I leave the sitting room with my sketchbook hugged to my ribs. The guest wing hallway is familiar now: framed photographs that look like catalog images of calm—a pebbled beach, gray horizon, a hand picking lavender—a carpet runner that doesn’t try to impress, and sconces that give off enough light to keep the edges of things honest. The air smells like lemon oil and laundry, not expensive. The hum I’ve gotten used to follows me halfway and then thins as I step into a cross-corridor that points toward the older part of the estate.
The shift is subtle. Less sound, a different weight in the floorboards, the kind of quiet objects make when they’ve been in the same place for a century and they know it. The walls are paneled in darker wood here, the kind with grain you could map if you had a year. Portraits hang in a series: men who look like they grew old doing nothing and women who look like they grew old because no one let them do anything else. Their eyes have that gallery trick of following you without moving. I let them. It’s better than the feeling I get in his studio, where the only eyes I can feel belong to him.
I pass three closed doors with brass plates that say nothing. On the fourth, the plate is missing. The door is ajar by the width of a hand. There’s a sound from inside—soft and steady, but not voices. I tell myself to keep walking. I tell myself to go outside and breathe salt air and count gulls and come back with knuckles that aren’t trying to punch through a page. Curiosity puts its palm between my shoulder blades and nudges.
I push the door with two fingers. It swings inward on silent hinges.
The room is stripped down to function: mats across a third of the floor, a heavy bag hanging from a ceiling beam, a steel rack with bands and ropes coiled like sleeping snakes, a squat ice bath steaming lightly in the corner where condensation climbs glass like a living thing. The windows are high andnarrow; the afternoon light comes in through rain and lands in long bars across the floor. The air smells like rubber and clean sweat and the menthol camphor of someone’s childhood memory of chest rub.
He’s at the bag, shirt off, hands wrapped. Not the curated version of himself from the mezzanine or the careful version that sits in a chair in the clinic. Bare arms cut with work instead of mirrors. A long scar curves from his left ribs toward his back, old and neat, the kind that was sutured by someone who cared about function and line. He breathes in through his nose, out through his mouth. The strikes are slow and precise, not for show or anger. It’s control work. It’s one more place in the house where rules keep a person from being a rumor.
For a second he doesn’t see me. I should back out now, the way any rational creature retreats from the edge of a clearing when it notices a predator. Instead I hear my voice say, “I didn’t know this was here.”
He turns. Breath hard. Eyes darker than night under a dock. The look he gives me would pin a more reasonable girl to the threshold. Instead, it pins me and I step anyway. He wipes his face with a towel slowly and deliberately, so he doesn’t have to speak until he decides to. His voice is rough when it arrives. “You’re not supposed to be.”
I wait, because the end of the sentence is the point with him. He gives it to me after a moment. “But since you are…”
The collarbone wet with sweat. The scar he doesn’t hide. A tremor in two fingers he doesn’t clutch into a fist. Pieces of a person instead of the icon the gala built around him. I step in, one step, the two, my sketchbook still against my chest like something I intend to use and not something I’m trying to keep him from seeing. The room’s cool air hits my face. It’s a relief and a warning.
“You built this place for them,” I say, tilting my head toward the hall where all the portraits live and judge. “But you use it too.”
“Sometimes,” he says, his voice lower. He tosses the towel onto the mat, unwraps one hand with his teeth, careful not to pull skin with cloth. He moves closer in a way that isn’t stalking, it is measured as if every inch is agreed upon even if neither of us signed anything.
He stops an arm’s length away. It feels closer. My body does a check: heart rate up, breath shallow but not panicked, hands that want to draw and touch without permission. He looks at the sketchbook.
“May I?” he asks. The question is a courtesy I don’t trust more than I trust a locked door with no label. I don’t answer with words. I don’t step back either. That’s an answer he’ll accept.
He takes the sketchbook from my hands. He holds it like it belongs to him by virtue of being in his house, then corrects himself and holds it like it belongs to me. He flips it open. The top page is what I left it on because I forgot to hide it: a half-finished drawing of his hand in the clinic, the tendons cut with charcoal, the half-moon scar at the knuckle I didn’t see until I drew it. He looks at it for a long second. No comments about “talent” or jokes about “good side.”
“You see too much,” he says finally in a quiet voice.
“Occupational hazard,” I say, reaching for the book because that line is mine, not his.
He doesn’t let go. He catches my wrist with his free hand instead. The skin-on-skin contact is a shock that shoots up my arm and detonates behind my ear. I hate that my mouth opens a little like my body wants more air. He notices. He always notices.
“Let go,” I say.
He does not. He guides. It’s not a pull; it’s a gradual pressure backward, like he’s moving me out of a line of fire Ican’t see. My feet step without my permission until my back touches the cool paneled wall. I’m not trapped; the door is ten steps away. He’s in front of me. He keeps a distance between our bodies that comes across as respect until you realize it also reads as precision. His sweat smells like salt and the way some rooms smell like a memory you didn’t realize you still carried.
“You shouldn’t wander,” he says. The words could be scolding, but they land like an observation.
“You’re dangerous,” I say before I can decide if that’s what I meant to say. It comes out half accusation, half acknowledgment.
“And you keep coming closer,” he answers, not moving, forehead lowering until it barely touches mine. It’s the kind of touch that saysI couldandI won’tin the same breath.
My body runs its inventory again. Heart faster. No fear that makes the air thin, just the fear that tells you you’re alive. It nauseates me and anchors me and makes me furious that this is the person who can turn my physiology into an argument I can’t win with language.
“Lila’s leaving Monday,” I say, because information is a control mechanism and blurting it is the opposite of control. “She has to get back.”
“I know,” he replies. “I was told the moment the flight was booked.”
“Of course you were,” I say, steel trying to regrow in my voice. “Why shouldn’t you know everything?”
He doesn’t rise to it. He tilts the sketchbook in his other hand until the drawing of his hand catches the light and turns the paper tooth rough. “You signed an NDA to be in this house,” he says. “Not an oath.”
“You sure act like I did,” I whisper.
“That’s because I know the cost of letting rooms like this become stories for people who haven’t had to live in them,” hesays. He could be talking about Caldwell. He could be talking about me.
