Chapter 2
Two
The Claim
Xerses
My mother had spent the first forty minutes of dinner pretending she wasn’t watching me.
That was how I knew I was in trouble.
Roxanne Norouzi never pushed. She smiled.
She poured tea. She fed people until they were too content to defend themselves properly.
Then she moved the pieces where she wanted them and let the rest of us discover, usually too late, that we’d been maneuvered by a woman in diamonds and silk who called everyone habibi while quietly running the room like a military operation.
It would have been impressive if I hadn’t been one of her preferred battlefields.
I sat through the first course with Roman on one side of the table, Charlie three seats down, and my father at the head like a calm emperor presiding over a small, loud kingdom. The windows were open enough to let in the smell of the Atlantic. Salt. Summer. Wet stone.
The compound looked especially good at dusk.
Everything did here.
My parents had somehow managed to make a sprawling beachfront palace feel like home instead of performance. Persian rugs softened every room. Light poured in everywhere. Ancient-looking details and family photographs existed side by side without clashing.
Or maybe it felt normal because I’d been raised inside it.
Either way, I knew what this dinner was before my mother ever opened her mouth.
A head count.
Another one of her sons had found his person. Another woman had been pulled into the family and loved five seconds after crossing the threshold. Another proof point in her long-running argument that all men worth being proud of eventually settled down and gave her grandchildren.
My father believed it too, though he said it less aggressively.
Parvis could make a philosophy out of anything. Marriage and instinct. Legacy. He liked to talk about greatness as if it were a discipline men either rose into or failed by choice. He had softened over the years, but not on that point.
A man built differently once he had something to protect.
A man became more when he stopped living only for himself.
It sounded very noble and also very exhausting.
I drank my tea and let Charlie make enough noise for the whole side of the table.
“Are you even listening?” he asked me at one point.
“No.”
“Honest. I respect it.”
Roman didn’t look up from his plate. “You respect very little.”
Charlie grinned. “And yet I’m still your favorite brother.”
“You’re not even your own favorite version of yourself,” Jeff said dryly from farther down.
Hope laughed into her wine.
The whole table felt settled in that peculiar, dangerous way family dinners here always did. Comfortable enough that everyone started saying what they thought. That was when mistakes happened.
My mother rose to refill someone’s tea and stopped beside me.
I didn’t look up.
“Xerses joon.”
I set my glass down. “Maman.”
She smoothed a hand over my shoulder like this was tender and not tactical. “You’ll be here next weekend too, yes?”
“Adrien’s graduation?” I asked.
“Yes. The full weekend. No disappearing to Manhattan after brunch. I mean it.”
I flicked my gaze up to hers. Beautiful and warm. Deadly. “You say that like I’m twelve.”
“You disappear like you are twelve.”
Charlie snorted into his drink.
I turned to him. “Would you like to live through dessert?”
“Not especially.”
My mother ignored both of us. “There will be guests.”
That was all she needed to say. I leaned back in my chair. “No.”
She blinked once. “No, what?”
“No, I’m not interested in your guests. No, I’m not being seated beside anyone’s daughter. No, I’m not discussing my future with women whose fathers think a merger is foreplay.”
Michael made a sound that might have been a breathed laugh.
Britney, seated beside him, didn’t even try to hide her amusement.
My mother’s expression remained beatifically maternal. “You’re assuming quite a lot.”
“I was raised by you. I’m not assuming anything.”
Parvis took a slow sip of tea at the head of the table, saying nothing. Which meant he was enjoying himself.
Roman cut a piece of lamb with infuriating calm. “If you know what she’s doing, why are you always surprised when she does it?”
“Because I keep hoping age will soften her.”
“It has,” Charlie said. “You should’ve seen her when Jeff was twenty-four.”
Jeff didn’t glance up. “You’re all very brave while she’s at the far end of the table.”
“She can still hear you,” Hope said.
“Good,” Charlie replied. “I have no secrets.”
“That,” Michael murmured, “is one of your more alarming traits.”
My mother finally moved away from me with the kind of smile that meant she changed strategies.
I’d spent years avoiding women like the ones she thought made sense for me. Beautiful, connected, polished and usually accompanied by an expectation package so heavy it could’ve sunk a yacht.
