Elodie's POV
I know what's on that security footage.
I've known since the night I covered that camera lens outside Calista's hospital room three weeks before our wedding. I knew it was wrong. I knew how it would look. I did it anyway because what I saw happening inside that room was worse than how I looked standing outside it—and I needed one more minute to think before everything blew apart.
But Thornwick doesn't know that.
And right now, sitting across from me at this business dinner while Fenn leans in for the third time tonight with his too-wide smile and his hand drifting toward my arm—Thornwick is watching me with an expression I cannot read. Not jealousy this time. Something heavier. Something that looks a lot like a man who has just seen something on a screen and is deciding what to do about it.
He knows.
The thought hits me cold. I reach for my water glass. Smile at something Fenn says. And spend the next forty minutes waiting for the night to end.
It ends badly.
Fenn touches my hand when he says goodnight. One second, fingers over mine, too deliberate to be an accident.
Thornwick is beside me in two steps. His hand finds the small of my back—firm, warm, absolutely intentional—and he says, "We have an early morning" in the tone he reserves for boardrooms and people who have miscalculated badly. Fenn pulls back. We say our goodbyes. And in sixty seconds we are in the elevator, the doors closed, the silence between us loud enough to hurt.
"You don't have to keep doing that," I say.
"Doing what."
"The possessive husband act. Fenn's harmless."
"Fenn touched your hand."
"Thornwick—"
"Don't." He turns to face me and the look on his face stops my words completely. He's not performing now. He's not doing the cold-executive expression or the business-arrangement voice. He looks like a man who is tired of pretending. "Don't explain Fenn to me. Don't tell me it's harmless. I know what I felt and I'm done pretending I didn't feel it."
"We're not real," I say. My voice cracks slightly on the last word. I hate that it does. "You said it yourself. Business arrangement. Placeholder. We're not—"
"Aren't we?"
Two words. Same ones from last time. Except this time he doesn't wait for my answer.
He steps forward. His hand cups my face—both hands, careful and certain at once—and then he kisses me.
Not gentle. Not testing. Desperate. Like the word has finally been said after a very long silence.
For exactly one second I think about the security footage. About the screenshot Senna sent. About everything I still haven't told him.
Then I kiss him back.
And I stop thinking entirely.
We barely make it through the penthouse door.
I won't write it like a story. It wasn't like a story. It was clumsy and urgent and real—the kind of real that doesn't give you time to be graceful or careful or smart. The kind that bypasses every wall you've spent years building and goes straight through.
Afterward we lie still in the half-dark of the living room, both of us breathing like we've been running, and I stare at the ceiling and think: what did I just do.
His hand finds mine on the floor between us. Not romantic. Just there. Like in the car after the family dinner.
"Elodie."
"Don't apologize," I say immediately.
"I wasn't going to."
I turn my head to look at him. He's already looking at me.
"Last night was—" he starts.
"Amazing," I finish.
Something moves across his face. Relief, maybe. Or recognition.
"Yes," he says. "It was."
Morning is awkward in the way that only honest things are awkward.
We make coffee. He stands too close. I let him. We don't have the right words yet so we use the small ones—"did you sleep" and "there's eggs" and "I have calls at nine"—and underneath all of them is the thing neither of us is saying yet.
Finally I say it.
"We should keep this between us. While we figure out what it is."
He wraps both hands around his mug. Nods slowly.
"Agreed."
A pause.
"Calista—" I start.
"I know," he says. Quietly. Not defensively. He just—knows. And the guilt is right there in his voice, the same guilt that is sitting like a stone in the middle of my chest. We didn't plan this. We didn't mean for it to be real. But it is, and she's lying in a hospital bed, and neither of us knows how to hold both of those truths at the same time.
"I'm not her replacement," I say. "Not for this."
"No," he agrees. "You're not." He looks at me with those steady dark eyes. "You're something I didn't see coming. That's different."
It should be enough. It almost is.
I almost tell him then. About the camera. About the room. About what I saw that night that made me cover a hospital security lens with my hand and walk away without saying a word to anyone.
Almost.
I don't, because my phone rings at that exact moment.
Unknown number.
My stomach drops. I look at Thornwick. He hasn't seen the screen. I step into the hallway.
"Hello?"
The voice on the other end is one I have never heard before. Low, flat, careful.
"You need to stop," the voice says. "Whatever is happening between you and Thornwick Vale—you need to end it. Tonight."
I grip the phone harder. "Who is this?"
"Someone who has been protecting you." A pause. "Someone who cannot protect you if you get any closer to him. You don't understand what he's capable of, Elodie. You don't know what he did."
"What he did," I repeat slowly. "What does that mean?"
The line is quiet for three full seconds.
"Calista didn't fall," the voice says. "And she didn't jump. And the person whose fingerprints are on that balcony railing—the ones the police missed—" another pause, precise and devastating—"are his."
The call ends.
I stand in the hallway with the phone against my chest and listen to Thornwick moving in the kitchen. The quiet sounds of a man making breakfast. A man I just let all the way past every wall I own.
A man whose fingerprints may be on the railing where my sister nearly died.
"Elodie?" he calls. "Toast or no toast?"
I close my eyes.
"Toast," I say.
And I walk back into that kitchen smiling, because I have spent twenty-six years being invisible—and the one thing invisibility teaches you, above all else, is how to hide exactly what you're feeling.