10. Dorian
DORIAN
There’s pink eyeshadow on my left eyelid and a clip-on bow in my hair. I’m sitting in a chair designed for someone who weighs less than fifty pounds.
I’ve never been happier in my life.
Lillie is standing in front of me with a makeup palette and a brush that sheds more than it applies.
She is concentrating with the intensity of a surgeon.
Her tongue pokes out from the side of her mouth.
Her little brow is furrowed. She dabs the brush into a shade that can only be described as violent pink and brings it toward my face with the confidence of someone who has done this many times before and has never once cared about the result. “Close your eyes, Daddy.”
I close my eyes and feel the brush drag across my eyelid, depositing what I can only assume is a thick, uneven streak of glitter.
Something falls into my eyelashes. I don’t flinch, because flinching during makeover time is a violation of the rules.
That, and I’ve been in this position before.
If I’m not careful, the glitter will go in my eye, and nobody needs that.
Ask me how I know.
“Now the other one,” my daughter announces.
Quinn is sitting in the tiny chair beside me.
She already has both eyes done—blue on one, green on the other.
She’s wearing a red line of lipstick that extends approximately half an inch past her actual lips.
There’s a yellow bow clipped to the side of her hair.
She is, without question, the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen.
“Don’t laugh at me,” she warns when she catches me looking.
“I’m not laughing.”
“Your mouth is doing that twitchy thing it does.”
“My mouth doesn’t do a twitchy thing.”
“It absolutely does. Lillie, tell your daddy he has a twitchy thing going on with his mouth.”
“Daddy has a mouth thing,” Lillie confirms without looking up from her work.
Quinn is wearing my T-shirt and a pair of my sweatpants.
Her hair is still pulled back from this morning.
She hasn’t left, and I haven’t asked her to.
At some point in the afternoon—while she was coloring with Lillie at the kitchen table, or helping her give Poptart a bath with the hose, or sitting on the back terrace with her feet up while Lillie played in the grass—she became part of the day.
Not the nanny. Not a guest. She’s just here.
I’ve been thinking about this for hours.
Thinking about last night, too. The green dress on the floor of my bedroom.
Her voice in the dark. The way she held onto me like I was the only solid thing in the room.
I’ve been thinking about it the way I think about everything I want to keep: strategically, with the full understanding that wanting a thing and being able to protect it are two different problems.
I’ve had her now. That complicates things further. Before, she was a possibility I could walk away from. Painful, but survivable. Something I could shut down and board up, the way I’ve shut down every personal want that threatened to interfere with the work. I’ve done it before.
I don’t think I can do it with her. I knew that last night, the moment she fell asleep against my chest. The door I thought I’d sealed shut isn’t just open. It’s off its hinges. There’s no closing it again. She’s in.
Which means I have an enormous problem.
Every person I care about lives inside a perimeter a rival family has started measuring. Quinn goes home every night to an apartment with a lock a child could pick, in a building with no security, on a street where any car could park for any length of time without anyone noticing.
The problem is that she doesn’t know what I am.
Every hour I spend not telling her is another hour the lie gets heavier.
She thinks I’m in finance. She thinks the wall, the cameras and the guards, and the rest of it exist because rich men get stalked by disgruntled investors.
I’ve overheard her mention it to Ms. Beaumont, who didn’t bother to offer a correction.
She’s built a version of me that makes sense to her, and I’ve let her build it, because the truth would send her running.
But here’s the thing I keep coming back to. The safest place for her—the most secure, the most protected, the most monitored square footage in a fifty-mile radius—is this house. My house. Behind my wall, inside my perimeter. Watched by my people.
If she’s here, I can keep her safe. I can’t do that if she goes home to her apartment. It’s that simple and that selfish, and I’m not pretending those things aren’t tangled together. They are. I don’t care.
“All done!” Lillie announces, stepping back to admire her work.
She holds up a plastic hand mirror, and my reflection stares back at me with glittery pink eyelids, an uneven stripe of rouge across each cheek, and a small purple bow clipped above my left ear.
I look like a man who has surrendered completely, which is accurate.
“Beautiful,” I tell her.
“Now you have to wear it all day.”
“We’ve discussed this. I’m not wearing it to—”
She folds her arms. “All. Day.”
“Maybe for the next hour?”
Quinn leans over. “You should do what the artist says,” she whispers loudly. Her eyes are bright, and her ridiculous blue and green eyeshadow catches the light, and I’m so far gone on this girl that the word gone doesn’t begin to cover it.
“Quinn.” I say it before I’ve planned what comes after it, because the thought that’s been building all afternoon has reached the point where keeping it inside would take more effort than letting it out. “Move in.”
The playroom goes quiet. Even Lillie stops arranging her impressive makeup collection.
Quinn blinks. “What?”
“Move in. Here. With us.” I say it flat, the way I say things I’ve already decided, because that’s usually how you make things real. You speak them into existence.
Underneath the flat delivery, my chest is tight in a way it hasn’t been since I asked her to the party.
