All Chapters of Never Meant to be Seen : Chapter 1 - Chapter 6

"You have three weeks left in this apartment, Ms. Leonie. I'm not enjoying saying that any more than you're enjoying hearing it."My landlord said it the way he said everything flatly, like a man reading a grocery list instead of ending someone's life piece by piece. Behind him, my father's oxygen machine hissed its slow, mechanical rhythm from the next room, counting down something neither of us said out loud."I have a payment coming," I lied. "This week.""You said that three weeks ago."I didn't argue. There was nothing left to argue with. I closed the door on him and stood in the hallway of an apartment I couldn't afford, above a studio full of paintings no one wanted to buy, down the hall from a father whose heart was failing faster than my bank account could keep up with the surgery that might save it.I'd sold two canvases that month. Four hundred dollars combined. The specialist wanted sixty thousand just to put my father on the schedule.I went back inside and sat by his bed

I heard him before I saw him, unhurried footsteps on marble that somehow still managed to sound like a warning, like a man who had never once in his life needed to walk quickly toward anything, because everything simply waited for him to arrive. I came down the stairs because staying hidden felt more dangerous than being seen, smoothing the borrowed silk of my robe, arranging my face into the practiced, unbothered calm Renata had spent two weeks drilling into me. Isabelle doesn't ask for things. Isabelle expects them. Arlo Alfie stood in the entryway like he owned the marble under his feet, which, I would later learn, he technically did, his family held the mortgage on half the properties in this district, this house included. He was younger than I'd expected from the file photos, dark-suited despite the hour, tie loosened just enough to suggest he'd come straight from somewhere that had already exhausted him. His eyes found me on the staircase and stopped there, sharp and assessin

The engagement gala was held in a ballroom with ceilings higher than any ceiling should reasonably be, chandeliers throwing gold light across three hundred guests who all seemed to know exactly who I was supposed to be while I still wasn't entirely certain myself, some days, anymore. Arlo found me on the terrace an hour in, escaping the noise the same way I had. "You're good at this," he said, joining me at the railing, close enough that I could feel the warmth of him even through the cool night air. "Better than I expected. Better, honestly, than I think you realize." "Is that a compliment?" "It's an observation." He turned to face me fully, and something in his expression had softened since the study, some wariness quietly set aside, replaced by an intensity that felt more dangerous precisely because it no longer felt calculated. "I've spent three days trying to catch you in a lie, Isabelle. I haven't managed it once." "Maybe there's nothing to catch." "Maybe," he said, though