All Chapters of He Watched Me Grow…Then Claimed Me: Chapter 1 - Chapter 10

Aria | Age Eighteen I have practiced this moment my whole life, so I hold his gaze.“I’ve been in love with you—”The words catch.For one awful second I think they are going to die there and I will have ruined myself for nothing.I force them through.“I have. For years.” My throat tightens. “Since I was old enough to understand what that meant.”The party is still going on in the next room. My mother’s laugh. Glasses touching. Someone crossing the hall outside the study without knowing the air in here has changed shape completely.He goes still.Not blank. Not empty.Completely rigid, as if something has hit him somewhere he cannot afford to show.Heat floods my face.“I know what it sounds like,” I say, quieter now, because there is no point pretending my voice is steadier than the rest of me. “I know who you are to my father. I know what this is supposed to be. I just—”My breath turns on me. He still is not saying anything. Oh God.“I needed you to know it wasn’t childish. It wa

Adrian | Three Weeks LaterMarcus is telling the Rotterdam story.I know this because I can hear the specific cadence of it from the kitchen doorway — the way his voice rises on “I told them—, and drops on “—and they didn’t listen.” And the way the whole table responds to the pause before the punchline the way an audience responds to a comedian they have seen many times and still love. I have heard this story approximately eighty-five times across fifteen years of Sunday lunches. I could deliver it myself, including the gestures.I pour myself a drink instead.The kitchen is warm. Diane is at the oven, which is making a sound she does not approve of, and she is speaking to it in the specific low tone she uses for things that are failing to cooperate.“I need another twenty minutes,” she says. To me or to the oven. Unclear.“Marcus said fifteen.” I say.“Marcus,” she says, with the precise, practiced weight of a woman who has been translating her husband’s optimism into reality for tw

Adrian | Monday MorningMarcus is in my car.This was not my idea.He was standing at the bottom of my building at six-fifty-two in the morning with a coffee in each hand and the specific expression of a man who has decided something and is not going to discuss whether he has the right to decide it. I had looked at him through the windscreen for approximately three seconds. Then I had unlocked the door.He got in. He handed me one of the coffees. He did not explain himself.We drove in silence for four minutes.“You think I need babysitting,” I said.“I think nothing of the sort,” Marcus said, looking out the window.“You’re standing outside my building at six-fifty-two on a Monday morning with two coffees.”“I was in the area.”“You live twenty minutes in the other direction.”“I was in the area,” he said again, with enormous composure.I looked at the road.“You’re three years older than me,” I said.“I’m aware.”“Not twenty years. Three.”“Yes.”“Then I don’t require—”“The paparaz

Aria | Four Weeks LaterThe outfit was Zara’s idea.Not the research group — that was mine, earned, Professor Harland’s assistant calling on a Thursday afternoon while I was eating cereal over the sink and trying to remember what normal felt like. But the outfit was Zara at seven forty-five this morning, standing in my wardrobe with the specific expression of a woman conducting a professional assessment and finding the subject lacking.“You’re not wearing that,” she said, pointing at what I had laid out. Dark trousers. A safe blouse. The kind of outfit that says I am serious and competent and absolutely not trying to be seen.“It’s a research meeting.”“It’s your first research meeting.” She was already pulling things out. “There’s a difference.”What she found was mine. I had forgotten I owned any of it. A cream ribbed tank, soft and fitted. A black leather mini skirt, high-waisted, unapologetically short. Knee-high boots with a slight heel that I bought in October on a day I was

Adrian | The Same EveningThe office still smells like her when I drape my coat over my shoulders and leave. I notice this the way you notice something wrong with a room before you can identify what it is — a shift in the air, something sweet that does not belong to the usual order of cedar and paper and the particular cold of conditioned silence. Something warmer. Something that sits underneath the cedar now like it was always there and I simply was not paying attention.Strawberry. Of course it’s strawberry. It’s Aria.Something floral, sweet and absolutely, horrifyingly wrong.It invades my senses, going somewhere I do not authorize.I have always known her smell. I told myself it was the smell of her shampoo that she will grow up out of. That it was the smell of a child who liked sweet things. Sweets, pastries, the particular sweetness of someone who has not yet learned to want anything complicated. I told myself this and filed it and did not take it back out of the file.Was it