ANMELDENScarlett’s POV“No, I didn't tell you about Giovanni…”“What?” he giggled. “Yes, you did, when you told me about your love for art and your mentor.”“Ohh yeah… I must have skipped that.”So, I did tell him about Giovanni.About the studio with the northern light and the smell of mineral spirits. About forty years of steady hands and the particular lectures that seemed theoretical until suddenly they were the most practical things I knew. About the morning, I had successfully removed a layer of grime from a painting that had not been seen clearly in decades, the colours coming up like something being born, and Giovanni standing behind me saying nothing for a long time and then saying, quietly, Now you understand.Ezra listened the way he had listened to everything, fully and without hurry, and when I finished, he was quiet for a moment before he spoke."He sounds like the kind of person who changes the shape of how you see things," he said. "So that even after you leave, you are still
Scarlett’s POVI had settled on a sundress, simple and yellow, the kind of thing that required no explanation and offered none, paired with sandals and my hair down, still slightly damp at the ends from the shower. I looked like someone going for a walk. I looked like someone who had not thought too carefully about this.I had thought too carefully about this.Ezra was already there.He was leaning against one of the lobby pillars with the specific quality of ease that some people carried in their bodies naturally, not performing relaxation but actually comfortable with existing in a space, the posture of someone who had arrived and was content to wait without requiring the waiting to be anything other than what it was. He was looking at his phone, not with the anxious scrolling of someone filling time, just reading something with mild interest, and when he heard the elevator, he looked up.His face did the thing.Not elaborate. Not performed. Just a simple, genuine shift, the express
Scarlett’s POVThe quiet arrived, the specific quality of a hotel room quiet when you are alone in it, different from the quiet of a room you inhabit, more complete, more enclosed, the hum of the air conditioning the only constant, steady and unhurried and entirely indifferent to the person breathing inside it.I lay back on the bed.Stared at the ceiling.The Houston afternoon pressed itself against the windows with warm, generous light, and I lay in it and tried to be a person who was content to rest, who was grateful for the stillness, who did not feel the specific restlessness that had begun building in my chest approximately four minutes after the door closed.I was not that person.I moved to the window. Stood looking at the city for a while, at the geometry of it, the towers and the roads and the small, distant movement of people going about their lives in the ordinary world far below. I thought about calling my mother back, about the voice note she had sent in reply, and picke
Scarlett’s POVThe nap was the best thing that had happened to my body in weeks.Not the deep, scheduled sleep of someone who had gone to bed at a reasonable hour with a clear conscience and nothing pressing on the other side of wakefulness. The other kind, the kind that arrived unexpectedly in the middle of the afternoon in a warm room with good linen and the solid, steady warmth of another person beside you, was the sleep that came after something that had used up everything you had and left you pleasantly empty, light and loose and thoroughly unconcerned with the world beyond the immediate square footage of the bed.I was aware of Cade beside me, the slow rise and fall of his breathing, his arm a warm weight across my waist, the particular quality of a man deeply and genuinely asleep, and all the controlled tension of him finally released into something softer. I lay in the half-world between sleep and waking and listened to the hum of the air conditioning and the distant muffled s
Scarlett’s POVHe made a sound against my mouth that was somewhere between a laugh and something considerably less composed, and his weight shifted, following where I pulled him, both of us moving until he was above me and I was beneath him on the white hotel linen, and we kissed with the unhurried warmth of two people who have been through an enormous amount in the last twelve hours and have arrived, temporarily, at something simple.He pulled back.I made a sound of protest."I will absolutely continue that," he said, and his voice had dropped into the register that did specific things to my ability to think clearly, "if you text your mother right now."I stared at him."I'm sorry?""You heard me." He was entirely calm, which was somehow more aggravating than if he had been smug about it. "Text your mother. Let her know you are alive and well and not lying in a ditch somewhere in Houston. Then we can discuss the moon.""Cade.""Scarlett.""Are you genuinely going to withhold right n
Scarlett’s POVHe was still looking at me.That was the thing about Cade in the aftermath of enormous news: he did not look away, did not find something else to occupy his eyes while his mind caught up with what had just been said. He looked directly at the thing, or in this case directly at me, the person who had delivered the thing, with the focused, unblinking attention of a man who had decided that whatever was in front of him deserved his complete and undivided presence.His expression was still doing that unguarded thing.Still stripped of management."What's wrong?" I asked because the silence had stretched past the point where I could sit comfortably inside it without knowing what was living there. "Are you okay?"He blinked."No.” A pause. "I mean, yes. "I'm fine." He ran a hand over his face, the gesture of someone returning to their body from somewhere slightly further away. "I am just processing what you told me."I watched him process.Watched the information continue to
Scarlett’s POVI'd catch him on the phone in the garden, pacing like a caged animal, speaking in rapid Italian that I couldn't quite make out through the windows. His hand would rake through his hair repeatedly, a tell I'd learned meant he was stressed.When he came back inside, I'd ask, "Everythin
Scarlett's POVThe Tuscan countryside unfurled before us as a Renaissance painting come to life. Rolling hills covered in olive groves and vineyards, cypress trees standing like dark sentinels against the golden afternoon light, terracotta-roofed farmhouses scattered across the landscape like dropp
Scarlett's POVThe Uber dropped us at a private hangar on the outskirts of Austin-Bergstrom International Airport, far from the commercial terminals with their crowds and security lines and crying babies. I'd been here before, years ago, when a wealthy client had flown me to Santa Fe for a consulta
Scarlett’s POV"Unless you don't want this. Then we stop."Want was a laughable understatement. I was burning up from the inside, need coiling tight in my core."I want this." I gripped his shirt. "I want you."He made a sound low in his throat, something between a growl and a groan, and then we we







