Chapter 4 Thirty Seconds
The gate light comes on when the car pulls up, same as it always did.
Two years. The stone is the same. The east wing windows are dark. The gravel under the tires sounds exactly the same, and for a second I'm aware of how strange that is, that places don't register absence the way people do.
Then the headlights sweep across the garden, and I see it.
The irises are gone.
In their place: roses, deep red, in the kind of dense, deliberate rows that take planning. Someone chose this. Someone stood here and decided what should grow.
Mrs. Fen follows my eyes. She's been working this house since before I was born, and she has the particular talent of knowing when to fill silence and when not to. Tonight she decides to fill it.
"Alpha Callum planted them for Isabella," she says, smiling at the beds. "He didn't want her scratching herself on the thorns. We keep them trimmed so she can pick without worrying."
"Mm." I pick up my bag and walk through the gate.
The front hall is lit but empty. I knew it would be. A younger maid hovers near the staircase, twisting her apron a little, and when she sees me take in the room she steps forward.
"Isabella wasn't feeling well," she says, keeping her voice low. "She's been trying to —" A pause. "Her health hasn't been cooperating lately. She got upset this evening. Alpha Douglas and Moira were up with her for a while. They've only just gone to sleep."
Hasn't been cooperating. I think about the photo from three days ago. The supplements arranged on a table, labels facing out, a box tucked in the corner. A caption about being ready for the next chapter.
Apparently the next chapter has been harder to start than the caption suggested.
I don't say anything. I pick up my bag and head for the stairs.
Third floor, east corridor. My old room is at the end.
I'm following Mrs. Fen's directions out of habit when I turn the corner and stop.
Callum is standing in the hallway. Sleep shirt, collar loose, hair still slightly damp. He's holding a glass of water with both hands and looking at me the way someone looks at a thing they weren't prepared to see.
This is the problem with a house this size. You can live in it and avoid someone for years. Or you can round a corner at the wrong time and there's nowhere to go.
He doesn't move. I start walking.
I get two steps past him.
My wrist pulls back. His grip isn't hard. It's involuntary, the kind of hold that doesn't know it's happening until it already has.
I turn around. He's closer than he was a second ago.
I take my wrist back.
"Brother-in-law," I say. "Not appropriate."
The words land. I watch them land. His hand stays open at his side for a moment, closes, then releases. He looks at me another beat.
"Why are you back?" His voice is quiet.
I'm tired. The flight was fourteen hours and I haven't slept and the time difference is sitting behind my eyes like pressure. I open my mouth —
The bedroom door clicks.
Isabella comes out in a slip dress, one hand on the doorframe, blinking in the hall light. There's a mark on her collarbone that hasn't faded yet. Her eyes find me and the soft, drowsy look drops away.
"Why were you gone so long?" She says it to Callum. Then she looks at me. "Rowan? Why are you back?"
She measures the distance between us in one glance. Calculates something. Crosses the hall in her slippers and takes hold of Callum's arm, drawing him back half a step, repositioning him.
"You've only just arrived and you're already catching up with your brother-in-law." Her voice carries that particular sweetness that has always meant the opposite of sweet. "Aren't you tired, Rowan?"
Down the corridor, another door opens.
My father and Moira, both in robes, both looking like they were already half awake. They take in the scene — Isabella's grip on Callum's arm, my bag at my feet, the space between all of us — and the calculation is immediate.
Moira moves toward Isabella. "Are you alright? You should be resting."
My father looks at me. "She hasn't been well. Don't stir things up the moment you walk in."
I press two fingers to my eyebrow.
The thing is, I don't understand it — I've never understood it — this bedrock conviction that he could put me down and love her by morning, and yet no one can accept that I spent two years putting him down in return. As if grief only runs one direction in this family.
I'm too tired for this corridor, for any of this.
"I ran into him coming from the stairs," I say. "It lasted about thirty seconds. There's a camera on the landing if anyone wants to verify that." I pick up my bag. "I'm going to bed."
I turn. No one says anything.
I know this silence. It's the same one from the night they pulled up the security footage and watched it three times to make sure.
I was fourteen. Isabella had decided that Callum wasn't paying her enough attention. Her preferred method of correction was to make things difficult for me and wait to see what happened.
It worked, for a while.
But I kept refusing to apologize for things I hadn't done.
They wanted evidence and they found it. What the footage showed was Isabella at the top of the stairs, checking the angle, and then arranging herself at the bottom of them.
The look on their faces that day was the most honest thing I had ever seen from either of them.
Nobody mentioned it again. It became one of those family facts that lives in the walls.
They remember it now. I can tell by the half-second where no one speaks.
I walk to my room.
The door is almost closed when his voice comes up from downstairs, calm and well-arranged. "It's nothing. I went for water and happened to pass her in the hall. She called me brother-in-law. That's when Isabella came out."
Brother-in-law. Two syllables. In his mouth they sounded like something that cost him something to say.
I push the door shut.
The room is exactly as I left it. I shove my bag against the wall and drop onto the bed without pulling back the covers.
The ceiling is the same ceiling.
I lie there and try to locate the feeling I'm supposed to be having, and what I find instead is just — tired. Heavier than the flight accounts for, a kind of exhaustion that has nothing to do with time zones.
I looked at him tonight.
I thought I'd feel something — pain, or some version of it. We go back a long time. Far enough back that if you wanted to be precise about it, you'd start at the year I was ten.
The year she moved in.