CHAPTER 10

ELENA

Before Adrian could say anything the front door flew open before either of us could get another word out.

"Adrian!"

An elderly woman came through it at a speed that seemed genuinely dangerous for someone her age, and had her arms around him before he could brace for it.

He staggered slightly. "Grandma...."

"I can't believe you're actually here."

"You're crushing me."

"Good."

I pressed my lips together, fighting a laugh. This was the same man with the emotional range of a legal contract yet here he was acting totally different.

She pulled back far enough to hold his face in both hands, studying him like she was checking for damage. "You've lost weight."

"I haven't."

"You have. You never call."

"I've been busy."

"You're always busy." She smacked his arm. "It's been three weeks, Adrian!"

"That's not that long."

"It's been forever, for pete's sake, Adrian, I'm your grandmother."

I lost the fight with my own laugh. It slipped out before I could stop it, and her attention swung straight to me.

She went still. Her gaze travelled to face, traveled back up to his face, then back to mine again, and something sharpened in her expression....not the easy delight at all, but something closer to disbelief.

"Adrian." Her voice had dropped a register. "Who is this?"

"Elena." He didn't elaborate right away, which told me even before he said it that this wasn't going to go as smoothly as I'd assumed. "My wife."

Her hands slid off his face entirely. "Your 'wife'?"

"Yes."

"Since when?"

"Recently."

" 'Recently' meaning what, exactly? A week? A month?" She looked at him like she was recalculating something. "You've never once mentioned a woman to me, Adrian. Not a date, not a name, nothing. And now you're standing on my doorstep with a wife?"

"It happened quickly."

"Clearly." She turned to me, and for a moment her scrutiny had nothing warm in it at all....the look of someone doing careful math. "How long have you two known each other?"

Adrian's took my hand and tightened it slightly, a silent warning not to fumble it. "Not very long, about a year," I lied because everything about Adrian and I was a lie.

"A year," She repeated flatly. She looked back at her grandson. "Adrian Blackwood, you swore off marriage after...." She stopped herself, jaw tightening, like she'd nearly said something she wasn't ready to say in front of a stranger. "You swore it off. For years. And now, out of nowhere, you're telling me you found someone and married her before I even got to hear her name?"

"Grandma."

"Don't 'Grandma' me. This is exactly the kind of thing you do....decide something in a boardroom and expect the rest of us to catch up."

Someone voice came from somewhere inside the house before he'd even appeared. "Carrie, let the boy breathe, whoever's making all that noise had better be worth the trip."

She ignored him, still watching me with an expression I couldn't quite place....not hostile, exactly, but guarded in a way that felt entirely earned, given what I still didn't know about whatever had happened before me. "Elena, was it?"

"Yes."

"You'll forgive me for not throwing a party just yet. My grandson doesn't do anything without a reason, and marriage isn't usually one of his hobbies." Her eyes flicked to Adrian. "So either you're going to explain yourself properly, or I'm going to stand here interrogating this poor girl on my own doorstep until one of you does."

Adrian exhaled, clearly having expected some version of this and dreading it anyway. "Can we come inside first?"

Adrian's grandmother considered him for a long moment, then softened, though not all the way. "Fine. But I want the whole story. Not the version you'll try to sell me in three sentences."

She turned and led us in without further ceremony, though she kept glancing back at me every few steps like she hadn't fully decided what to make of me yet.

The house itself didn't match her mood at all.... warm, lived-in, family photographs crowding every wall, the smell of something baking drifting from somewhere further in. It felt like the kind of home that had absorbed decades of noise and arguments and love in roughly equal measure.

"Sit," She said, gesturing toward the kitchen island once we reached it, and pulled a tray of cookies from the oven without missing a beat, because apparently nothing in this house paused for anything, including a grandson's sudden marriage.

Adrian sat beside me. His grandmother planted herself across from us, arms crossed, waiting.

"Start talking."

He gave her the story.... the hospital, a courtship compressed into a handful of sentences that sounded thinner out loud than it had in the car. I filled in where I could, grateful he'd rehearsed it with me at all, though I still stumbled once over the timeline and felt her eyes narrow at the pause.

"Hmm." She didn't look convinced, but she also didn't push further....not yet. Instead, her gaze moved to me, softening by degrees, the way someone decides to give a stranger the benefit of the doubt without fully surrendering their suspicion.

"Well." She reached over and covered my hand with hers. "Whatever the story is, you're here now. I suppose that counts for something."

"Thank you," I said, meaning it more than the moment probably called for.

An elderly man who I assumed was Adrian's grandfather finally wandered in, drawn by the smell of cookies rather than any announcement, and he was caught up everything in three clipped sentences from his wife that made his eyebrows climb steadily higher.

"Married," he repeated, looking at me properly for the first time. "Well. She's pretty, at least."

"I know," Adrian said, and I shot him a look he didn't seem to notice.

"I'm Adrian's grandfather, Phil and this is my lovely wife who you've already met, Carrie." He said shaking my hand.

"Uhmm, nice to meet you, Mr and Mrs. Blackwood." I said feeling slightly less nervous than before.

"Nonsense, Call us by our names, Darling." Phil said with great enthusiasm.

--

The hour that followed went easier than the doorstep had promised. They asked about medical school, about my interests, about small, safe things, and every time I faltered on a detail of our story, Adrian smoothed over it before Carrie could catch the seam.

Then, gently, she asked about my parents.

"They're dead," I said. "Both of them."

The warmth in the room dimmed. "Oh, sweetheart." Carrie's hand found mine again. "I'm sorry."

"It's all right."

She studied me a moment too long, something flickering behind her eyes. "Have we met before?"

"I don't think so."

"No…" She trailed off, distracted, chasing something she couldn't quite catch, then shook her head and let it go. "Never mind."

Carrie exhaled and, with visible effort, pulled herself back into lighter territory and spoke to Adrian. "Well. I suppose I should be glad you married again at all."

I let that sit for a second before it registered properly. I already knew, from the moment Adrian had first mentioned Elias, that there had to have been someone before me....a mother, somewhere, whether she was in the picture or not. That part didn't surprise me. What caught my attention was the way Carrie's voice changed on the word 'again', like it carried something none of them had planned on setting down at this table, and the way Phil suddenly found urgent business with the sugar bowl.

I kept quiet. If it mattered, it would find its own way to the surface. Pushing felt like the fastest way to make three people close ranks against me on my first afternoon in this family.

"Grandma," Adrian said, low, almost a warning.

"I didn't say anything."

"You were about to."

Carrie pressed her lips together and busied herself refilling my tea instead, though I caught her glancing at Adrian twice more before she managed to let it go entirely.

I didn't ask. I sat with my cookie and my tea and let the silence do what it wanted to do, watching Adrian's shoulders stay rigid a full minute longer than the conversation seemed to require.

Later on, when Carrie walked me toward the door to say goodbye, she paused with her hand still on my arm, her voice dropping so only I could hear it.

"He hasn't looked at anyone the way he looks at you in a very long time," she said. "I can't say what happened before you, and it isn't my place to say. But be patient with him. He's carrying more than he lets on and take care of Elias to, they both need you."

I didn't know what to do with that except nod.

Whatever had gone quiet in that kitchen when she said 'again', I understood I wasn't meant to have it yet. But I understood something else too, riding home in the car beside a man who hadn't said a word since we left.... that I'd stepped into the middle of a story that had started long before Adrian Blackwood ever needed a wife on paper.

And somehow, without meaning to, I'd already become part of it.