I look at her. "That's not reassuring."
"It's not meant to be." She picks up one of the cut stems and turns it in her fingers. "What I do know is this, you found her yourself. Whatever he knew or didn't know, that part was yours." She sets the stem down. "Hold onto that."
The garden smells like jasmine and cut grass and the cold stone of the wall is solid under my palms.
"She's going to be all right," Olive says. "With James. With your father. With all of it. She's tougher than she looks."
"I know."
"You should go home to her."
I stand. She lifts her face when I lean down to kiss her cheek, her hand coming up briefly to my arm.
I walk back through the house and out to the front drive and get in my car, sitting there for fifteen minutes.
The estate is quiet around me. The cypress trees along the drive stand absolutely still in the early morning air. Through the study window I can see the shape of my father at his desk, the lamp on, the file open again, already back to work. Whatever had happened this morning, he had moved on.
I think about a photograph I stole when I was ten years old. A little girl in a purple dress, dark hair, dark eyes, a gap between her front teeth. I don't remember much about that day, whatever occasion brought us into the same space, but I remember the photograph. I took it and I kept it and I told myself I'd find her again when the time was right.
It took seventeen years. I spent them keeping that promise.
8
JADE
Phoenix comes home at noon. I hear his car in the drive and then the front door and then his footsteps down the hall, and I know before he appears in the kitchen doorway that something is different. He's still in his jacket but he's loosened his tie and his jaw is set differently, the tension sitting lower, closer to his throat than his temples. He looks like a man who sat in a driveway for fifteen minutes and came home still holding on to something.
He looks at me. At the laptop open on the table in front of me, the blank document I've been staring at for two hours. He crosses the kitchen, closes the laptop with one hand, and holds out the other.
I take it.
He leads me down the hall to the bathroom without saying anything. I don't ask. The tile is cold under my feet and the room smells like his soap from this morning and he reaches into the shower and turns it on and then turns to me and his hands find the hem of my shirt.
We undress each other without any words, just hands and the rustle of fabric and the quiet of a room filling with steam.He's watching me as he does it, not managing the pace. Just watching me like a man who needs to hold onto something.
The water is too hot, but neither of us adjusts it.
He pulls me under and I feel it across my shoulders and down my back, that sharp edge between heat and pain, and his hands are already in my hair and his mouth is on my throat and I press my palms flat against his chest and feel his heart going fast under my fingers.
His hands move without their usual precision. He's not building toward anything, not reading my responses to adjust his. He's just here, urgent without a plan, wanting without managing it, and I feel the difference in every place he touches me. Whatever his father said in that study is still in him and he hasn't decided what to do with it yet and so, instead, he's here, his forehead against my collarbone, breathing me in like I'm the thing keeping him tethered.
I tilt his face up to mine and kiss him and he makes a sound low in his chest.
His hands slide down my back and grip my hips and the hot water runs down both of us and I stop thinking about what happened in the study or what happens next or any of the things I've been holding onto since the BBQ. There is just the heat of him and the tile under my feet and his mouth finding mine again, urgent.
He presses me back against the wall. The tile is startling against my shoulders, cold against the heat of everything else, and I gasp and his hands are already everywhere, learning me again like something he was afraid he might lose. I pull at his shoulders, his hair, trying to get closer, and he obliges, closing every last inch of distance until there's nothing between us but the water and the steam and the sound of his breathing.
I wrap my leg around him and he understands immediately, lifting me, and I feel the full weight of him solid against me before he slides home and we both go still for a moment.
His forehead drops to mine. My fingers curl into his shoulders hard enough to leave marks.
Then he starts to move.
Not slow, not the version of him that builds things in stages. This is urgent and honest. I give him everything he asks for and take everything back. The hot water runs down our faces and I taste salt and steam on his lips when I kiss him and he says my name once, quiet, like a thing he needed to say out loud.
The orgasm hits me hard and fast and I hear myself make a sound I couldn't suppress if I tried, my whole body going tight around him, and he follows thirty seconds later with his face buried in my neck and his hands gripping me hard.
We stay there for a long time.
