Charlie's POV:

The kitchen smells like Vivi’s coffee before I’m even down the stairs.

Which is how I know it’s close to 7:52 and she’s already at the island, phone face-down, reading something with her shoulders squared like it owes her money.

I’ve stopped needing the alarm.

Most mornings I’m awake before it goes off now.

I know it’s close to 7:52 because the light comes through the east window at that slant, the one that puts a stripe across the tile right where her elbow rests. I know she’ll have made mine first—cream, no sugar, the mug with the chip on the rim that she’s decided is mine for reasons she’s never explained. I know she’ll be wearing the charcoal sweater on Thursdays, the one with the cuff she keeps rolling and unrolling like it’s a nervous habit she’d deny having.

Eleven days out from the wedding, the house has stopped being a house.

There’s a rack of garment bags in the front hall that clinks when the heat kicks on. Floral samples fanned across the dining table like evidence. A seating chart on the library wall the size of a window, little cards pinned across it, names I don’t know. Every time I walk through the powder room there’s a new box on the counter—ribbons, votives, a tin of something that smells like lavender and money.

Vivi hates it.

She hasn’t said so.

She doesn’t have to.

She just moves through it like a woman stepping around puddles.

“You’re up,” she says without looking up.

“So are you.”

“I’m always up.”

“That’s a sad way to live.”

She turns a page.

“The coffee’s getting cold.”

I take the mug.

It’s exactly right.

It’s been exactly right for nine mornings in a row now, and the fact that I’ve started to expect it—that I’d notice if it were wrong—is the kind of thing I’m choosing not to think about at seven fifty-three in the morning.

On my way through the library, I see the throw.

Gray cashmere, folded over the back of the wing chair like it’s never been anywhere.

Like it didn’t spend a whole night covering me on that couch.

Like I didn’t wake up with it tucked under my chin and Vivi asleep at the opposite end, her laptop dark beside her and the lamp still on.

She folded it.

Put it back.

And we’ve both been walking past it for four days like it’s furniture.

“You coming, or what?” I call from the mudroom.

Because it’s what I always say.

Because it’s become a thing I say.

Because somewhere in the last week I started needing to hear her footsteps behind me.

Keys.

Ceramic on stone.

The door.

The Range Rover smells like her.

Bergamot and something drier underneath. Cedar, maybe.

She drives with both hands at nine and three like she’s taking a licensing exam, and I’ve got my feet on the dash because I know it makes her twitch, and the fado comes on low—a woman’s voice in a language I don’t speak, all longing and salt—and I know the third track is her favorite because she never skips it.

“You’re going to put a footprint on my windshield,” she says.

“It’s already there. From Tuesday.”

“I know. I cleaned it.”

I turn my head.

“You cleaned it and didn’t say anything?”

“What would I say?”

“You could say, ‘Charlie, I cleaned your footprint off my windshield because I am a deeply strange person who notices everything.’”

“That’s a lot of words.”

“You’re a lot of words.”

She almost smiles.

Almost.

The corner of her mouth moves maybe two millimeters before she files it back down, and I count it as a win and look out the window before she catches me counting.

Tess finds me after seminar.

She’s got her bag slung across her body and a coffee in one hand, and she stops in the doorway like she’s blocking my exit on purpose, which—knowing Tess—she probably is.

“So,” she says. “Round two.”

“Round two of what?”

“Dinner. Friday. There’s a place off Main that does a decent burger and a terrible wine list. I’m told it’s charming.”

She’s got this grin.

Crooked. Easy. The kind that doesn’t ask permission.

There’s a silver ring on her thumb and a smudge of blue ink on her wrist from taking notes, and she’s looking at me like I’m the most interesting thing that’s happened to her all week.

And she’s not wrong to.

She’s smart.

She’s funny.

She read the same essay I did for class and hated it for better reasons than I did.

She’s the kind of person you’d be an idiot not to want.

“Friday,” I say. “Yeah. Okay.”

“Okay.”

She bumps my shoulder with hers on the way out.

I stand there for a second in the empty seminar room wondering why okay felt like a word I had to reach for.

By Friday afternoon, I’ve told myself three separate times that I’m looking forward to dinner with Tess.

This would be less suspicious if I hadn’t needed to tell myself at all.

I text Vivi from the library steps.

dinner with tess. don’t wait

Three dots.

Then:

I wasn’t planning to.

I stare at it.

Read it twice.

wow

What?

nothing. devastating. carry on

Enjoy dinner, Charlie.

And I’m annoyed.

Which is insane.

Because she said the correct thing.

The polite thing.

