My Step Brother's Midnight Obsession

I had loved my stepbrother in silence for seven years, and he had never once noticed. Caleb Ashford looked at me and saw a sister, and he was gentle about it, which was the cruelest part. Everyone else in that house hurt me in ways I could brace for, but he hurt me without knowing it, every time he was kind.

On the morning I graduated, I was on my knees in my room at the residence hall, taping my last box shut for the third time, when the noise from the courtyard changed. It didn't stop so much as rise in one spot, the way water starts boiling in a single place before the whole pot goes. 

Girls were squealing down there, somebody was chanting a name, and my stomach knew a half-second before my brain did that only one person could make a crowd sound like that.

I kept to the side of the window where nobody below could see me, and looked down anyway.

The courtyard had tilted. Forty people stood at angles toward the gate, where Caleb was walking in like the sun had followed him through it. He had dark hair that never sat where the barber left it, and gray eyes that stayed cool against all the warmth he carried around with him, and then there was the almost-smile, just the corner of his mouth, the kind that made people lean in as if he were about to tell them a secret. Two girls on the fountain edge were filming him openly. A mother holding a bouquet actually stepped backward to let him pass.

He was looking up at the building window by window, the way he looked at everything, and I stepped back so fast that my hip hit the desk.

My phone buzzed on the floor beside the box.

Second floor, third window. I saw your curtain move. Come down before I come up. 

I read it twice. If he came up, the whole courtyard would follow him with their phones out, and I would be standing in my own doorway being rescued in front of half the university. I could already hear the version of it they would tell. I grabbed the box and took the stairs too fast in my gown, and I had almost reached the gate when someone stepped in front of me.

"Look at that. Carrying her own stuff." Marta Conti, from my design seminar, stood there with two friends flanking her like they'd rehearsed it. Marta had spent four years acting like my last name was a smell. "Where's your family, Moore? They sent the heir? Nobody else could be bothered?"

It landed because it was true. My mother had texted at seven that morning with something about a spa appointment and a little heart at the end, and I had answered it's fine before I finished reading it.

"Please move," I said, quieter than I meant to sound.

"Or what?"

She bumped the box with her knee, though she didn't even do it hard. The whole thing tipped, the sketchbooks went across the grass, and one page slid out and landed face up between us. It was the drawing I had been working on for three weeks. A man's hands, every knuckle done twice, because I could never get them right the first time. Marta had watched me redraw those knuckles all spring from two seats away. That was the thing about her. 

She never forgot anything she could use.

She put her heel on it.

"Give me that." It came out smaller than I wanted it to. 

"Please."

"Wait. Is this who I think it is?" She looked at her friends, delighted with herself. "Oh my God. Is this his? That's actually sad, Moore. That's really sad."

"It's just a drawing."

"Then why are you shaking?"

Heat crawled up my neck so fast that my eyes stung. I dropped to my knees and grabbed for the sketchbooks, my fingers clumsy, one sleeve dragging in the dirt, and I missed the page twice while thirty people stood around pretending not to watch any of it. Something small and humiliating broke loose in my chest.

I didn't hear anyone come up behind me. A polished shoe landed in the grass beside the page, and a hand reached past me and lifted Marta's foot off it as easily as I would have moved a chair.

"Pick them up," Caleb said.

He wasn't loud, and he never was, which somehow made it worse. Marta's face went blank. "Caleb, I was only..."

"I know what you were doing. Pick them up, then apologize."

"It was a joke."

"Then it'll be a short apology."

She did it, shoving the sketchbooks into a pile and muttering a word that might have been sorry at the grass, and then she left with her friends hurrying behind her.

I stayed on my knees a second too long. I pressed the heel of my hand against my eye once, hard, which was an old trick of mine for pushing tears back in before they got out of hand. When I looked up, my eyes were still too bright, and there was nothing I could do about it.

Caleb was looking at me. Not at the courtyard, not at Marta's back. At me.

