CHAPTER FOUR: THE WATCH

MIA'S POV

I didn't sleep. I lay in an unfamiliar bed doing the same math over and over — *nothing memorable* against *that night*, Sebastian's careful stillness against the crack in his voice right before Finn's interruption — and by six in the morning I'd talked myself into three different conclusions and out of all of them twice.

So when I couldn't stand my own head anymore, I went looking for coffee, and found Julian already in the kitchen instead, dressed for a Sunday like it was a Monday board meeting, reading something on his phone with the particular stillness of a man who resented being interrupted before he'd finished his first cup.

"You're up early," he said, not looking up.

"Jet lag." It was becoming my default excuse for everything, and it wasn't even entirely a lie. "You're up early too."

"I'm always up early. It's the only part of the day nobody else has ruined yet." He said it dryly, but there was something almost like humor underneath it, the first hint I'd caught that Julian's iciness might be a temperature rather than a personality. He nodded toward the coffee machine. "Help yourself. You'll need it if you're spending the day with Finn. He operates at a volume the rest of us gave up on years ago."

I poured a cup and leaned against the counter, watching him over the rim of it, and decided — recklessly, exhaustedly, at six in the morning with no sleep behind me — that I was done being careful about at least one thing today.

"Can I ask you something?"

"You're going to whether I agree or not. I've known you for less than a day and I can already tell that much."

"Where were you three nights ago?"

I watched for it — the stillness, the flicker, whatever Sebastian's face had done on the terrace — and got, instead, nothing at all. Julian actually looked up from his phone this time, brow faintly furrowed, more confused than caught.

"Working," he said. "I flew back from a client dinner in Chicago the morning after. Why."

It wasn't performance. I'd spent a lifetime learning to read rooms that didn't want to be read — new schools, new stepfathers before this one, years of being the outsider who had to learn a room's temperature fast or get burned by it — and Julian's confusion had none of the careful construction Sebastian's stillness had worn the night before. This was just a man who genuinely didn't understand the question.

Which meant it wasn't him. One name crossed off a list I hadn't admitted out loud I was keeping.

"No reason," I said, exactly the way I'd said it to Sebastian, and watched Julian decide, visibly, not to push it — filing the strangeness away instead of chasing it, which felt like its own kind of mercy.

"You're odd," he said, not unkindly. "I mean that as an observation, not an insult. Most people who move into a house full of strangers try to make themselves smaller. You're doing the opposite." He studied me for a moment longer than the comment strictly required, something recalibrating behind his eyes. "It's a better strategy, for what it's worth. Sebastian could learn from it."

My pulse skipped. "What do you mean?"

"He's been in a mood for three days. Started right before you arrived, actually." Julian said it idly, already turning back to his phone, entirely unaware of the effect the sentence had just had on the room. "Wouldn't say why. Sebastian doesn't explain himself to anyone if he can avoid it — comes from being raised to think feelings are a liability. Dad's doing, mostly. Don't take it personally."

*Three days.* The party had been three nights ago. I set my coffee cup down very carefully, because my hand had started doing something I didn't trust.

---

I found Finn an hour later in what turned out to be a converted pool house at the back of the property, guitar across his lap, headphones around his neck instead of over his ears, and the first genuinely unguarded smile all morning when he saw me in the doorway.

"You look like someone who needs a distraction," he said, setting the guitar aside. "Come sit. I promise not to interrogate you about art history. Yet."

I sat. It was easy, being around Finn — no careful calculations, no cataloguing his voice against a memory I couldn't fully trust, just an easy, warm kind of company that asked nothing of me except that I be present for it. For a while we talked about nothing — London, the flight, a truly unfortunate customs incident involving my suitcase — and I let myself relax into it the way I had at dinner the night before, grateful for one relationship in this house that didn't come loaded with a question I was afraid to answer.

"Can I tell you something weird?" Finn said eventually, turning his guitar over in his hands, some of the easy brightness dimming into something more careful. "You're going to think this is strange."

"Try me. I've had a strange week."

"Sebastian asked me three days ago — the night before you got here — whether I thought it'd be weird if one of us already knew you. Before all this." He gestured vaguely at the house, the family, the whole enormous architecture of a life none of us had chosen. "I laughed it off. Told him how would that even happen, you'd just flown in from another country. He didn't say anything else about it. Just got quiet." Finn's eyes found mine, sharp now underneath the usual warmth, more perceptive than his easy grin usually let on. "You went pale just now. Why did you go pale just now, Mia?"

I opened my mouth to say *no reason* a third time, the same careful deflection I'd used on Julian and on Sebastian himself, and found, for the first time since I'd walked into that study yesterday afternoon, that I didn't actually want to say it.

"Because I think I already know the answer to a question I haven't asked out loud yet," I said slowly, "and I think Sebastian's known it since before I even walked through the front door."

Finn went very still, guitar forgotten in his lap, and for a moment the easy warmth I'd come to rely on in him gave way to something sharper, more careful — a boy doing the same fast math I'd been doing for two days straight, and clearly not liking where it landed.

"What exactly," he said slowly, "happened three nights ago, Mia?"

I looked at him — genuinely warm, genuinely kind, the one person in this house who'd made me feel welcome instead of catalogued — and understood, with a sinking, complicated certainty, that whatever I said next was about to make the easiest relationship in this entire impossible house a great deal harder.

"I think," I said, "I need to talk to Sebastian first.”