The stolen moments

“Victor.” My voice came out thinner than I wanted. “I’m not….”

He smiled like I’d said something fond. His forehead dropped against mine, heavy, uncoordinated.

The whiskey on his breath was sharp enough to leave no argument about how far gone he was.

“You always do that,” he murmured. “Start a fight when you show up late.”

“I’m Adelaide.”

“Mm.” He kissed the corner of my mouth. The name went through him and came out the other side unused. “Andrea.”

His eyes weren’t tracking right. When I leaned back to make him look at me, he followed the movement a half-second late, like the room was arriving to him in pieces.

I should have put him on a chair and gone to find staff. Instead I hooked his arm over my shoulders because his knees had started to give, and the alternative was letting him fold onto his own garden path in front of his friends.

“Walk,” I said. “You’re going inside.”

“Bossy tonight.” The words slurred into my hair. “I like it.”

“You won’t like it when you wake up on stone.” I responded.

He laughed once, low, and let me take more of his weight. We moved off the path toward the house. The men by the fountain glanced over and then away.

The first staff member we passed was a woman in black with a tray. She stopped, lowered her head, and stepped aside.

“Miss Hale.”

Not Adelaide. Not the other one. Just the name that opened doors in this house.

A man at the inner doors did the same. Eyes down. A small bow that wasn’t theatrical, just trained.

“Good evening, miss. Shall I send someone up?”

“No,” I said, too quickly. “I’ve got him.”

“Of course.”

They thought I was her. Every polite dip of the head, every cleared path, every assumption that I belonged with my hand under Victor Langford’s coat was for Andrea. I had spent my whole life watching rooms rearrange themselves around my sister. Tonight they rearranged themselves around my face.

The staircase was wide enough for four people. It still felt narrow with him leaning into me, murmuring things that weren’t meant for my ears.

“You smell different.”

“That’s because I’m not….”

“Good different.” His mouth brushed my temple and missed, landing closer to my hairline. “Stay. Don’t go back to that sleepover. I told you I didn’t want to do the after-party without you.”

“Victor. Listen to me. I’m Adelaide. Andrea sent me for a box.”

He made a sound that might have been agreement. His head tipped against my shoulder, too heavy to be performing it.

“Always running errands for everyone,” he said. “You don’t have to tonight.”

I stopped trying to correct him. He wasn’t refusing the truth. He couldn’t hold onto it long enough to refuse it.

His bedroom was at the end of the second-floor hall. Another staff member saw us coming, opened the door without being asked, and vanished. No questions. Andrea Hale could drag their employer upstairs half-conscious and the house would treat it as routine.

The room was larger than it needed to be. Low light. Dark wood. Floor-to-ceiling glass along one wall, the garden a scatter of gold below.

I steered him toward the bed.

“Sit.”

He sat. Then his hands found my waist and pulled, and I went with it because I hadn’t braced for how fast he still was when he wanted something.

I landed half in his lap. For a second I only felt the shock of being reached for that directly. Then his mouth was on mine.

It wasn’t careful. It was the kiss of a man who thought he was kissing the woman he’d been looking at all night.

I turned my head. “Victor—stop. I’m not Andrea.”

“Then stop talking like you’re trying to leave.” His hand came up into my hair, not hard, just sure. He kissed the place under my jaw and said her name against my skin like a habit he didn’t know he was keeping.

“Andrea….”

“Don’t.”

He misunderstood it as play. “Alright. No names.”

His eyes were open and unfocused. If there had been any chance he would clock the difference, it was already gone. That should have been enough to put me on my feet.

It wasn’t.

No one in that house had looked at me like I was the point of the room. He was looking at me like I was the reason he’d walked outside. The wanting was for her. The hands were on me.

Maybe for once. This once.

I kissed him back.

What followed wasn’t a decision I made cleanly. It was a door I stopped holding shut. Clothes came off because neither of us stopped them.

He touched me like he already knew the map of a woman he was engaged to, and I let him, because being mistaken for her was the closest I had come in years to being chosen.

When it was over he dropped beside me with a sound that was almost relieved, found my wrist without looking, and passed out with his fingers still loosely around it.

I lay there in the dark and waited for the room to become ordinary again.

It didn’t.

I had known exactly who he thought I was. That was the whole of it. There was nothing left to explain to myself after that.

I should have gotten up, find the blue box and leave like nothing happened. Instead, I watched him sleep.

Even unconscious he looked like the kind of man rooms organized themselves around. There was a mark on his shoulder I could not look at for more than a second.

Then suddenly my phone rang.

The sound was obscene in the quiet. I snatched it off the floor and saw her name.

Andrea.

I answered because not answering would have been worse.

“Addie?” Her voice was bright and tight at the same time. “Where are you? You’ve been gone forever. I started getting worried. I came myself.”

I opened my mouth. Nothing useful came out.

“Addie. Hello? Where are you?”

I stood up too fast. The sheet fell. I went to the glass because I needed to see if she was lying.

She wasn’t.

A car I recognized from home had pulled into the curve of the drive below. The door opened. Andrea got out in the same pale gold, phone to her ear, face tipped up toward the house like she was counting windows.

“Hello?” she said, into my ear and into the night at the same time. “Can you hear me Adelaide?”

I couldn’t speak. If I spoke she would hear the room.

She looked up.

I stepped back so hard my heel hit the bedframe. The reflection of the lit bedroom would have been a square of gold from the lawn.

I dropped out of the window line and pressed my back to the wall, phone still against my ear.

“Wait,” Andrea said, suddenly closer to a decision than a question. “Why is Victor’s bedroom light on? I thought he was asleep by now.”

Then the line cut off.

For one second I stared at the dark screen like it might reverse the last ten seconds if I asked nicely.

Then I moved to put on my clothes. My jacket was by the door. Blouse half under the bed. I yanked things on with hands that would not work. Missed a button. Didn’t care. Pulled my hair forward like that would do anything.

Victor slept on his stomach as if the house was not about to split open. He didn’t stir.

Then I heard footsteps in the hall.

Not the staff foot steps but one that seemed too familiar to the extend I knew who it belonged to. Andrea. Faster, coming closer and closer until the door knob turned.

I froze with one shoe in my hand and the other still somewhere on the floor, staring at the door as it started to open.