Chapter 6: The Interview

The clip was already at four hundred thousand views by the time Adrian’s assistant pulled it up on the office’s second screen. Vivian sat across from a daytime talk show host, dressed in soft blue instead of the armor-ivory she’d worn at the gala, her hands folded with the practiced stillness of someone who’d rehearsed looking like she hadn’t rehearsed anything.

“I don’t blame my sister,” Vivian was saying, her voice trembling in a way that read as vulnerability rather than performance to anyone who hadn’t grown up across the dinner table from her. “Arabella has always struggled to find her place in our family. I think, in a strange way, this is good for her. She needs the structure. The guidance.”

The host leaned forward. “Some people are saying Mr. Blackwood’s choice was… unconventional.”

Vivian’s smile turned sad, indulgent, the smile of a woman being generous about a painful subject. “Adrian has always had a soft spot for people who need rescuing. I think he sees Arabella as someone to take care of. It’s very noble of him, really.” A pause, timed like a held breath before a blow. “I just hope she’s ready for the kind of life he lives. It’s not for everyone. Some of us were raised for it.”

Adrian closed the laptop without finishing the clip.

Arabella sat very still in the chair across from his desk, her coffee cooling untouched. She’d known, somewhere beneath the numbness, that Vivian would find a way to make her sound like a charity case rather than a choice. Still, hearing it stated so calmly, so publicly, dressed up as sisterly concern, landed harder than she’d braced for.

“She’s good,” Arabella said finally, because someone had to say something and the silence had gone on a beat too long. “No one watching that will think she said anything cruel.”

“No,” Adrian agreed. “Which is precisely why it’s effective.” He studied her for a moment, and she recognized, with some surprise, that he wasn’t looking at her the way people usually did after Vivian’s performances—not with pity, not with the awkward reassurance people offered when they didn’t know what else to say. He looked like a man calculating the shape of a problem he intended to solve.

“You don’t have to fix this,” Arabella said. “Some things aren’t fixable. People will believe what they want.”

“I’m not interested in what people believe,” Adrian said. “I’m interested in whether you believe it.” He came around the desk and sat on its edge, closer to her than his usual careful distance. “Do you think I chose you because you need rescuing?”

The bluntness of it caught her off guard. “I don’t know what you think anymore. I thought I understood the reason you gave my father. Now I’m watching my sister rewrite it in front of half a million people, and I don’t know which version is closer to true.”

Something shifted behind his eyes—not defensiveness, but a kind of careful honesty, as if he were choosing which door to open. “I’ve spent twenty years being handled,” he said. “Business partners who agree with everything I say because they want something from me. Women who perform interest in my company rather than my company.

She wanted to press him, the old habit of needing to know the shape of things before they happened, needing to brace herself in advance for whatever cruelty was coming. But something about the certainty in his voice made her decide, for the first time in longer than she could remember, to simply wait and trust that whatever he’d built would hold.

His assistant knocked once, apologetic, and leaned in. “Sir. Mr. Hart is on line two. He says it’s urgent.”

Adrian’s jaw tightened, almost imperceptibly—the first crack Arabella had seen in his composure since the gala. He picked up the phone without breaking eye contact with her, and whatever her father said on the other end drained the color from his face by degrees, second by second, until he set the phone down with a stillness that felt far more dangerous than any raised voice could have.

“What is it?” Arabella asked, her pulse already climbing.

“Your father,” Adrian said slowly, “has just informed me that Arthur collapsed at the office twenty minutes ago.”