Chapter Four: The Visit

“Get out,” Vivian said. Her voice shook, but not from sorrow—from something sharper, colder. “Everyone. Except her.”

Arthur exchanged a glance with Edward. Adrian didn’t move.

“Vivian—” her father started.

“I said get out.” She hadn’t taken her eyes off Arabella. “This is between me and my sister.”

Adrian’s gaze flicked to Arabella, a silent question. Do you want me to stay. It startled her, the fact that he’d asked it at all, even wordlessly—no one had checked whether she wanted to be alone with Vivian in eleven years of watching her sister’s moods rearrange every room they shared.

“It’s fine,” Arabella said. “I’ll be fine.”

He held her eyes a moment longer, then inclined his head, once, and walked out. Arthur followed, and after a long look that said this conversation wasn’t over either, so did her father. The door clicked shut.

Vivian crossed the study in three furious strides. “How long.”

“How long, what?”

“How long have you been planning this. Whatever you did to make a man like that say that in front of everyone—”

“I didn’t do anything.” Arabella stood, because it felt wrong to be sitting while her sister loomed over her like a verdict waiting to be delivered. “I didn’t know he was going to say it. I was as surprised as you were.”

“Don’t lie to me.” Vivian’s voice cracked, and beneath the fury, for just a moment, Arabella saw something rawer—humiliation, grief, the particular devastation of watching a future you’d been promised your whole life get handed to someone else in front of an audience. “Do you know what people are saying out there right now? That he passed over the daughter who was ready for someone who—” She stopped herself, but not soon enough.

“Say it,” Arabella said quietly.

“I don’t need to.” Vivian’s eyes swept over her, sharp and deliberate, the way their mother’s did at dinner. “You know what they’re saying. You’ve heard it your whole life. You just usually have the decency not to make it everyone’s problem.”

The words should have hurt more than they did. Arabella had absorbed versions of this sentence for twenty-four years—quieter, gentler ones, offered by relatives who meant to be kind and weren’t, by her mother in moments of exhausted honesty. She’d built calluses over the places they used to land. But calluses weren’t the same as immunity, and something in her chest went tight and hot anyway.

“I didn’t ask for this,” she said, quiet but not small. “I didn’t campaign for it. Until twenty minutes ago I didn’t think it was possible. So if you need to be angry, be angry at him, or at whatever made him choose what he chose. But I won’t apologize for a body I didn’t choose either, and I won’t apologize for existing in a room you wanted to yourself.”

Vivian’s mouth opened, then closed. Something in her expression flickered—surprise, maybe, at the steadiness in her sister’s voice. Arabella rarely spoke to her that way. Rarely spoke to anyone that way.

“You don’t even want him,” Vivian said, quieter now, almost accusing. “You barely know him. He’s fifteen years older than you, Arabella. He’s not going to want—” She gestured, vaguely, at all of her sister, and didn’t finish.

“Then he shouldn’t have chosen me,” Arabella said. “But he did. In front of everyone. And I don’t know what to do with that yet. But I’m not going to hand it back just because it makes you uncomfortable.”

Vivian stared at her for a long moment, something working behind her eyes. Then her expression hardened again, the vulnerability sealing itself back beneath practiced composure.

“This isn’t over,” she said. “Adrian Blackwood doesn’t do anything without a reason, and I promise you, whatever his reason is, it isn’t love. You’re a placeholder for something. A strategy. And when you figure out what it is, don’t come crying to me.”

She turned and swept toward the door, pausing with her hand on the frame.

“Enjoy your engagement, little sister.” Her voice had gone glass-smooth again, the mask fully restored. “I give it six months before he realizes what everyone else already knows.”

The door shut behind her, and Arabella was alone in her father’s study, her pulse still uneven, Vivian’s words settling into her chest like stones dropped into still water. A placeholder. A strategy.

She wanted to believe it wasn’t true. She wanted to hold on to the way Adrian had looked at her, the way he’d asked—wordlessly—if she wanted him to stay.

But she’d spent her whole life being the fallback option, the afterthought, the one whose body and presence were discussed like a liability to be managed. It would be foolish to assume that had changed just because a powerful man nearly twice her age had decided, for reasons still unknown to her, that she was useful.

She crossed to the window, looking out over the estate’s dark gardens, and caught her own reflection ghosted faintly in the glass—overlaid, for a moment, with the shape of a car pulling into the drive below. Black, sleek, unmistakably Blackwood.

Adrian hadn’t left.

He was still here. And as she watched, he stepped out of the car alone, looking up at the study window as though he’d known exactly which one she’d be standing behind.