Chapter 18 – Ariane – The Week on the Clock #2
“What?” He keeps his gaze on the road, just a quick side look.
“Your phone,” I say, lighter than I feel. “Did you change the code?”
“Oh.” He frowns at the windshield. “Yeah. Face ID was glitching last week. I turned it off and changed the code. I’ll fix it when I get home. I didn’t even think about it.”
I stare at him and try to reconcile this man, warm water bottle bringer, tea watcher, porch light checker, with the text that says room 314 like a command. He reaches across the console and squeezes my fingers. His palm is warm. The gesture is easy and kind. It feels borrowed from a different life.
“We’ll get Eleanor settled,” he says. “I’ll take the first shift with her meds.”
“She won’t let you,” I say. “She’ll insist on reading the label out loud as if we’re trying to trick her.”
He smiles a little. “We can be tricksters later.”
If I weren’t busy pretending my heart hadn’t slid to the floor, I would make a joke about him choosing tonight to discover mischief. I watch his profile in the streetlights instead and think of a winky face I want to crush under my heel.
“You’re very quiet,” he says.
“I’m collecting myself,” I say. It’s true. It also hides a galaxy.
“Do you want to talk about anything?”
I look at his mouth and hear: Don’t ask questions. It’s easier that way. I look at his hands and see: You’re lucky I can make time. He has a gift for tenderness. I used to trust it with my whole spine. Tonight, I can’t stop wondering what’s costume and what’s skin.
“I will,” I say, and the words scrape. “After we get my mother home.”
He accepts that like a man who believes schedules can save families. “All right.”
We pass a bus stop where a kid leans into a girl’s shoulder and she laughs into her scarf.
A man in a neon vest pushes a broom across a storefront stoop, slow and methodical.
A woman carries a bag of oranges against her chest like something warm and valuable.
I stare at all of them as if they have answers.
I think of Finn. I don’t want to but he arrives anyway. I tell my brain we don’t have the bandwidth for that man’s mouth tonight. My brain tells me he doesn’t ask permission.
Julian fills the quiet with logistics. Flights.
Donors. A board member who wants to move a dinner because his alma mater is in playoffs.
If I didn’t know him, I would find it soothing, the tidy way he stacks complications and calls it planning.
I nod at the right places. He says he’ll miss me.
I say I’ll miss him. The words bounce off my teeth, but they don’t stick.
We turn onto our street. The trees along the median are lit from below and look like they’re whispering. The porch light is already on and I know who’s home.
Finn.
“Here we are,” Julian says, soft. He parks, kills the engine, and the jazz slides away like it knows better than to try for a big exit.
We sit.
He turns to me in the quiet. “You were brave today,” he says. “You kept your mother calm. You kept me from arguing with the discharge nurse about the price of a blood pressure cuff. You were… you.”
I nod. Compliments usually pat my hair. Today, they land and roll to the floor.
He reaches for his phone, pauses, pockets it instead, and opens his door.
He comes around to my side because that’s who he is even if everything else is crossed out.
He helps me up, one palm light on my elbow, and for a second, I want to fold into his chest and let the whole day spill out.
The urge knocks the wind out of me. Then I see a sticky note in my head with a number on it and the urge dies.
“Go on,” I say. “I’ll bring the bag.”
He hesitates, eyes searching my face. If he’s hiding something, he’s a professional. If he’s sorry, it doesn’t show. If he’s oblivious…Well? I guess that’s a talent too. He kisses my temple like a benediction I don’t deserve and carries the hospital folder inside.
I stand by the car and wrap my arms around myself until the tremor in my fingers eases.
The night on our street is alive with ordinary life.
Someone reversing too carefully, dogs throwing barks back and forth, a neighbor laughing into a phone behind a half-open curtain.
I let myself feel all of it because I’m about to wreak havoc.
I go inside.
Julian is at the low table, sleeves rolled to his forearms, sorting my mother’s pill bottles into a straight little army.
Two mugs steam on cork coasters. The blood-pressure cuff sits on a folded towel.
He looks up when the gallery swallows the last of my steps.
That soft, careful face, the one that used to make my spine unclench, finds me.
“There you are,” he says, gentle. “Peppermint. Sit.”
“Put it down,” I say.
He sets the mug back like he’s handling a fragile bird. His eyes stay on me. “Okay.”