“You’re here every day as it is. You drive twenty-five minutes each way.
You leave at night and come back in the morning.
Half your week is spent in transit between here and an apartment you barely see. It doesn’t make sense.”
“It—” She’s staring at me with her mouth slightly open. Her gaze darts to Lillie before returning to me. “Dorian, we… you know… just last night. Isn’t this a little—”
“It’s practical.” And it is. It’s also the only way I can sleep, knowing she’s behind the wall, but she doesn’t need to hear that part. “Lillie is here. Your work is here. You’d have your own space—the guest suite is yours, or any other room you want. You wouldn’t have to worry about rent.”
“My lease—”
“Can be dealt with.”
“My stuff—”
“Can be moved.”
She laughs. It’s the startled, overwhelmed kind. The kind that happens when you’re trying to process something too big to seem real. She looks at Lillie, who has stopped pretending not to listen and is now vibrating on the spot with her hands clasped under her chin.
“Do you want Quinn to live here with us?” Lillie whispers, as though speaking at full volume might undo something.
“I do,” I tell her.
Lillie turns to Quinn. Her whole body is a question. Please?
Quinn drags both hands down her face, smearing the lipstick further, streaking eyeshadow to her temples. She looks at me through her fingers. “You’re serious?”
“I’m always serious.”
“That’s actually true,” she admits, and now her mouth is doing a twitchy thing. “Except right now. Now you just look pretty.”
“Is that a yes?”
She lowers her hands and looks around the playroom. Then she looks at Lillie, who has gone so still with anticipation that I’m not sure whether she’s breathing.
“Okay,” Quinn decides. “Yes. Okay.”
Lillie’s shriek is a physical force. She launches herself at Quinn so hard the tiny chair tips backward, and they both go down in a pile of limbs and laughter and eyeshadow palettes.
I sit in my tiny chair, and I watch the two people I love most in the world roll around on the floor, and I think: this is it.
This is the thing I’ve been building the wall to protect.
I just didn’t know it yet.
It’s past eight, and the living room has gone golden with late sun.
Lillie is draped across Quinn’s lap on the sofa, where the three of us have been watching a movie.
Lillie is fighting sleep the way she always fights sleep—with increasingly absurd conversation topics and eyes that keep drifting shut before snapping open.
“Daddy?”
“Yeah?”
“If Poptart had a brother, what would his name be?”
“I don’t think we need another Poptart.”
“But if he did.” She then lets out a yawn that damn near splits her head in two.
I look at Quinn. She looks at me. “I think it’s time to brush your teeth,” Quinn decides.
The routine is familiar, but there’s a new shape to it tonight.
It’s Quinn who carries Lillie to her room, because Lillie won’t let go of her.
There’s nothing for me to do but follow along.
We brush teeth and negotiate pajama choices, and I read a page and a half of a book about a rabbit who doesn’t want to go to bed. Talk about a relatable topic.
Then Lillie says, “Quinn? Can you tuck me in?”
Quinn tucks the blanket around Lillie with the practiced care of someone who has done this many times. Then she smooths the hair back from her forehead, leans down, and presses a kiss against her temple. Lillie’s eyes are already closing. “Night, Quinn.”
“Goodnight, sweetheart.”
“Night, Daddy.”
“Goodnight, baby.” I kiss her head. She smells like strawberry shampoo… and horses. She always smells faintly of horse nowadays.
We leave the door open a crack, then step into the hallway. Quinn leans against the wall and lets out a breath like she’s been holding it for an hour. “She’s perfect.” Her smile is so full of love, I can hardly breathe. “You know that, right? She’s really, really—”
“I do know that.” The fact that she sees it opens my heart wider than ever.
She pushes off the wall and takes my hand. Her fingers lace through mine, and it’s easy, natural, like we’ve been doing it for years.
We make it four steps before Tristan appears at the end of the hall. He doesn’t walk toward us. He materializes out of thin air the way he does, standing where the hallway meets the landing, hands at his sides, face flat. He looks at Quinn, then at me. Then he looks at our hands.
“A minute,” he says.
Quinn’s grip tightens on my fingers. I feel the tension arrive in her body before I see it on her face. The way she goes slightly rigid, the small animal instinct that tells her this man is something more than what she’s been told.
“Go ahead,” I tell her. “My room. Get ready for bed. I’ll be there in a minute.”
She hesitates. Her eyes move from me to Tristan and back. I see the questions forming. The same questions she almost asked this morning at the breakfast table, about extra guards and unfamiliar faces. The things I told her not to worry about.
She doesn’t ask them. She squeezes my hand, lets it go, and walks past Tristan toward the bedroom. He doesn’t watch her go. He watches me, and his flat expression says what it always says, which is everything and nothing.
I wait until I hear the bedroom door close. Then I step toward him, and whatever’s in his face makes the thing that settled in my chest just a few minutes ago get up and start pacing again.
“Talk,” I say.