24. Mia
MIA
Sophia never called me during the day.
She texted. She left notes on the kitchen counter in her neat, slanted handwriting. She packed plastic containers of leftovers into my bag without asking.
But she didn't call. Sophia Desai communicated her love through food and silence and the occasional look that could peel paint off a wall.
So when my phone buzzed with her name while I sat in Emma's coffeehouse, a chill moved through my chest.
"Sophia?"
"She's here." Two words. Tight. Furious.
I didn't need to ask who. There was only one person on earth who could make Sophia sound like that.
"Vampira," Sophia said, and the word came out like she'd been chewing on it. "She called an hour ago. Said she was coming to discuss Avery's welfare."
A pause. A drawer rattled in the background. Sophia stress-organized when she was angry.
"She's staying at that hotel in Telluride. The fancy one. And she brought someone. A fiancé."
My hand tightened around the phone. "Where's Tony?"
"Studio. Door closed. I haven't told him yet."
"Where's Avery?"
"Playdate with the Henderson girl. She's safe."
"I'm coming."
I grabbed my jacket and left a ten on the table. Emma called after me but I was already pushing through the door. The mountain air hit my face, sharp and clean, and I sucked it in like I was drowning.
Angelina Marshall.
I'd hoped. Stupid, desperate hope that she'd stay in whatever gilded corner of Manhattan she'd crawled into after Ludo cut her from the will. That she'd content herself with charity galas and fabricated illnesses and leave this family alone.
I drove too fast on the mountain road. My hands were steady on the wheel but my head was racing. Because I knew things about Angelina Marshall that Sophia didn't. Things that had nothing to do with Tony or Avery or Colorado.
Three years ago, I'd sat across from that woman in a television studio. Called her "Our Lady of Perpetual Victimhood" on national television. Investigated her pyramid scheme.
Her public records. Her tax filings. Her charity fraud. I'd laid it all out for six million viewers while she sat in the green room threatening to have me fired.
Hadley Winslow had made an enemy of Angelina Marshall.
And now Mia Hayes was about to walk into a room with her.
Don't recognize me. Please don't recognize me.
I pulled up the long driveway. The Castle sat against the mountains like it always did, glass and stone and impossible beauty.
But today the glass walls looked like a fishbowl. No privacy. No hiding.
Sophia was in the kitchen when I came through the side door. She was pacing. Not the slow, purposeful Sophia walk I knew. Real pacing.
Back and forth between the island and the stove, her sandals slapping the tile.
"That woman." Sophia stopped and pointed at me with a wooden spoon. "That woman has the nerve to call this house and say she wants to discuss Avery's welfare. Avery's welfare."
She switched to Hindi, fast and biting, words I couldn't follow, then back to English.
"She hasn't seen that child once. Not once. And now she shows up with a fiancé and a smile and expects what? Tea?"
"Sophia."
"I will not make her tea."
"Nobody's asking you to make tea."
"Good. Because I'd rather drink bleach." She stopped pacing. Her eyes were wet.
Not from sadness. From the kind of fury that lives in people who love without limits.
"You know what she did to him. You know."
I did. Not all of it. Not yet. But enough.
The bruises Sophia had told me about. A sixteen-year-old boy with marks on his arms that nobody questioned. Because his stepmother was beautiful and charming and came from a family that bought silence the way other people bought groceries.
"When is she getting here?" I asked.
"Any minute. She said noon."
It was eleven forty-five.
I heard the car before I saw it. A rental. Black. It pulled up the circular drive and parked like it belonged there.
My journalist brain switched on without permission, cataloging everything. The way the driver's door opened first. The way she stepped out and paused to check her reflection in the car window before walking toward the house.
Angelina Marshall was thinner than I remembered. The cheekbones I'd studied on a monitor in a Manhattan editing suite were sharper now, the skin pulled tighter. She wore all black. Simple. Expensive.
Her hair was blown out to within an inch of its life. And that smile. I remembered that smile from across a television desk. The one that said I know something you don't. The one that never reached her eyes.
She moved like she was walking a runway. Chin up. Shoulders back. Every step calculated.
Then the passenger door opened.
A man unfolded from the seat. Tall. Well-built. Blue eyes that caught the light even from across the courtyard.
He wore dark wool and leather, casual in the way that only very expensive clothes could pull off. He had an easy walk. Relaxed. The kind of person who made you feel comfortable just by existing.
At the entrance, he held it open for Angelina. She swept through without thanking him.
"Sophia, darling," Angelina said, and I watched Sophia's spine go rigid at the word darling. "How wonderful to see you. The house looks marvelous."
Sophia said nothing. Her knuckles were white around the spoon.
Angelina's attention moved past her. Landed on me.
I kept my face neutral. Blank. The face I'd worn through a hundred interviews with people who'd rather see me fired than quoted. I met her stare and held it.
She studied me. Her head tilted. One degree. Two. Her focus traced my hairline, my jaw, my mouth.
"Do I know you?"
My heart slammed against my ribs.
"I don't think so." I extended my hand. Steady. Professional. "Mia Hayes. I work for Tony."
