His smile turned a little sad. “Every day.”
I sat with that.
How had I lived in the same house as this man and not known a thing about the world he carried in his chest?
“Does she know?” I asked. “About what you do?”
“She knows I keep people safe,” he said. “That’s enough for now.”
I nodded, the lump in my throat getting harder to swallow.
“Quentin, I’m sorry,” I said, surprising even myself. “I’ve never really spoken to you before. Not like this.”
“You were never unkind,” he said. “Just busy being who you thought you had to be.”
I looked down at my hands, then back at him.
“Charlie says I didn’t realize I needed protection.”
Quentin’s gaze was steady. “He’s right. But not in the way you think.”
“What way, then?”
He leaned forward just slightly, his voice low. “You needed someone who saw you. Not just the Carrington daughter. Not just the polished version.”
I felt like the air had been knocked out of me.
“Do you think that’s what Charlie sees?”
“I think,” he said gently, “that Charlie Dane sees more than most people want him to. And that scares them.”
I sat back, absorbing the weight of everything I hadn’t known.
Outside, cicadas buzzed, loud and relentless. Inside, the silence held something new.
Respect. Truth. Maybe even the start of something like trust.
“I’d like to know more about her,” I said after a moment. “Layla.”
Quentin smiled then, full and proud.
“She’s got a mind like a steel trap,” he said. “Loves books. Obsessed with the stars. Thinks she’s going to be an astronaut.”
My lips curved. “She sounds like a force.”
“She is,” he said, with quiet reverence. “Like someone else I know.”
For the first time in a very long time, I felt something close to proud. Not for how I looked or what I wore or how well I’d played the game.
But for sitting down. For seeing. For asking.
Quentin’s words lingered in the quiet like a balm and a warning all at once.
I traced the rim of a crystal coaster on the end table beside me, then looked up, hesitant.
“Did you hear what my mother said?” I asked. “About Byron Dane?”
His expression didn’t change, but the air around him seemed to shift. Still, alert.
