CHAPTER FIVE: PROCESS OF ELIMINATION

MIA'S POV

I didn't confront Sebastian. I'd meant to — I'd walked out onto that terrace with the whole accusation loaded and ready — but the moment I saw his face, careful and closed and giving away exactly nothing, I lost my nerve for a different reason than I expected.

I realized I didn't actually want it to be a confrontation. I wanted it to be true. And those were two very different things to want at six in the morning with no sleep behind me.

"You're staring," Sebastian said, without turning around.

"Am I?"

"You've been staring since you walked out here. It's a specific kind of staring. I'd like to know what I did to earn it."

*Everything*, I almost said. *Nothing. I don't actually know yet, and that's the problem.*

"Julian said you've been in a mood for three days," I said instead, testing. "Since right before I arrived."

Something shifted behind his eyes — there and gone so fast I couldn't have sworn to it in a courtroom. "Julian talks too much before he's had coffee."

"That's not a denial."

"It's not a confession either." A ghost of something almost like a smile. "You'll have to try harder than that, whatever it is you're trying."

It told me nothing. That was the maddening part — Sebastian was unreadable on principle, careful with every word he handed anyone, which meant his stillness could mean *I'm hiding something* or could simply mean *I'm Sebastian.* I had no baseline for him. I had no baseline for any of them. That was the whole problem with building a case out of a voice in the dark — every single one of these men had reasons to be guarded around me, and guilt looked identical to caution from where I was standing.

I left the terrace no more certain than I'd arrived.

---

Theo was next, mostly by accident — I found him in the garage at ten a.m., elbow-deep in the engine of something old and expensive, headphones around his neck instead of over his ears, which was apparently as close as he got to inviting conversation.

"You're the one who barely talks," I said, leaning against the doorframe.

"Observant." He didn't look up from the engine. "You're the one everyone's talking about."

That stopped me. "What does that mean?"

"Means this house doesn't usually have this much energy in it before noon." He wiped his hands on a rag, finally glancing up, and there was something quietly assessing in it that reminded me uncomfortably of Julian, except warmer, less performative. "Finn's been weird all morning. Sebastian's been weirder. You want to tell me why, or should I guess?"

My pulse did something complicated. "Guess."

"I don't do guessing games." But he held my gaze a beat too long before he said it, and something about the deliberate flatness of his voice — low, unhurried, the kind of voice that didn't waste words because it didn't need to — snagged on a memory I'd been trying to pin down for two days and couldn't quite land.

*I'd rather not know yours either.*

Had it sounded like that? I genuinely didn't know anymore. I'd replayed the memory so many times it had started to blur, worn smooth like a stone handled too often, and I was terrified that I'd shaped it, unconsciously, into whoever I wanted it to be.

"Forget it," I said, and meant it, mostly.

---

Finn found me on the back stairs an hour later, considerably less easy than he'd been the night before — something careful in his eyes now that I hated putting there.

"I keep thinking about what you said," he admitted, sitting a step below me, guitar-calloused hands loose between his knees. "About already knowing the answer to a question you hadn't asked yet."

"Finn—"

"I need to ask you something, and I need you to just answer it. No spiraling." He turned to face me properly, and underneath the usual warmth there was something that looked almost like nerves, which I hadn't seen on him yet. "Three nights ago. Before you flew in. Was there — someone. At a party."

My whole body went still. "Why would you ask that specifically."

"Because I was at a party three nights ago too," he said quietly. "Different one, probably. Almost definitely. This city has about four hundred of them on any given Friday, and there's no reason on earth it would've been the same one." He held my gaze, and for the first time since I'd met him, that easy, unguarded warmth had something more complicated underneath it — something that looked like hope and dread wearing the same face. "But I keep thinking about how I met a girl I never got the name of, right before my dad told us his new stepdaughter was flying in from London. And I've been telling myself that's a coincidence stupid enough to be funny. I just can't quite make myself laugh about it."

The floor tilted under me for the second time in an hour.

*Two of them.* Not Sebastian's stillness, and now Finn's careful voice, and I had no way — none — of knowing which one, if either, was real and which one I'd simply talked myself into out of sheer desperate hope that one of these strangers might turn out to be someone I already knew.

"I don't know," I said, and it was the first fully honest thing I'd said to anyone in this house. "I don't know if it was you. I don't know if it was Sebastian. I have a voice in my head and no name to match it to, and every single one of you has some version of the exact tone I remember, and I am starting to think I built the whole memory out of nothing but wanting it to be real."

Finn was quiet for a long moment, and when he spoke again, his voice had lost its usual brightness entirely. "That's a strange thing to hear, when I've spent all morning hoping the answer was me."

"Don't," I said softly. "Don't hope for that yet. Not until I actually know something."

"Too late," he said, with a small, rueful smile that didn't quite reach his eyes. "I think I started hoping the second you laughed at something I said last night and it sounded exactly like a laugh I hadn't been able to get out of my head for three days."

I didn't sleep that night either. I lay in the dark running four voices on a loop — Julian's clipped precision, Theo's unhurried flatness, Sebastian's careful stillness, Finn's warm, unguarded ease — and understood, with a kind of dread I hadn't expected, that I was no closer to an answer than I'd been on the terrace two nights ago.

I had four stepbrothers under one roof.

Any one of them, for all I actually knew, could have been the stranger in the dark who'd asked me to stay.