She took my hand. Her grip was cool and dry and lasted a beat too long. "Mia." She tasted the name like she was testing it for cracks.
"No. You remind me of someone. Someone I disliked quite a bit." A flick of her wrist. Dismissal. "No matter."
But her gaze stayed on me. Two seconds longer than it should have.
The man stepped forward. Warm expression. Open posture. He extended his hand and his handshake was firm without being aggressive.
"Elijah Brooks. Pleasure to meet you both."
His voice was pleasant. His eye contact was direct. The warmth in his face reached all the way up to those blue eyes and sat there like it belonged.
He looked like the kind of man who held doors and remembered birthdays and tipped well at restaurants.
I shook his hand. I searched for something wrong, some instinct, some alarm bell.
Nothing.
He was just nice. And standing beside Angelina, who radiated coldness like a January window, he looked even nicer by contrast.
"Lovely home," he said, looking around the open kitchen and the glass walls and the lake beyond them. "Tony has extraordinary taste."
"He does," Sophia said. No warmth. No invitation. The first thing she'd said since Angelina walked in, and it closed every conversation that might have followed.
Angelina perched on one of the kitchen stools. Crossed her legs. Folded her hands on the counter.
She surveyed the room with the quiet authority of someone who'd once owned half of everything in it.
"Where is Anthony?"
Anthony. The name in her mouth made my stomach turn. She said it with ownership. With intimacy. Like she had any right to the name his father used. The one that belonged to people who loved him.
"He's working," I said.
"I'll wait."
Of course she would. She was a woman built for waiting. For watching. For finding the crack in a wall and pushing her fingers through it until the whole thing came down.
Elijah pulled out a stool for himself and sat. He caught my eye and gave me a small, almost apologetic look. As if to say: I know she's a lot.
I didn't smile back.
Sophia busied herself at the counter, her movements sharp and deliberate. She set glasses of water in front of our guests with the precision of someone placing evidence at a crime scene.
Angelina didn't touch hers. Elijah thanked her.
The minutes stretched. Angelina asked about Avery's school. I deflected. She asked about the cottage. I gave her nothing.
She sat there with that patient, cat-eyed expression, and I thought about what Sophia had told me weeks ago. About bruises on a teenage boy's arms. About doors that locked from the wrong side.
I wanted to scream.
To grab this woman by her silk collar and drag her out of this house. Tell her she would never set foot here again. That she'd lost the right to say his name when she'd destroyed a child's ability to feel safe in his own home.
Instead I stood with my back against the kitchen counter and watched her the way I'd watched a hundred interview subjects. Cataloging. Filing.
Every gesture. Every micro-expression. Every word she chose and the ones she avoided.
Hadley Winslow would have destroyed her on camera.
Mia Hayes had to stand here and say nothing.
Then the studio door opened.
Tony walked out in bare feet and paint-stained jeans and a white t-shirt with a smear of blue across the shoulder. Dark curls pushed back from his face.
He looked relaxed. Loose. Like he'd been somewhere deep inside a canvas and hadn't come all the way back yet.
His gaze found Sophia first. He read her face. His steps slowed.
Then he saw Angelina.
Everything changed.
His shoulders locked. His jaw set. His hands, still streaked with paint, curled into fists at his sides.
The color drained from his face so fast I could see it happen in real time. He went from warm to white in the space of a heartbeat.
I'd never seen him look like this. Not angry. Not afraid. Older than both. A wound that lived in the body of a boy who'd been trapped in a room with someone who'd hurt him. A boy who never had the words for what she'd done.
Then it passed. A mask slid into place. His face went flat. Controlled. Empty.
"Angelina."
His voice was dead. No warmth. No curiosity. No inflection at all. Just her name, dropped into the room like a stone into still water.
Angelina smiled. That same patient curve of the mouth. The one I now understood was the expression of a predator who'd cornered something small and was in no hurry.
"Anthony." She uncrossed her legs. Stood. Smoothed her skirt with both hands.
"How wonderful to see you. You've grown."
She said it the way someone compliments a meal they're about to devour.
Everything in me went hot. My vision narrowed. My jaw ached from clenching.
Tony looked at me. One look. His green eyes found mine across the kitchen and held them for exactly one second. In that second I heard everything he couldn't say out loud.
Not now. Not in front of her. I need you to hold it together.
I held it together.
He turned back to Angelina. "Why are you here?"
Angelina Marshall lifted her chin. She looked at Tony the way she'd looked at the kitchen. The glass walls. The mountains. Calculating the value of everything in front of her.
"I want to see my granddaughter."
The words landed in the room like a grenade.
Sophia's hand clenched around the counter edge. Elijah Brooks shifted on his stool, his pleasant expression unchanged. Tony stood in the middle of his own kitchen, barefoot and paint-streaked and six foot five, and said nothing.
And I stood there with my back against the counter and my nails cutting half-moons into my palms. I thought about a woman named Hadley who'd once looked Angelina Marshall in the eye on national television and called her exactly what she was.
That woman was still in here. Somewhere under the brown hair and the fake name and the careful silence.
And she was furious.