Chapter 7

CHAPTER SEVEN: Underwater

~Zella's POV~

I woke up to the penthouse still decorated.

That was the thing about Evander Ashford, he had put all of it up before Christmas and none of it had come down. The lights were still strung along the staircase, the tree still stood in the corner of the living room with its old ornaments catching the morning light, the wreath still on the front door. Brynn had told me he did this every year regardless of where they were, that Christmas morning always looked like Christmas morning no matter what city they woke up in.

He had done it here too, quietly, before either of us arrived, and now we were two days past Christmas and it was all still standing and I wasn't sure if that was habit or if he simply hadn't gotten around to taking it down or if some part of him wasn't ready to let it go yet.

I stood in the hallway with my hand on my bedroom doorframe and looked at the lights and thought about a man who decorated penthouses in the dark for his daughter and shook strangers' hands with a straight face and made agreements he sat too long inside of.

I needed to stop thinking about him.

---

We spent the morning the way you spend Christmas when you're not at home and not pretending to be, slowly, without agenda. Brynn found a Christmas film on the television and we watched it wrapped in blankets on the sofa eating the pastries that had appeared on the kitchen counter alongside the decorations. Evander joined us for a while, sitting in the armchair with coffee, saying very little, occasionally saying something dry and quiet that made Brynn laugh. I kept my eyes on the television and laughed when Brynn laughed and contributed enough to the conversation that my silence wasn't noticeable.

Or at least I hoped it wasn't noticeable.

Later we ate properly, a full Christmas lunch that Evander had somehow arranged, the table set with the candles lit now, Brynn insisting on crackers and refusing to accept that the jokes inside them weren't funny, reading each one out loud with complete commitment while her father sat across from her looking like a man who found his daughter's enthusiasm for bad jokes genuinely one of his favourite things in the world.

I watched them and thought about what Brynn had told me over the years, that her parents' marriage had ended when she was twelve, that her father had thrown himself into work in the years after, that they had rebuilt something between them slowly and on their own terms. Watching him pull a cracker across the table with her now, wearing a paper crown she had forced onto his head without asking, I thought that whatever they had rebuilt looked like the real thing.

It made him harder to flatten into something manageable. Easier to think about a person as a problem when they weren't also a father who decorated penthouses in the dark and wore paper Christmas crowns without complaining.

I excused myself after lunch, went to my room, and sat on the bed with the card from my nightstand in my hand, not because I needed to read it, I had memorized it two days ago but because holding it felt like holding evidence of something I needed to keep taking seriously. A mistake. An agreement. Her father. I put it back in the drawer and lay on the bed and stared at the ceiling for twenty minutes. Then I got up and changed into something comfy because lying on the bed was clearly not working.

---

Brynn knocked around four in the afternoon, opening my door with the particular energy of someone who had just thought of something.

"Have you seen my dad? He's not anywhere in the house."

I looked up from the book I wasn't really reading. "No, I haven't seen him since lunch."

She frowned, pulling her phone out. "He's not picking up either. Weird." She lowered the phone. "You know what, forget it, he'll turn up. Come swimming with me."

"Swimming."

"There's a pool on the lower level, I saw it when we arrived. Come on, it'll be fun."

I agreed because staying in my room was making things worse not better, and because an hour in a pool with Brynn sounded uncomplicated in a way that most things currently did not. I changed into my swimming shorts and a bra top and followed her downstairs.

The pool was long and still and lit from underneath, the water a deep clear blue in the low light of the room. It smelled like chlorine and warm air and it was completely quiet. Brynn went straight to the edge and I stood beside her and we both looked at the water for a moment before she said "alright" under her breath like she was preparing herself.

Then the water moved.

At the far end of the pool, something broke the surface, a shape rising slowly, water sheeting off dark hair, shoulders emerging first, then the rest of him, and Evander Ashford stood waist deep in the pool and pushed his hair back from his face and took a breath like a man who had been underwater for a very long time and was in absolutely no hurry about any of it.

"Dad." Brynn's voice came out higher than usual. She was already moving along the edge toward him. "Oh my God, how long have you been down there? Are you okay? Why didn't you tell me you were..."

"I'm fine." He looked at her with the patient expression of a man who was accustomed to his daughter's volume. "I come here most mornings. The water is good for thinking."

"You scared me half to death." She crouched at the edge, peering at him. "Why is your phone off?"

"Because I was swimming."

I had not moved from where I was standing.

I was aware, distantly, that I should probably also be walking toward the edge and saying something normal, but there was a significant problem which was that Evander Ashford had just emerged from the water and I was having serious difficulty processing what I was looking at in a way that was appropriate given who he was and who I was and the agreement we had made the night before in the living room.

The swimming had clearly not been a recent development. His shoulders were broad in a way that spoke to years of it, his chest and arms carrying the kind of build that didn't come from a gym alone but from actual sustained physical effort over a long time. The water was still running off him, catching the light from the pool beneath, and he looked... he looked completely unfair, was what he looked like, he looked like something that had been specifically designed to make the agreement I had made with myself significantly harder to keep.

He moved toward the ladder at the side of the pool.

I looked away. Looked at the wall. Looked at the ceiling. Looked at a fixed point somewhere above the pool that was definitely not Evander Ashford climbing out of the water in soaking wet underwear that left absolutely nothing unclear about anything and I was not looking at it, I was looking at the ceiling, I was absolutely fine.

My face was doing the thing. I could feel it.

'We agreed,' I reminded myself. 'Mistake. Her father. Done. Finished. Agreed.'

Brynn had straightened up and was talking to him still, something about telling her next time, something about heart attacks, her voice filling the pool room the way it filled every room. Evander was listening with the same patience he always had, a towel around his shoulders now, and he said something that made her laugh and the tension broke slightly and I thought — I thought maybe I had gotten away with it, maybe I had stood there for forty-five seconds staring at the ceiling and nobody had noticed and we were going to move past this moment without incident.

Then Brynn turned around.

"Zella, you've gone completely quiet over there, are you alright?"

"Fine." The word came out a full note higher than I intended. "Completely fine, I was just.... thinking about something."

She walked toward me with her head tilted, reading my face the way she always did, and behind her Evander also turned to look at me and something moved briefly across his expression that I couldn't name from this distance and didn't want to examine closely.

"You look red again," Brynn said, stopping in front of me and reaching up toward my forehead. "I'm checking your temperature, don't argue."

"I'm fine, Brynn, it's just warm in here..."

"It's not warm in here, it's a pool room." She pressed her hand to my forehead and then stepped back. "You're not feverish but you look...." She trailed off, still studying me.

Evander crossed the pool room in a few unhurried steps and reached toward my forehead as well, his hand coming up before I had time to process that it was coming and then his palm was against my forehead, large and warm and still slightly cool from the water, and every nerve ending I had went completely haywire simultaneously.

I stepped back without meaning to.

My heel caught the edge of the pool.

For one suspended second I was aware of exactly what was about to happen and completely unable to stop it, my arms coming up instinctively, grabbing for something that wasn't there, and then Brynn's hand shot out and caught my arm and pulled and the momentum shifted and instead of me going into the water it was Brynn, her foot slipping on the wet tile, her hand still gripping my arm as she went sideways, and the sound she made when the edge of the pool caught the side of her head before she went under was a sound I felt in my chest before I had even fully understood what I was hearing.

"Brynn..."

She surfaced immediately, one hand going to the side of her head, and the water around her went faintly pink.

Everything stopped.