I preferred uncomplicated. No mess. No false innocence. No romantic aspiration hidden under strategic patience. No woman quietly imagining she’d be the one to control my schedule. That bored me at best and irritated me at worst.
It wasn’t even cynicism, not exactly.
Truthfully, I did not have time for romance.
I had a company to run, investors to manage, products in development, competition I intended to bury, and a family large enough to create drama without my adding to it.
If sex came attached to clarity and everyone got what they wanted, there was no reason to complicate it.
That had worked for me just fine.
Right up until Kelly walked in and made the room sharper.
I noticed her before anyone announced her. I always did.
Hope pulled her into the dining room by the arm, and the whole atmosphere shifted half a degree.
That last part interested me.
Kelly usually entered rooms like she owned at least half the jokes she was about to tell in them.
She was warm, loud when she wanted to be, sharper than most people expected, and filthy-mouthed enough that Charlie had once nearly proposed to her on principle.
She made men laugh. Made women relax. Made children climb all over her.
And somehow managed to do all of that without ever feeling easy.
That was the thing about her.
She looked easy from across a room, but then you got close to notice the edges. And tonight they were there.
She greeted my mother, smiled at my father, let Hope steer her to the table, and for one second, one small, unguarded second, I saw it.
The awareness.
The strain under the jokes.
Five women in her friend group. Five women folded into this family by love, luck, chaos, or some combination of all three. Kelly was the only one left unattached, and she knew what that looked like from the outside.
I did not enjoy that I noticed.
“Kelly.”
She looked at me. “Xerses.”
I asked if she was running late. She told me she liked to make an entrance. I told her she had.
That was mostly true.
The rest of it wasn’t something I was going to explain to a room full of people.
She sat across from me, reached for water too quickly, and started pretending she wasn’t aware of me. It was almost charming.
Almost.
Dinner moved around us in its usual rhythm.
My mother fed everyone like it was a moral command.
Charlie talked too much. Miley wore the expression she always wore right before saying something surgically vicious.
Isabel managed to look elegant even while correcting Roman.
Avril watched everyone else’s plates more than her own.
Jeff and Michael had drifted into some practical conversation about business and law and the general burden of competence.
And Kelly made the table laugh.
It started with Hope pushing her into one of her disastrous dating stories. Batman. A vigilante voice. A Renaissance man “between eras.” Kelly told it exactly the way she should have, fast, deadpan, filthy enough to make it good, charming enough to keep it from sounding bitter.
But the thing under it.
She was pretending not to be tired that came from being expected to treat your own disappointment like a running joke because everyone preferred funny to sad.
I watched her while everyone else laughed.
Watched the flush that kept rising under her skin every time the conversation angled too close to the obvious.
Then I made the mistake of smiling at her and she found my face like I’d done something to her.
My mother noticed too.
Kelly joked. Charlie howled. Hope nearly cried laughing.
My father looked scandalized in the fond way he reserved for women he found amusing and boys he’d failed to civilize completely.
And all through it, my mother kept glancing between Kelly and me with the expression of a woman looking at two pieces she was already certain would fit.
I should have cut it off earlier.
Instead I let myself play.
Asked Kelly if there had been one normal date in the parade of horrors. Listened while she dismantled another man with admirable efficiency. Told her I was conducting quality control. Took the hit when she called me smug.
Easy and harmless.
Until it wasn’t.
The mood shifted when my mother moved behind Kelly’s chair and rested a hand on her shoulder.
It was a simple gesture.
Deadly.
“Kelly joon,” she said warmly, “you must come next weekend too. We’ll all be here. It will be nice.”
Kelly answered carefully, which told me she heard the trap too.
My mother smiled. Squeezed her shoulder. “And family should be together as much as possible.”
Silence didn’t fall. Not completely. But something tightened around the table.
And then, because my mother had decided that subtlety was no longer enough, she said, brightly, “I’ve invited the Azharis as well. Their daughter is finally back from London. She is lovely.”
I didn’t move.
My father looked at his plate in that careful way he did when choosing not to interfere with his wife’s campaigns.
My mother’s hand stayed on Kelly’s shoulder while she looked directly at me.
Not a request. A setup.