CHAPTER FIVE

Evanthe - POV

“I was not supposed to want her.”

That was the part I kept coming back to in the days after, the part that sat wrong no matter how I arranged it in my head.

I had been clear about what this was. I had drawn the lines myself, plainly and without room for misinterpretation. A transaction. A legal arrangement with a defined endpoint. Nothing that required anything from me beyond basic civility and the patience to see it through.

And yet.

It had started three weeks after I came home. A Tuesday night, late, the kind of late where the house had gone completely quiet and the only sounds were the ones buildings make when they stop performing for the day.

I had come to bed later than usual. The Harmon account had been bleeding problems all week and I had spent four hours on calls untangling damage my uncle’s management had allowed to accumulate.

I was tired in a way I hadn’t been since before the coma. The good kind of tired. The kind that comes from using yourself properly, from pushing against something that pushes back. I had forgotten what it felt like.

She was already in bed. Asleep, or close to it. I could tell from her breathing, slow and even, her back to my side. She always faced away. I had noticed that. Like a woman making herself as small and unobtrusive as possible even in unconsciousness.

I don’t know what happened. I have gone over it many times and I still don’t have a clean answer.

I lay there in the dark. I was tired. The room smelled like her, something quiet and warm I had stopped being able to ignore weeks ago. And somewhere between one breath and the next the careful distance I had been maintaining felt less like a boundary and more like a punishment I was administering to myself for no clear reason.

I reached for her.

She didn’t pull away.

What happened after that was not soft or simple or anything I could file neatly into the transaction I had built in my head. It was complicated and charged and completely outside the terms of any arrangement I had drawn up with anyone.

Afterward I lay in the dark and stared at the ceiling and told myself it was physical. Uncomplicated. A release of tension that meant nothing beyond the obvious.

I was a very convincing liar when I needed to be.

The problem was the morning.

She was already up when I woke. Her side of the bed empty and cool, no indication that anything had shifted. She brought coffee to my study an hour later the same way she always did, set it in the same spot, said good morning in the same even tone.

Like nothing had happened.

Like she had filed it away somewhere and returned to business without breaking stride.

It should have been exactly what I wanted.

It made me furious in a way I couldn’t justify and refused to examine.

That was two weeks ago. Since then I had been managing it the way I managed most things that didn’t fit my framework, by working. More hours, more calls, more problems to untangle.

The company was responding. The board was recalibrating around my return. The numbers were beginning to move in the right direction and there was genuine satisfaction in that, the deep particular satisfaction of rebuilding something that had been taken apart in your absence.

But she was always there.

In the margins of the day. A file left on my desk before I knew I needed it. Coffee at the right temperature. The quiet efficient presence of a woman who had learned the rhythms of this house so completely that her absence would have been felt like a missing wall.

I noticed her in ways I had not given myself permission to notice.

The sound of her voice when she was on the phone with the household staff, patient, clear, no wasted words. The way she sat in the garden some mornings with a book and didn’t look up for an hour. The scar at the edge of her jaw that I still didn’t know the story of.

The fact that she had never once in all the weeks since my return asked me for anything. Not warmth, not conversation, not acknowledgment of any kind.

She just moved through this house like a woman who had made her peace with being invisible.

That bothered me more than anything else.

I was in the middle of this, sitting at my desk on a Thursday evening not reading the document in front of me, when my phone rang.

The name on the screen stopped me completely.

“Sena.”

I sat with it for a moment. The phone rang twice more before I picked up.

Her voice came through exactly as I remembered it. Warm, slightly careful, the particular tone of a person approaching something they aren’t sure of yet.

“Evanthe.” A breath. “I heard you were awake. I didn’t know whether to call.”

I leaned back in my chair.

Four years ago I had been three weeks from proposing to this woman. I had the ring selected. I had a plan, a quiet dinner, nothing performative, just the two of us and a question I had been certain of for two years.

Then the accident happened. Then the coma happened. And apparently Sena had happened to move on while I was unavailable to stop her.

I had told myself I had made my peace with that.

“You should have called sooner,” I said.

She exhaled, relief carefully contained. “I didn’t know how. I didn’t know what you’d been told or how you were feeling or whether—”

“Have dinner with me,” I said. “Tomorrow. We’ll talk properly.”

A pause. Then, “Yes. Okay. Yes.”

After I hung up I sat for a long time in the quiet of my study.

Through the window I could see the garden, dark now, the fountain catching what little light came from the house. And Evi’s light was on in the east sitting room. I could see it from here. The warm rectangle of it against the dark grounds.

I looked at it for a moment longer than I meant to.

Then I pulled the document in front of me closer and got back to work.