The reasonable thing.

The entirely appropriate thing.

And I’m sitting here on cold stone steps with my jaw tight like she insulted my mother.

What did I want her to say?

I don’t know.

I put the phone in my pocket and don’t answer that.

The restaurant is small and loud and warm.

Brick walls. Tin ceiling. Candles in old wine bottles.

Tess orders the burger and I get the fries and we split both, and she tells me about her sister in Portland who’s getting married next spring and hates her fiancé’s mother, and I tell her about the time my mother married a man who collected antique clocks and how I learned to sleep through chimes.

I laugh.

Twice, hard, at things she says.

She flirts with me across the table with her eyes and her fork and a story about the time she got kicked out of a museum, and I flirt back, and the wine is cheap and cold and I drink two glasses.

It’s good.

It’s really good.

Except somewhere in the middle of it, the waiter brings a black coffee to the table behind us and I clock it before I clock anything else.

No cream.

No sugar.

Mug set down with the handle to the right.

And I think:

Vivi would drink that in two sips and then order a second.

Then I’m annoyed again.

At a cup of coffee.

At myself.

“You okay?” Tess asks.

“Yeah. Sorry. What were you saying?”

“I was asking how living at the estate is going. Is it as gothic as it sounds?”

“It’s—”

I start.

And then I’m off.

“It’s fine. It’s big. It’s got this library that’s mostly for show, but there’s a chair in it that’s actually good, and—okay, so, there’s a girl. My—”

I stop.

“Vivi. My future stepsister. She alphabetizes things.”

“Your future stepsister.”

“She doesn’t alphabetize everything.”

Tess looks at me.

Just looks.

Fork halfway to her mouth.

“I didn’t say she did.”

“Right.”

I take a fry.

“Right.”

She asks what Vivi’s like.

And I answer.

And my answer takes four minutes.

Four minutes of Vivi.

Vivi’s coffee order.

Vivi’s music.

The way Vivi says astute like it’s a diagnosis.

The way she’d already noticed the lilies in the foyer were dying and simply never said anything about it, like apparently that’s a normal piece of information to keep to yourself.

I hear myself.

Somewhere around minute three, I hear myself.

“Sorry,” I say. “I don’t know why I’m—she’s just very—she’s a lot of information.”

“She sounds like it.”

There’s something in Tess’s voice I can’t read.

I decide not to.

Afterward, we walk.

There’s a used bookstore on the corner still open, and we go in and she finds a first edition of something and I find a paperback with a cracked spine, and we stand in the poetry aisle arguing about whether anyone actually reads poetry.

It’s fun.

Genuinely fun.

The kind of night I would’ve been thrilled about a month ago.

Outside, it’s cold.

She walks me to the corner where the campus path splits toward the lot.

“I had a really good time,” she says.

“Me too.”

“I’d like to do it again.”

“Yeah.”

And then she kisses me.

It’s good.

A real kiss.

Her hand comes up to my jaw, she tilts in, she knows what she’s doing.

Her mouth is soft and she tastes like wine and mint, and I kiss her back, and I mean it.

I put my hand on her waist and lean in and for a solid, honest stretch of seconds there is nothing in my head but Tess.

How nice this is.

How nice it is to want something simple.

We break apart.

She’s smiling.

I’m smiling.

And my first thought—not my second, not my third, the first thing that surfaces, unbidden, like a bubble in a glass—is:

I wonder if Vivi’s still awake.

I blink at Tess.

Tess, who is lovely.

Tess, who just kissed me and is standing here in the cold with her hands in my coat.

“Goodnight, Charlie,” she says.

“Goodnight.”

She goes one way.

I go the other.

And I walk toward the lot with my keys in my fist, annoyed at myself in a way I can’t name and don’t try to.

The house is dark.

The porch light’s on, and a lamp in the upstairs hall, and that’s it.

Cate and Alexander are long asleep. Cate leaves a note on the counter most nights now—little things, caterer called, love you, x—like I’m twelve.

I expect the kitchen to be empty.

It isn’t.

Vivi is at the island.

Laptop open.

A mug gone cold beside it.

Reading glasses on.

Actual glasses. Wire-rimmed.

I have never seen them before, and they do something to her face I refuse to name.

Her hair is up in a knot with a pen through it. Oversized gray sweater. No makeup. One bare foot hooked around the rung of the stool.

She looks like a different person.

She looks like the person who lives here when no one’s watching.

I stop in the doorway.

“You’re awake.”

“Astute.”

“It’s eleven.”

“I can read clocks.”

She doesn’t look up.

Her fingers keep moving over the keys, but slower now.

