Chapter Four:

Nadia's POV

"Aurora Sinclair, what is going on with you?"

She looks up from her sketchbook like I startled her. But I have been sitting across from her for twenty minutes watching her draw the same line over and over without finishing it, and I am done pretending not to notice.

"Nothing is going on with me," she says.

"You've redrawn that same sleeve four times."

She looks down. Something moves across her face, not embarrassment, not the flustered Aurora energy I have known since we were teenagers. Something quieter. Something that looks like someone catching themselves.

"I'm just thinking," she says.

"About what?"

She closes the sketchbook.

I put both elbows on the table.

Aurora does not close her sketchbook. She sleeps with it. She once refused to close it during a fire drill, and we stood outside in the cold for eighteen minutes while she finished a call detail. The sketchbook does not get closed for thinking.

"Talk to me," I say.

"There's nothing to talk about."

"You're lying."

She meets my eyes, and something flickers behind hers, not the look of someone hiding something small. The look of someone carrying something so heavy the effort of holding it is starting to show in places they haven't noticed yet.

"Is it Damien?" I ask.

Nothing. Not a flinch. Not that complicated mix of devotion and anxiety his name usually pulls out of her. Just nothing. Clean and flat and completely unbothered.

That is not the Aurora I know.

"Did something happen between you two?" I ask.

"No."

"Aurora."

"Nadia." Firm. Final. A door closed politely but clearly. She picks up her coffee and looks out the window, and I sit back and study her.

The Aurora I know cannot hold a secret. The effort makes her physically uncomfortable; she overexplains, she laughs at the wrong moment, and she shifts in her seat like the truth is trying to get out on its own. This Aurora is holding something in just fine. Steady. Contained. Like she has been practicing.

That steadiness unsettles me more than any reaction would.

"Are you going to Damien's father's dinner on Friday?" I ask.

"Yes."

"Since when? Last week you weren't sure."

She turns back from the window and looks at me measured, like she is deciding exactly how much to give me. "I changed my mind. It's important that I go."

"Important how?"

The corner of her mouth moves. Not quite a smile. More like someone who knows the punchline to a joke the rest of the room hasn't heard yet.

"Just important," she says.

I want to push. Every part of me wants to reach across this table and pull whatever this is into the open. But the way she is sitting straight, still, completely in control of every word coming out of her mouth, tells me pushing will get me nothing today.

So I try something else.

"I ran into Megan this morning," I say, and I watch her hands around her coffee cup.

They don't move. Not even slightly.

"How is she?" Aurora asks. Voice perfectly neutral. Somehow, that neutrality is louder than anything she could have said.

"She was asking about you. Said you seemed different." I pause. "I told her people change."

Aurora is quiet for exactly one second.

"That was the right thing to say," she says.

No, thank you. Why would she say that? Just that was the right thing to say. Like I passed a small, quiet test without knowing I was being tested.

Something cold moves down my arms. I look at my best friend across this table, calm, careful, carrying something enormous behind her eyes, and I feel it land clearly in my chest for the first time.

She is not falling apart.

She is preparing.

For something specific. Something with a shape and a timeline and a Friday dinner sitting right at the center of it. The way she is moving through this conversation, giving just enough and holding the rest, is not Aurora managing her feelings.

It is Aurora managing me.

And she is doing it so smoothly, I almost didn't catch it.

I make a decision quietly while she finishes her coffee. Whatever she is walking into, she is not walking into alone. I don't care if she hasn't asked. Some things you don't wait to be invited into.

My phone buzzes on the table.

We both look down at the same time.

A news alert. One name in bold.

Sebastian Reed, Reed Global Enterprises CEO, announces the surprise acquisition of Sinclair Fashion Group's primary investor portfolio.

Two seconds of silence.

I look up at Aurora's face.

And everything stops.

She is completely still. Not surprised, not even close. Her eyes move across that headline with the focused calm of someone reading confirmation of something they already knew was coming. Jaw set. Hands around her cup haven't moved a millimeter.

She knew.

I don't know how. I don't know when. But she knew Sebastian Reed was coming for the exact investor portfolio that funds everything she has been quietly building, her designs, her label, her entire future.

She knew, and she said nothing.

"Aurora," I say slowly.

She looks up at me. And what I find in her eyes is not fear. Not shocked. Something that looks almost like relief, like a clock she has been listening for, has finally started ticking.

"I know," she says quietly.

I lean forward. "How do you know?"

She holds my gaze for a long moment. Long enough that I think she might actually answer. Long enough that something shifts in the air between us.

Then her phone buzzes on the table.

She looks down at it, and whatever she sees there makes her go very still in a completely different way. Not the controlled stillness from before.

Something colder. Something that looks, just for one unguarded second, like fear.

She turns the phone face down before I can see the screen.

"I have to go," she says. She is already standing, already reaching for her bag, already moving toward the door with a speed that has nothing casual about it.

"Aurora."

"I'll call you tonight." She stops at the door and turns back, and looks at me, and for just one second, the mask slips completely. "Nadia. Whatever happens, stay close, okay? Just stay close."

Then she is gone.

I sit at the table alone and stare at the door she just walked out of, and feel the cold certainty of someone who has just realized that the thing their best friend is walking toward is not safe.

And she already knows it.

Aurora just ran out of a coffee shop because of a message she wouldn't let Nadia see. She told Nadia to stay close, not as a comfort, but as a warning.