CHAPTER THIRTEEN

Xavier’s POV

I told myself, on the drive back to the penthouse that evening, that I was overthinking it.

Resemblances happened. The world was full of people who shared the same jaw structures and eye shapes with strangers they had no connection with whatsoever,  it was pure biology, the finite number of ways a human face could arrange itself across a global population. I had read somewhere once that every person on earth had at least seven people who shared their approximate facial architecture. The number made coincidence not just possible but statistically expected. I told myself all of this very clearly and rationally.

I sat in my penthouse at eleven in the evening with a glass of scotch I hadn’t touched, staring at the city through the floor-to-ceiling windows, and my mind drifted to the little boy again. the way he tilted his head.

I had a photograph on the shelf in my study, one of the few personal items I kept in the penthouse. It was a picture of my father taken when he was around thirty, the year before the accident. My father at thirty looked nothing like me in the broad strokes, but in the details; like the set of the eyes, the jaw in concentration, the way his head angled when he was thinking. The similarity was precise enough that people who had known him always stopped at that photograph.

Bryan had tilted his head at that same angle when he looked up at me in the doorway.

I finished the scotch in silence and went to bed. I lay awake for more than an hour before finally drifting into sleep.

**********

The more I push the thought behind me, the more it resurface. I went back to the estate two days later. Grandfather was in his study when I arrived, which was where he spent most of his mornings, a correspondence of a man whose retirement had somehow accumulated more obligations than his working years. 

He looked up when I knocked on the open door, and the expression that crossed his face was the same from the library, a watchful look of a man who had been expecting this visit and had prepared for it quietly.

He set his pen down. “You visit a lot these days, Xavier.” He said jokingly.

I sat across from him, ignoring the sarcasm. The study held the silence of a room that had absorbed decades of important conversations and knew how to wait for another one.

“That boy,” I said. “Bryan.”

“What about him?”

“Who is he and how come he’s here?” I asked.

“He is my friend,” Grandfather replied simply.

“You make friends with five years old now.” I said

“I make friends with whoever makes me happy.”

“And his mother?”

“She’s a remarkable young woman.” He said with the warmth he reserved for things he genuinely meant. “I met them at Westbrook General during one of my foundation visits. Bryan had a minor football injury and we got talking.”

“And you just decided to bring a strange child into the house?” I asked.

“He’s not strange,” he said, unbothered by my tone. “He’s five and remarkably good company, which is more than I can say for most adults I know.”

I looked at him for a moment. “You like him.”

“Very much.” He said it without any of the qualification people usually attached to unexpected affections. Just a clean, settled fact.

“He looks,” I stopped. I shifted uneasily in the chair, the thought refusing to stay where I had been pushing it in the last two days. “He looks familiar, Grandfather.”

“Does he,” Arthur said. 

“You noticed it too,” I said, curious.

Arthur picked up his pen and set it back down, a small, idle motion that I recognized as his version of buying time. “I noticed many things lately,” he said. “It happens when you’ve been alive long enough.”

“I studied him across the desk and felt the particular frustration of someone being handled by the one person who had always known exactly how to handle him.

“Why won’t you just say it?” I asked.

“Say what?” His eyes were steady on mine, calm in a way that had nothing passive about it.

“Whatever it is you already know and aren’t telling me.”

Arthur was quiet for a moment. Outside the study window, the estate grounds held the grey, quiet of a cloud-covered morning, the oak trees along the far lawn standing without wind. When he spoke again, his voice had lost its lightness and carried an older base underneath it.

“Perhaps you might consider getting to know the boy rather than sitting across from your grandfather interrogating him about a five-year-old’s origins.” Grandfather said, the lightness returning slightly to his voice. He picked up his pen properly this time, signaling the portion of the conversation he was willing to continue had reached its end. “He’ll be here by Saturday, you’re welcome to stay.”

I stood up slowly, recognizing the dismissal for what it was. At the door, I paused, turned around and took a second look at him.

Then, I walked out of the study, down the corridor and back to my car. The drive back to the city felt longer than it should have. But the truth is, I honestly do not know why I felt bothered.