His knee brushed mine beneath the table.
Once.
No one else would have noticed. I kept my eyes on Sofia, who was reading the citation Daisy had handed her and trying very hard not to laugh.
Beneath the table, Nick’s hand shifted until his fingers found mine. The contact was steady, certain, and far too intimate for something no one else could see.
Sofia’s gaze dropped for half a second.
Then she looked away, and my throat tightened.
I hated that sort of thing. Feelings that arrived without warning and expected to be accommodated. Terribly inefficient.
Nick’s thumb moved once over the side of my hand, because of course he knew.
After dinner, the family loosened into smaller clusters around the patio, though none of them stayed separate for long. Theo followed Annie toward the pool, listening with the focused devotion of a man who considered every footnote foreplay, until Brynn called out, “If this is about seal aggression, I’m emotionally unavailable.”
“Spatial pressure,” Annie said without turning around.
“That is what I said.”
“It is absolutely not,” Theo said.
Summer disappeared inside to take a call she insisted was professional, fooling absolutely no one, while Jerrick stood beside Brynn’s chair and watched the bowl of mango sorbet balanced far too close to Wyatt’s sleeping head.
“It’s fine,” Brynn said. “He has no upper-body control. He can’t reach it.”
Sofia wandered toward the lawn with Daisy, badge still around her neck.
Nick watched her go.
I stood beside him near the patio steps, the heat of his body close enough to register along my arm. The night smelled of salt, cut limes, and smoke from the grill cooling behind us.
“She’s doing well,” I said.
His gaze stayed on Sofia. “She’s adapting.”
“That wasn't an answer.”
“It was accurate.”
I looked up at him. “Mercer.”
His jaw shifted once, and there he was.
“She checked her room this morning,” he said.
My chest tightened before I could stop it. “At your place?”
“Yes.”
“Checked it how?”
His gaze stayed on Sofia. “Opened the closet. Looked at the shelf. Counted the books.”
Sofia laughed at something Daisy said, then immediately composed her face as if joy were a clerical error.
“She wanted to know if anything had moved since March,” he said.
