10. Ashton
Ashton
“That was my dad.” She says it light, already drifting toward the coffee pot like the subject’s been handled. “He’s always checking up on me. It’s the closest thing he has to a hobby.”
“Sounded like more than a hobby.”
She pours, her back to me, and the line of her shoulders gives away more than her voice means to.
“I’m sorry I lied about who I tutor. I know how that must look to you as my boss but my dad can be a lot.
One mention of your name and he’d be using all his resources to do a full background check on you and your whole family. ”
“Sounds like an important man,” I reply. She has no clue that he wouldn’t even need a background check to know who I am.
“Nope, he’s no one important, just an overly protective dad.”
No one important.
She has no idea what those three words do to me. The man she’s just waved off is the one man I can’t stop thinking about every time I take Luke from her arms, and she’s handed him to me like loose change.
She thinks the secret is the job. That’s the whole of it, as far as she knows.
A tutoring post her father would wrinkle his nose at, taken behind his back, kept off his desk the way she’s kept everything off his desk since she was old enough to have a desk of her own.
A grown daughter ducking a man who can’t stop managing her.
One direction. Small enough to carry in a pocket. The oldest arrangement there is.
She doesn’t know she’s a secret too. She doesn’t know I ran her name through the firm the night I hired her, the same routine check I’d run on anyone I let near my son, and watched Rutledge come up on the page where Spencer should have been.
She doesn’t know that I am lying to the one man on this earth I have no right to lie to.
He was at the hospital the night Luke came.
Midnight, still in a dinner jacket from wherever he’d been, holding two coffees neither of us drank.
Sophia’s people hadn’t shown and mine were long gone, and he was the one in the chair beside me when they said my son was healthy.
He gripped my shoulder once, said nothing, and that was the closest thing to a father I’d had in a long time.
Which is the part that guts me now. Not the money, not the board seat, not any of the ledger between us. That. The chair at midnight. That’s the man I’m lying to.
The weight of that is mine alone. That’s the part she’ll never see. She thinks she’s carrying the secret, the small portable one, but the truth is she’s carrying a coin purse and I’m carrying the vault.
It’s for Luke. I tell myself that, and I tell it well, because I’ve had practice telling myself things lately.
He’s not fixed. He still wakes screaming.
But this morning he ate a whole breakfast at the table instead of pushing eggs around a plate until I gave up, and he did it because she was across from him telling him something about sharks, and he wanted to stay in the room with her more than he wanted to disappear into himself.
That’s new. That’s everything. A month ago I couldn’t get food into him without a negotiation.
If I pull her out of this house to keep faith with Harrison, I hand my son straight back to the strangers, to another quitting nanny, to another adult who can’t get past the door he keeps locked. So I stay quiet. For the boy. I almost believe it all the way down.
My phone goes and I’m grateful for the interruption of my thoughts the way you’re grateful for any excuse to stop looking at a thing. It’s Lola. I take it on my feet, crossing toward the wall of windows like she did twenty minutes ago.
“Tell me it’s good,” I say, glancing at the door closing as Imogen went to check on Luke.
“It’s news.” Lola has never once softened a landing for me, which is precisely why she still has the job. “The board approved a press play for the coast. They want a candid family shoot. Loose, natural, sun on everyone, the rebuilt-man story they keep putting in their order. You, Luke, the beach.”
“No.”
“And the tutor,” she says, her tone leaving no room for argument.
“They want her in the frame specifically. The settled household. A woman who isn’t your ex-wife, in soft light, with your kid leaning on her, looking like the most natural thing in the world.
That’s the photograph that moves the number, Ashton.
They’ve made their decision and they won’t back down. ”
“It’s not happening.”
“I said that, but they made it very clear that it wasn’t a suggestion.
” She takes the small breath she takes before the part she knows will be worst. “They want the whole thing wrapped and bowed. Her in it because she reads as stability. Nobody in that meeting wasted a second wondering how she’d feel about being read that way. ”
“Of course they didn’t.”
“No,” Lola says. “They didn’t.”
I’m already turning it over, already hating the idea of it, when the air in the room shifts at my back.
I turn.
Imogen’s in the doorway with a mug in both hands, and she’s heard enough.
I watch the pieces lock together in her face in real time, the candid, the frame, the woman who isn’t Sophia, the kid leaning on her in the soft light.
