CHAPTER FOUR

She couldn't sleep.

Midnight. Zara lay on top of the covers in her childhood bedroom, still wearing her dress because she hadn't gotten around to changing and now it seemed like too much effort, staring at the ceiling with the particular stillness of someone who had stopped fighting their own thoughts and decided to simply let them arrive.

Fine, she thought. Let them come.

She let them come.

His name was Ethan Harlow. Her mother's husband as of tomorrow. And she had kissed him in a hotel corridor in another city 3 years ago — kissed him and pressed her face into his neck at 3am while rain struck the windows and thought, for approximately 48 reckless hours, that something was beginning.

Nothing began. He left.

The retreat had been in July. She had been 22 years old, finishing second year of design school, attending as a junior intern on the goodwill of her supervisor and the fact that she had the strongest portfolio in her year. She was the youngest person there by nearly a decade and she was not intimidated by that. She was, on the first evening, genuinely annoyed about the east façade of the manor house venue, which used glass panelling that created a thermal glare problem in the afternoon sun and she had been saying so to nobody in particular at the bar.

"You're right," someone said beside her.

She had turned.

He was — she hadn't had a word for it immediately, that first evening. The brain worked in categories before it worked in details and the categories were: tall, older, the kind of composed that came from having stopped needing to prove something rather than the kind that came from not knowing there was anything to prove. He was looking at the façade through the window the way a person looked at a problem they were already half-solving.

"The solar angle in July makes it worse," he had said. "They should use a low-e glass on that elevation."

She had stared at him. "That's exactly what I told my supervisor."

"And what did he say?"

"He told me I was thinking too much."

"Your supervisor is wrong."

She had decided immediately that she liked him. His name was Ethan and he did not offer a last name and she didn't ask, the way you don't at a certain kind of evening when the conversation was already going somewhere more interesting than introductions. Guest speaker, integrated sustainable urban design. They talked for 2 hours that first night — at the bar, then at a corner table, then the bar picked up, then standing outside in the failing evening because neither of them suggested stopping.

That was how it went for nine days.

The thinking came first, she was supposed to be noting, lying in her childhood ceiling at midnight, by now — how much she had to stay around him and how simply he made her feel like she was saying the most interesting things. He asked questions that showed he had been tracking the thread of her thinking back three exchanges. He remembered details from conversations two days prior and brought them back at unexpected moments. She was not used to that kind of attention. She hadn't known she'd been waiting for it.

The rest of it arrived the easy way — the way it happened when two people spent enough time in each other's orbit, gradually and then all at once.

The first time he touched her deliberately it was his hand at the small of her back, guiding her through a doorway, and he left it there two seconds longer than necessary and she felt it for the rest of the evening. The first time she touched him deliberately she reached up without thinking and straightened his collar and then met his eyes and neither of them moved for a moment that stretched past comfortable and into something else entirely.

He kissed her three days later. They were on the terrace after midnight, the rest of the retreat long in bed, and she had been watching his mouth approximately forty minutes and apparently so had he, because when she turned to say something he was already leaning towards her. The kiss was — unhurried. That was the word. Like he had decided and was in no rush now that he had.

She forgot what she was about to say.

She forgot several other things.

After that it acquired its own momentum. She learned things about him in those weeks — not biographical facts but the other kind. The way he went quiet when he was thinking hard. The way his hands moved when he explained something he cared about. The way he looked at her when he thought she wasn't paying attention.

But she was always paying attention.

She learned the way he touched her and that deserved its own consideration because it had undone her every time, thoroughly, like a man who was in no hurry and had no intention of being rushed. She had not experienced that before. It had approximated something less and she had been furious about it for the last 9 months afterwards.

The last night was quiet.

He crossed the room. Sat beside her. Cupped her face in both hands and kissed her — long, slow, complete, like a question and an answer at the same time.

Then he was gone.

No number, no last name. No call.

She had waited two weeks. Then she had packed the whole thing into the smallest possible box and put it somewhere she did not visit and she had been, for 3 years, entirely fine.

She was staring at the ceiling of her childhood bedroom. Ethan Harlow was somewhere down this hallway.

Did he remember her? she thought. Or was I forgettable?

She already knew the answer. She had seen it in his eyes across the room at the rehearsal dinner — that controlled, furious, unmistakeable recognition. She had not been forgettable.

He just wished she had been.

The house was completely silent. She lay still and listened.

And then she heard footsteps in the hallway — slow, measured. They stopped outside her door.

The silence had a specific texture — the kind that happened when someone was standing very still on the other side of a door. Not knocking. Not leaving.

She did not breathe. The footsteps stood there for a long moment — long enough to be deliberate. Then they moved on.

She exhaled. Closed her eyes. Tomorrow he would be her stepfather. And she would be absolutely fine.