Measured.

I come farther into the kitchen anyway, past the wedding boxes stacked against the pantry, past my bridesmaid dress in its garment bag hanging off the door like a body.

I set my keys on the counter.

“Were you waiting for me?”

“No.”

There’s a spreadsheet open.

Columns.

She is actually working.

So I can’t prove anything.

She knows I can’t prove anything.

I hate that.

“Okay.”

I lean against the counter across from her.

And I don’t know what gives me away.

Maybe I touch my mouth.

Maybe I do it without meaning to—thumb at the corner of my lip, feeling for something that isn’t there, the ghost of mint.

Whatever it is, her eyes flick up.

Just once.

Fast.

To my mouth.

Then back to the screen.

I catch it.

So I say it.

Because I can’t leave anything alone.

“She kissed me.”

Vivi’s fingers don’t stop.

“I didn’t ask.”

“I know.”

And that’s the thing, isn’t it.

I don’t know why I told her.

I don’t know why I’m standing here at eleven at night with my coat still on telling my future stepsister that a girl kissed me, except that I wanted to see what her face would do.

And her face is doing nothing.

The nothing is somehow worse than anything.

“Did you have a nice time?” she asks.

“Yeah. I did.”

“Good.”

“You don’t sound like you mean that.”

She looks up.

Finally.

Glasses and all.

“How should I sound?”

“I don’t know.”

“Then that’s difficult to accommodate.”

She goes back to the screen.

I should go upstairs.

I take my coat off instead.

Hang it over the back of a chair.

Sit down on the stool two over from her.

Neither of us says anything for a while.

The refrigerator hums.

Somewhere upstairs, a floorboard creaks under Cate or Alexander or the house itself.

“Can I ask you something?”

“You’re going to anyway.”

“Do you date? Like—at all. Currently.”

She types a number into a cell.

“Yes. I date.”

“Anyone right now?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

A real shrug.

Small and economical.

“School. Recruiting. My father’s wedding. There isn’t time.”

“That’s bullshit.”

“It’s also none of your business.”

“Those things can coexist.”

She stops typing.

Looks at me sideways over the glasses.

And I can’t tell if she’s annoyed or amused or something in between.

I want to know.

I hate that I want to know.

“Why Tess?” she asks.

That lands somewhere I wasn’t braced for.

I open my mouth.

Nothing comes out.

So I stall with the cold mug.

Then with the truth.

“She’s easy.”

“Easy.”

“Not like that.”

“I didn’t say anything.”

“Your face did.”

Vivi says nothing.

Waits.

She’s good at that.

At leaving a silence open long enough that you walk into it yourself.

“She’s uncomplicated,” I say. “She knows what she wants and she says it. There’s no—there’s no history attached to her. No one else’s life changes depending on what I decide. If I want to kiss her, I kiss her. If I don’t, I don’t. It’s mine. The whole thing is mine.”

I hear how it sounds as I say it.

I keep going anyway.

“My whole life has been other people’s decisions. My mother’s husbands. My mother’s houses. My mother’s everything. I’ve moved nine times. I’ve had four last names’ worth of mail forwarded. So yeah. Uncomplicated is—that’s the whole point. That’s the dream.”

Vivi is quiet for a second.

Then:

“You like exits.”

“What?”

“You like exits.”

She closes the laptop halfway.

“You always want to know you can leave. Even when you have no intention of going anywhere.”

I stare at her.

“Tess doesn’t cost you anything to walk away from.”

That lands harder.

I laugh, but it comes out thin.

“That’s a very rude thing to say to a person at eleven o’clock at night.”

“It’s an observation.”

“It’s a rude observation.”

“Those aren’t mutually exclusive.”

I want to argue.

But she isn’t wrong.

She knows she isn’t wrong.

And she isn’t pushing it.

She’s just sitting there, letting me have it or not have it, whichever I choose.

So I do what I always do.

I deflect.

“What about you?”

“What about me?”

“What do you like in a person?”

“People who know what they want.”

“That sounds exhausting.”

“For you, probably.”

“Wow.”

“Mm.”

I take a breath.

I know the answer to the next question already.

I ask it anyway because I like hearing her say it, and I’m not going to examine that either.

“Women?”

She gives me a look over the glasses.

Long.

Flat.

“We’ve covered this.”

“I know.”

“Then why are you asking?”

“No reason.”

“Charlie.”

“I just like—”

I stop myself.

“What’s your type?”

“Absolutely not.”

“Why not?”

“Because you’ll be unbearable.”

“I’m already unbearable.”

“Exactly.”

