I thought about it. The fire crackled. The shadows danced. Somewhere in the house, a clock chimed—nine o'clock, or ten, or something else that didn't matter.
"Can I still go to vet school?"
"Yes."
"Can I still work at the diner?"
"If you want to."
"I don't want to. I hate that place."
"Then don't go back."
I pulled my hand from his. The warmth lingered on my skin, a ghost of his touch.
"You're giving me everything I ever wanted," I said. "A home. An education. A future. All I have to do is let you own me."
"I don't want to own you."
"Then what do you want?"
He stood. Walked around the desk. Leaned against the edge of it, close enough that I could smell cedar and smoke and the faint, clean scent of his soap. He looked down at me, and I looked up at him, and the space between us was small enough to kiss.
"I want you to choose to stay," he said. "Not because you have to. Not because you're trapped. Because you want to. Because this—" He gestured at the room, the house, the life he'd built. "—could be yours. All of it. If you wanted it."
"And if I don't want it?"
"Then you leave. And I let you go."
I didn't believe him. I couldn't believe him. Men like Aleksander Mire didn't let things go. They accumulated. They possessed. They built empires out of the people who belonged to them.
But I signed the papers anyway.
Because the apartment was cold. Because the diner was killing me by inches. Because somewhere in the depths of this terrible, beautiful house, Gabriel was waiting for me, and Nathan was watching, and I was starting to understand that I didn't want to leave.
I wanted to stay.
I wanted to see what happened next.
The bedroom they gave me was larger than my entire apartment.
It was on the second floor, at the end of a long hallway lined with portraits of people I didn't know. The walls were papered in pale blue silk, and the windows faced east, toward the gardens and the greenhouse where Gabriel had kissed me. There was a canopy bed draped in white, a vanity with a gilded mirror, a fireplace that someone had already lit. The fire crackled and popped, filling the room with warmth and the smell of burning oak.
My bag sat on the floor at the foot of the bed. It was small—a duffel, the same one I'd brought from the farm six years ago. It held everything I owned. Jeans and sweaters and the blue dress my mother had bought me. A photograph of my father. The veterinary textbook I'd been reading in the greenhouse.
That was it. That was my life, condensed into a bag small enough to carry with one hand.
I unpacked slowly, folding my clothes into the armoire, setting the photograph on the nightstand. My father smiled at me from the frame—a rare smile, the kind he'd worn before my mother died. I touched his face with my fingertip.
"I'm okay," I told him. "I'm going to be okay."
I didn't know if I believed it.
There was a dress laid out on the bed.
I hadn't noticed it at first—it blended with the white canopy, pale and gossamer, like something from a dream. I picked it up. The fabric was silk, cool and heavy in my hands, the color of champagne. There were shoes to match—heels, delicate, the kind of shoes that belonged on someone who didn't have to walk anywhere.
I found a note tucked into the sleeve.