Whatever’s sitting in her expression now is not hurt.
It’s gone clean past hurt to the cold sharp place on the far side of it.
“I’ll call you back,” I tell Lola, and end the call before she can answer.
For a moment neither of us says anything. She crosses to the counter and sets the mug down with a care that’s worse than throwing it, the exact opposite of throwing it, a woman demonstrating to herself that she still owns her own hands.
“So that’s what the live-in clause was buying,” she says quietly, but with a bright edge filed onto it, a blade turned to catch the window light.
“It wasn’t for Luke, but for a fucking photo shoot.
You needed a wholesome woman to stand next to on a beach, and I went and filled out the right anonymous listing at exactly the right time.
I should be flattered, honestly. I came pre-screened by the agency, so at least it saved you a casting call. ”
“It isn’t that.”
“It’s a little that.”
“The clause isn’t about that.”
“Then explain it to me.” She comes off the counter and toward me, and she doesn’t stop.
She comes the whole way in, close enough that I can see the pulse going in the side of her throat, close enough that holding myself still takes effort.
“Live-in. Two months. A construction site at the far end of nowhere. Tell me, with a straight face, that not one inch of that was about having a presentable woman already in the building when the cameras turned up.”
“Luke needed someone who would actually stay.”
“Luke needed someone. Period. Full stop. You’re the one who needed her photogenic.
” She tips her head, studying me, and I get the rare and deeply unwelcome experience of being read down to the bones.
“God, you’re good. You nearly had me feeling sorry for you over those ridiculous rules.
The pencils. The snack zones. I thought, there’s a sad, careful man in there trying to keep his kid safe.
And maybe there is. But there’s also a selfish man who cares about his reputation. ”
“You’re enjoying this. Being right about me.”
“I’m enjoying it more than anything that’s happened to me in weeks, and that should tell you how my weeks are going.
” She still doesn’t step back. If anything she leans the last bit in, and the heat coming off her makes its own case, one I’m trying hard not to answer.
“Here’s where we actually are, so listen, because I’m only laying it out once.
I will teach your son. I will teach him until he’s reading Dostoevsky for the fun of it and correcting my arithmetic in three languages and explaining the universe to grown men at dinner parties.
That part is real. I’d do it for nothing, but I have bills to pay. ”
“Imogen.”
“But I am not your image rehab.” Right up into my face with it now, no slack anywhere in her body.
“I am not a prop you stage on a beach to make a line on a chart go the right direction. You don’t get to put me in soft focus next to your kid so a room full of strangers feels warm and safe about where their money’s going.
That was not in the contract. I read the contract and the fucking rules, and there’s no clause that rents my face. ”
“Understood.”
“I genuinely don’t think you do.” Then her voice drops, comes down low, and that’s the thing that gets under my skin, not the heat of it, but the quiet of it, every degree aimed straight at me with the safety off.
“So here’s the one I want you to write down.
Put it on page three, in your hard little handwriting, where you’ll see it every morning. I am not afraid of you, Ashton.”
She says my name like she’s done with the title for good.
“The cold thing. The wall. The face you put on to make everyone in those rooms blink first and agree to whatever you want. I’ve watched you do it for days and it doesn’t work on me. It never will because I’m not afraid of you.”
“I know,” I say.
She blinks. That’s the one answer she wasn’t ready for.
“You’ve never been afraid of me. I noticed that on day one.” I hold her eyes. “It’s not as reassuring as you think it is.”
And there it is. She’s close enough that her breath moves against my mouth when she talks, her chin up, her whole body planted in my space on purpose, daring me to pull rank and prove every cold thing she’s ever thought about me true.
What goes through me has nothing to do with the board.
Nothing to do with the photograph, or the clause, or the number that moves.
It’s lower and older and a great deal more dangerous than any of that, and I hold every muscle I own dead still so that not one inch of it reaches the surface where she could see it and use it.
You would be, I think, looking down into all that fury and nerve and heat.
If you had the faintest idea what my body has been screaming at me to do to you since the first night you stood in my kitchen eating my cake with your bare legs and your smart mouth, if you knew what it’s costing me right now not to close the half inch you left between us and find out whether you’d fight me or pull me in, you would be afraid.