She opens the laptop again.

The conversation is over.

She ends things the way she ends everything.

Cleanly.

I sit there with the cold mug and the hum of the refrigerator and the fact that she hasn’t moved to the other side of the island.

And I think about her type.

I think about it more than I should.

I don’t ask again.

My hand lands on a sheet of paper on the island.

The itinerary.

Cate printed it and left it under a magnet on the fridge, and it’s migrated here.

A whole page of times in a neat column.

Friday — Welcome cocktails, 7:00, Terrace.

Saturday — Rehearsal, 3:00. Rehearsal dinner, 6:30.

Sunday — Wedding morning. Ceremony, 4:00. Family photographs, 4:45. Reception, 5:30.

I read it twice.

Family photographs.

“We’re going to be in family pictures,” I say.

Vivi glances over.

“Presumably.”

“Weird.”

“Why?”

I open my mouth.

There’s no answer in it.

Because the answer is a word neither of us has willingly used for ourselves.

Not once.

Not in eleven days.

And I’m not going to be the one to say it at eleven at night in a kitchen full of wedding boxes.

“No reason.”

Vivi looks at me for a second longer than the moment needs.

Then she turns back to her screen.

A number goes into a cell.

The itinerary sits between us on the counter like a third person.

Later—I don’t know how much later—I’m on the back porch.

It’s cold.

The garden is all dark shapes.

The hedge.

The stone bench.

Bare branches reaching over the wall.

I’ve got my coat on over my sweater and I’m sitting on the top step with a cigarette I don’t really want.

I light it with the matte-black lighter that has been living in my coat pocket since the second morning I was here.

I don’t smoke much of it.

Mostly I hold it and watch the smoke go up into the dark and think about absolutely nothing.

Which is a lie.

But it’s the lie I’m telling myself tonight.

The door opens behind me.

Footsteps.

She doesn’t announce herself.

She just comes and stands at the edge of the porch, three feet away, arms crossed, looking out at the same nothing I’m looking at.

She doesn’t tell me to put it out.

She doesn’t ask what’s wrong.

She just stands there.

“You know these are bad for me,” I say.

“I have access to the internet.”

“You bought me a lighter.”

“I found you a functioning lighter.”

“Accomplice.”

“Enabler, at worst.”

I laugh.

A real one.

Small and short.

It goes out into the cold air and disappears.

We’re quiet again.

Then she says, “You only do that when you’re upset.”

I look at her.

“Do what?”

“Smoke.”

“I smoke all the time.”

“No, you don’t.”

“You keeping a calendar?”

“You didn’t smoke Tuesday. Or Wednesday. Or yesterday.”

I look at her.

She looks at the cigarette between my fingers.

“And when you do, you barely smoke it.”

I look down.

Half of it has burned on its own.

“You light one,” she says, “and mostly hold it until it goes out.”

I stare at her.

“That’s creepy.”

“It’s observational.”

There it is.

The same word.

Observational.

Like noticing me is a category of work she does.

Except it isn’t work.

She knows my coffee.

She knows my days.

She knows which mornings I put my feet on her dashboard and which songs make my thumb tap against the door.

She knows which nights I stand on the porch and burn a cigarette down to nothing without saying why.

She knows.

And she isn’t asking.

She could.

She has every opening in the world right now.

I’m standing here in the cold with a cigarette I’m not smoking, and she could say what’s wrong.

And I’d probably tell her.

That’s the terrifying part.

But she doesn’t.

She just stands at the edge of the porch and lets me keep it.

I don’t have a word for what that is.

So I don’t use one.

I put the cigarette out on the step and drop the butt into the coffee can by the door.

“Tess is nice,” I say.

“You’ve mentioned.”

“I might see her again.”

“Okay.”

I wait.

She says nothing else.

The wind moves through the hedge.

It sounds like something breathing.

“That’s all you’re going to say?”

She looks at me.

Just her face in the porch light.

Glasses off now.

Hair still up.

No armor on it at all.

“What do you want me to say?”

And I stand there with my mouth half-open because I don’t know.

That’s the whole problem.

I don’t know what I want her to say.

I don’t know why I need her to say it.

I don’t know why I told her about the kiss in the first place.

“Nothing,” I say.

“Then nothing.”

She goes back inside.

The door clicks shut behind her, quiet and precise.

I’m alone on the porch with the coffee can and the cold and the matte-black lighter still in my hand.

Tess kissed me tonight.

It was nice.

I turn the lighter over in my palm.

Once.

Twice.

Three times.

I can’t remember what her perfume smelled like.

I know exactly what Vivi’s does.