"You all right?" he asked, keeping his voice low so only I could hear it.

"I'm fine."

"Your hands are shaking."

"It's cold."

"It's twenty-five degrees out, Elise."

"Then it's the box." I tried to laugh, and it came out wrong, and he heard it. Something in his face changed.

He picked up the drawing and looked at it for one second, maybe less. His face didn't change at all. He slid the page back inside the cover, and my heart slammed so hard that I felt it in my fingertips, because one second longer and he would have known those hands. They were his own.

"Caleb, darling, there you are." A woman in white silk came through the crowd and put her hand on his sleeve like she owned it. Isabella Ferrara. I knew her from the society pages, and from the way Gerald's voice went careful whenever her name came up at dinner. Her eyes moved over me once, fast, the way I'd watched her check a room for stains. "Everyone's waiting for photographs."

Caleb looked at her hand until she took it off. "Not now, Isabella."

"You can't just..."

"I said not now."

He didn't say it unkindly, and that was what made it final. Isabella kept smiling, but her eyes went to the sketchbook in his hand and then to my wet eyes, and her smile went so sweet that it felt like a warning.

Caleb picked up the box, and his fingers brushed mine on the handle. It was an accident, or nothing, and it still took me a full breath to remember how lungs worked.

"Walk with me."

I went with him. Behind us the whispering started up again. She's so lucky. He's only nice to her because she's basically family. I kept my eyes on the gravel, because I had learned young that you can't argue with true things.

He took me down the path behind the old chapel, where it went quiet enough to hear our shoes on the stones. He set the box down and turned, and his jaw was tight.

"Did she hurt you?"

Nobody had asked me that in eight years in the Ashford house. My mother asked if I had eaten, and the staff asked if I needed anything in the tone that meant don't need anything. My throat closed around the question like it was too big to swallow.

"No, it's fine, she just..." I shrugged. "It's always the same people. I'm used to it."

"That's not an answer.”

"It's the only one I've got."

"You shouldn't have to be." His voice went flat, not up for discussion. He had been saying some version of that since the winter I was fifteen, when he found me on the back stairs of the villa with a split lip I had told everyone came from a door. I had loved him before that night, but that was the night I learned I always would.

He pulled a small blue box out of his jacket. "Open it."

"You didn't have to get me anything."

"I know I didn't."

Inside, on white velvet, lay a thin silver bracelet, and hanging from it was a single charm no bigger than my fingernail. It was a crescent moon.

I stared at it until my eyes burned, because nobody had ever bought me something just because.

"I saw it and thought of you drawing at night." He took my wrist and did the clasp himself, and his thumb pressed the inside of it, right where my pulse was hammering. If he felt it, his face gave nothing away. "Don't take it off."

"It's beautiful," I said, much too brightly. Bright was a costume I'd worn so long it fit like skin. "Thank you. It's too much, really."

"It isn't enough.”

He looked at me a second longer than he needed to, and I didn't dare try to name what the look was. Naming it would make it real, and real things got taken.

Then he turned toward the lawn, where a brass band had started warming up. "Gerald's got half of Como coming to the villa tonight. A marquee, a quartet, and caterers in the kitchen since dawn." He paused. "It's your graduation party. All of it. For you."

"For me?"

"Who else?"

In eight years, no one in that house had thrown anything for me. Not a birthday, not a card with my name spelled right. I looked down at the little moon on my wrist so he wouldn't see my face, and the old rule slid into place. Be grateful. Don't want out loud. Wanting is how you lose things. 

"That's really kind of everyone," I said. "I don't know what to say."

"You don't have to say anything." He almost smiled, and I stored it the way I stored everything, in scraps, because scraps were what I had learned to live on.

My phone buzzed against my hip.

"Is that your taxi?"

"It's my mother." I dug it out, expecting an apology, or instructions about what to wear.

It was one line, and my stomach dropped before I had even finished reading it.

Come home early. We need to talk before the party.