“Take my phone.”
A flicker crosses his face. confusion first, then the polite caution he uses with skittish donors. He reaches out to where my phone is on the counter, and unlocks it automatically. His thumb hesitates like it’s asking for permission from his brain; habit wins.
“What am I checking for?” he asks, and he really sounds puzzled. Almost affronted by the idea that there’s a quiz.
“The screenshots with Sunshine.”
He stills. He glances down at the screen. I watch every millimeter of it: the way his brows knit, the quick drag of his bottom lip against his teeth, the small flinch in his jaw like he just bit something too cold.
The blue and gray bubbles pop up, familiar and wrong.
His thumb stutters, then moves faster, then slows, like he’s trying to outrun the words.
Surprise cracks across his face, almost perfectly timed.
The bastard. He actually looks surprised.
For a stupid second, that hurts more than if he’d smirked.
He keeps reading. His eyes do this rapid-blink thing he does when a board member asks a question that wasn’t on the agenda. His mouth opens, closes. He swallows, hard enough I hear it in the quiet.
“Ari…”
“Don’t,” I say, because if he starts with that voice, the one that always makes me sit and drink water and breathe, I will go under. “Don’t start with soft.”
He drags his gaze up from the screen and fixes it on me, steady, almost calm.
It’s the look he wears when something messy happens onstage and he has to soothe a room with his eyebrows.
“I don’t know who that is,” he says. Steady and gentle.
“Someone’s messing with me. With us. I swear to you.
These are screenshots… they’re hardly believable… ”
I laugh, and it slices my throat on the way out.
“‘Room 314 again?’ ‘Still thinking about the elevator’? ‘Delete this’?” I tip my head toward the porte-cochère, where the security lights halo the curve of the drive.
“She texted you while you were pumping gas. Your good-boy halo was shining so hard you didn’t even look down. ”
“Ariane,” he says, palms open, inching around the table like he’s approaching a wounded animal. “Listen to me.”
“I have been listening to you,” I say, and my voice goes high before I yank it back. I plant it low. Even. “Flights, donors, the senator who loves a photo with a hand on your shoulder. You talk, I listen. I’m listening now. It sounds like lies.”
“It’s not.” The soft cracks at the edges; something raw shows. His eyes are bright. “I don’t know this person. I didn’t write those. That name…Sunshine… that isn’t…”
“Me?” I supply. “No. It isn’t.”
He flinches. “I mean it isn’t anyone. I would never…”
“You would never get caught,” I say. “That’s what you mean.”
“I would never do this to you.” He stops a few feet away, hands still visible, the posture of a man who wants to touch but knows better. “I know how this looks. But I need you to trust me.”
“Trust what?” I point at the phone. “That this is a glitch? A ghost? It’s not a rumor on a bathroom wall, Julian. It’s a map. It shows how you move when you think no one’s watching.”
He looks down at the screen again like it might have changed in the last two seconds. He flips once more, slower. I see the exact line hit his eyes. You looked incredible in red. Still thinking about the elevator. His throat works. He goes a little gray around the mouth.
“It’s not mine. You can check my phone…” he says. Quieter. It’s almost like he’s trying to convince himself.
“Then whose hand is that holding it?” I ask.
“People fake this. All the time,” he says, fast now, chasing the only rope within reach. “There are apps. You can doctor entire threads. Metadata, time stamps… there are forums. I’ve seen articles… anyone could have…”
“Enough with the excuses, Julian!” I cut in, and the steadiness in my voice startles me. “They’re your messages. Your screenshots. She texted you and asked for a key under your name.”
He swallows. “Christ.” His eyes squeeze shut for a beat, then open, frantic and pleading. “I’ll call. Right now. On speaker. I’ll ask who she is. You’ll hear it.”
“And if she answers like she knows you by the sound you make when you’re lying?” My smile feels like it could break my face. “What then?”
“If she answers like she knows me, I will stay and fix what I broke,” he says, every word chosen, heavy. “If she doesn’t, we figure out who did this to us. Together. Please, don’t… don’t set the house on fire over a thread you saw for two minutes.”
“You think I’m setting something on fire.” I shake my head. The chandelier throws light across the marble; the motor court beyond the windows glows like a stage set for a different family. “It feels like you did, and I’m just finally smelling the smoke.”
