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This was… something else.

It was another long, light evening. One of the sweet joys of summer was being able to walk home in the light no matter what time she closed the restaurant. It was something she remembered fondly all winter long.

When she made it to the house, she found Flannery outside, sipping a cocktail on the porch while scrolling on her phone. Kitty thought Flannery might say something—probably something cutting, it being Flannery—but her sister only smiled, then toasted her silently with her glass.

Inside, Indy was sitting at the dining room table that she’d long ago made her office. She had documents spread out in front of her, a calculator in one hand, and was taking notes on her pad. She had her big headphones on, deliberately blocking out the world, and Kitty knew better than to disturb her. Indy loved nothing more than running numbers at night. It was something she looked forward to the way Kitty looked forward to a bath.

Sometimes, Kitty thought that if they didn’t all look like each other, she really would have believed that Indy was a changeling who’d been left on their doorstep.

But if she’d thought that her sisters were going to corner her when she got home, thereby drawing out the time before she had to go upstairs and see what her husband was doing, she was disappointed. Because they were both clearly going out of their way to make sure that couldn’t happen. And maybe also proving that they could carry on the way they would at any other time, even if Kitty had decided to move a whole man into the house without really discussing it with them.

Something, she could acknowledge as she trudged up the stairs, she would not have taken too kindly to if one of them had done it to her.

She made a mental note to apologize, but then she was climbing up the stairs to the attic, and every single part of her body was suddenly on high alert. She held her breath, but she couldn’t hear anything. She found herself listening intently as she made it to the attic landing, certain that there should have been some kind of man noises that she would be able to pick up.

But she couldn’t hear anything. No matter how hard she listened, it was quiet up here.

The lights were on, which she assumed was a good indication that Finn was around, but she didn’t know where. She froze for a moment when she made it to the landing, and had to press her palm against her chest because her heart was beating so loudly. Then she made herself keep walking.

And after peeking down toward her office and the sitting room and not seeing him, she turned toward the bedroom instead. She pushed open the door—gingerly—and he was there.

Finn Patrick, who Kitty had actually married today, was sprawled out on her bed.

He had his ankles crossed and his head on her pillows while he lay there, reading a paperback. Kitty gulped, because it seemed far too intimate to just… walk in here and find a man on a bed, casually reading like they did this every night. Her heart hitched behind her ribs.

Finn glanced up then, and she thought her heart maybe stopped altogether when that blue gaze touched hers.

“Um. I think… I’m going to take a shower,” Kitty stammered out.

He only inclined his head, just a little, and she felt her whole body shake as she scurried for the bathroom.

She felt… She didn’t even know how she felt. Like she was three times her size, in a weird way. As if everything was misshapen, or maybe it was that she felt on display. She stood inside this bathroom she’d used for years and looked around like she’d never seen it before.

Or maybe she just didn’t know how to strip down and be naked when there was a man on the other side of the door.

Kitty forced herself to go through the usual steps, because it was obviously silly not to. She always showered after she came home from the restaurant. There was absolutely no reason that she should alter her schedule at all.

But she did stay in that shower until her fingers shriveled up.

When she got out, she very carefully brushed out her hair. Then she climbed into her usual summer pajamas, a set that she and her sisters all had a pair of, in different shades of happy little flowers on a short sleeve shirt and summer shorts set. Hers were daffodils.

She had never thought twice about these pajamas until she stepped out of the bathroom, and found Finn not even pretending to read his book. He had it flat on his chest and was looking straight at her.

Suddenly Kitty was aware of how skimpy the whole thing was. The shorts barely made it to midthigh and that V-neck was scandalously low-cut, now that she was standing in front of someone. Or maybe it was just the fact that she’d never realized how tiny and close her bedroom was, until now, and suddenly it was the only thing she could think about.

“I didn’t really know what the sleeping arrangements are supposed to be,” Finn said, in that calm way of his. “Are you expecting me to sleep in one of the other rooms up here? I didn’t see a couch.”

Kitty would have loved him to sleep somewhere else, now that he mentioned it. She wasn’t sure why it hadn’t occurred to her that the sleeping arrangements were going to be an issue. Because he couldn’t go sleep on the couch downstairs. He couldn’t even sleep in another room up here, because sometimes her sisters came up to get things out of the office or get a book from the library in her sitting room.

There couldn’t be any evidence that Finn and she were sleeping apart. That was no way to convince anyone that this was real.

“The sleeping arrangements are the bed,” she said, trying to sound matter-of-fact and unbothered and not really certain where she ended up on the other end of that sentence. She cleared her throat. “But I usually sleep on the side you’re on, so if you don’t mind…?”

“Yes ma’am,” he said, very politely, but with that laughter in his eyes once again.

Kitty then went about her usual nightly routine, though she felt as if she was on camera. Because she knew he was watching her. Maybe he wasn’t even watching her every moment, but she couldn’t pretend she didn’t know that he was right here in the room.

Finn slid over to the other side of the bed, which was not king-sized. It was a queen. Kitty had always found it perfectly suitable for herself. And now, looking at the size of him, she really couldn’t think of any possible way that the two of them could sleep nicely side by side…