Callum watches her, and he hates the idea that this, sorting through the debris of Keir MacLaren’s life, is something she’s better at than grief.
Her phone buzzes on the table.
She ignores it.
It buzzes again.
Callum doesn’t need to see the screen to know who it is.
“They’re persistent,” he says lightly, testing the surface.
“That’s one word for it,” Isla replies, not looking up.
Her phone vibrates a third time, then stops.A moment later, her email pings.Then again.
She closes her eyes for half a second, so brief, he almost misses it, then turns the screen facedown as if that can silence the world.
Callum feels something cold settle in his chest.
“You’re not going to check?”he asks.
“No.”
Another ping.Another.
Callum can hear the tension building under her skin.She’s not calm; she’s contained.
“They won’t stop,” he says.
Her laugh is quiet and razor-thin.“No.Theydon’t.”
He watches her stack the papers with more precision than necessary, like order can keep her safe.
“Who is it?”he asks anyway.
“My manager.My agent.And my mother, no doubt triangulating through both,” Isla says.“They’re threatening to release my performance slot.Framing it as a concern.”
“Of course, they are.”
“It’s always a concern,” she murmurs.“Concern that sounds like love until you realize it’s just control wearing perfume.”
The words surprise him.
He knows Isla is successful.That her life is built of airports and concert halls and applause.He’s admired her discipline from a distance, the way her hands can summon something sacred from wood and ivory even before he knew she was Keir’s daughter.
What he’s only beginning to understand is the machinery around that success, the quiet network of people who make decisions about her life and call it support.
It looks like a cage.
They continue sorting.Callum forces his gaze to the papers, to the evidence, to anything that isn’t the line of Isla’s mouth.The fullness of her lips.The way she smells.
He fails when she leans forward to reach a page near his side of the table.Her arm grazes his chest as she reaches across him, and the contact, brief, accidental, hits him like a spark.
Isla stills too.
For a heartbeat, neither of them moves.
Then she withdraws her arm quickly, like she’s been burned, and resumes sorting as if she hasn’t just turned the air between them into something volatile.