He flinches like I threw something, and it hit. He looks around the room as if the house could help him, as if the portraits might vouch. The softness returns, weaponized. “Tell me what to do.”
“Tell me the truth.”
“I am.” His voice fractures; he pulls it together. “Someone is doing this to us.”
“Maybe,” I say. “Or maybe you wrote to Sunshine about an elevator while I held my mother upright in one.” The memory spikes; I bite it back. “You want me to choose you. I can’t even I know you right now. Who are you? Why would you do this to me—to us?”
He scrubs a hand over his face, wrecking his neat hair. He looks young for a second and lost. “I love you.”
“I know.” It lands like a bruise. “I hoped you loved me more than you loved the version of yourself that gets applauded.”
“That’s not fair,” he says, heat under the words for the first time… an edge. “I don’t use people like that.”
“Then why do I feel used?” My voice gentles without permission. That scares me more than the anger. A part of me knows I’m being hypocritical considering last night with Finn. Considering everything I’ve been feeling since I came back here.
Fuck. How did I get into this mess?
He stares at the floor, then at the phone, then at me.
Resolve clicks in his eyes. He lifts the screen, thumb hovering over the contact at the top, no name, just the initials she saved in his thread, a little sun emoji next to them like an insult.
He looks like he’s about to jump and build the parachute on the way down.
“No.” I stop him. Quiet. Final.
“Ari, you can check my phone. I don’t even have the number saved…”
“No.” I hold his gaze. “Just put it away.”
He lowers it and puts it back on the counter.
I take my ring off.
It’s a small motion, a twist and a slide. The cold circle leaves a pale indent behind. I don’t look at my hand. I look at him as I set the ring in his palm. He stares at it like it might reattach itself to me if he opens his fingers.
“Ariane.” His voice breaks on my name. He isn’t pretending. He’s bleeding right in front of me. It doesn’t change what’s true. “Don’t.”
“Your bag’s in the car,” I say. My tone holds—flat iron over silk. “You were leaving anyway. Please don’t come back.”
He blinks. “You… what do you mean?”
“What I said, Julian. I can’t do this right now. Just stay gone.”
A shocked breath escapes him; it almost laughs, almost chokes. “You’re serious.”
“Please go,” I repeat, because if I say one more sentence I will crumble right here on the rug, and the rug doesn’t deserve that.
“I can’t leave you like this.”
“You already did,” I say. “You just didn’t notice.”
Something in his expression pinches, offended and wrecked. “This isn’t me. Fuck, you’re ruining this over some fake screenshots?”
“Find the version who didn’t do this and bring him back,” I say. “But he’s not the one standing in my mother’s lounge.”
The room goes very quiet. He nods once, a concession he doesn’t believe yet.
He tucks the ring into his jacket pocket like it might cut him.
He picks up the overnight bag he left behind the sofa earlier.
He walks to the gallery and pauses with his hand on the doorframe, not looking back like it might undo the last two minutes if he does.
“If you need me…” he begins.
“I won’t,” I say, and it’s cruel and also the only shield within reach.
He nods. Then, he goes. His footsteps travel the length of the gallery, the marble turning them into a record I’ll hear tonight when I try to sleep. The front door opens. Somewhere under the porte-cochère, an engine starts. Tires whisper. The gate clicks. Distance.
I stand very still until the tremor in my hands remembers who’s in charge.
The chandelier blurs; I blink it back into focus.
My finger throbs where the ring used to be.
I curl my hand into a fist and it stops feeling so empty.
Before I change my mind, I grab my phone and delete the file. I don’t ever want to look at it again.
I turn.
Finn is in the archway.
No sound or warning. Just him, set into the stone like the house decided to grow a darker doorway.
Jacket open, tie loosened, hair pushed back by a hand that didn’t ask permission.
One palm in his pocket, the other braced lightly on the column, like the estate needs his steadiness as much as I do.
The room is built to make people smaller; he looks perfectly scaled to it.
He takes in everything. The pill bottles aligned like soldiers, the two mugs steaming on coasters, the folded towel with the cuff, the yawning space where Julian isn’t, my bare left hand… and his eyes find mine and hold. He doesn’t say a word.
I don’t move.
He takes a step and slowly walks toward me, his footsteps echoing on the marble.