed up to because refusing meant dealing with far too many questions and explanations afterward.
The house was old money, inherited from my grandfather on my mother’s side, a British architect named Ellis Ashworth who married an American art dealer and built a home that couldn’t decide if it was a Georgian manor or a Miami estate. It was both, somehow, and it worked.
Grandfather Ellis was the reason I’d spent years in London as a boy, living with my grandparents after what happened.
I’d arrived at eight years old, terrified of everything, and he’d taught me how to hold a teacup, solve a Rubik’s cube, and pronounce "schedule" properly.
His accent stuck to me like a second skin, layered over American vowels until neither country could fully claim me.
Some things you pick up as a child and never put down.
My father, Richard Hunter, sat at the head of the table.
Semi-retired from Hunter Interactive, still sharp, still capable of dismantling a bad argument in three sentences.
My mother, Catherine, sat across from him, her wine glass held in hands that shook if you looked closely enough.
She kept them in her lap between sips. She thought nobody noticed.
Everyone noticed. Nobody said anything.
"You look thin," she said to me the way she always did.
"I’m the same weight I was last month, Mom."
"You’re not eating enough."
"I eat plenty."