LIVING WITH MR.VALE

CHAPTER 2: MR.VALE'S RULES

He looked the same.

That was the first thought, standing at the top of the stairs while my father shook his hand in the hallway below and my mother came from the kitchen with the warm, relieved smile she reserved for people she genuinely trusted. The same, which should not have been remarkable given that it had been four months rather than four years, but which struck me with the particular force of something I had been preparing for and found I had not prepared for adequately.

Tall. Dark jacket, no tie, the collar of his shirt open in a way that suggested a long drive rather than a formal arrival. He had the particular quality of stillness that I had spent two years cataloguing without meaning to, the kind that made everyone around him seem slightly louder than they needed to be simply by contrast.

He greeted my mother with the warmth he always brought to her, a brief, genuine embrace, the kind that meant something rather than performing meaning. He shook my father's hand with the ease of two people who had been shaking hands for twenty years and had stopped registering the gesture separately from the relationship it represented.

Then he looked up at me on the stairs.

His expression shifted in the small, specific way it sometimes shifted when he looked at me, a fractional softening that I had been trying to correctly interpret for two years without arriving at a satisfying conclusion.

"Hello, Aurora," he said. "It's good to see you again."

"You too," I said, which was the most aggressively insufficient sentence in the English language for what I was actually feeling. Still, it was also the correct sentence for the situation, the relationship, and the audience of my parents, who were standing right there.

I came down the stairs.

Close up he smelled of something I had catalogued and refused to name and he shook my hand in the way he had begun shaking my hand after I turned eighteen, treating me as someone who existed on the same social plane as the adults rather than slightly below it, which I had found at the time to be a kindness and currently found to be a specific and targeted form of personal difficulty.

My mother made coffee. The good kind.

We sat in the living room, and my parents walked through the arrangement with the organised thoroughness of people who had thought about it carefully and wanted to make sure everyone understood. Six months minimum, possibly seven. Singapore, which was as far from this living room as it was possible to get. The accommodation provided was a one-bedroom, which the company had not built for three occupants. Aurora was in her third year and had her studies and her life, and it simply made more sense for her to remain.

"There was never any question of where she'd stay," my father said, with the simple certainty of someone for whom this conclusion had been obvious from the beginning. "Damien has more room than he knows what to do with, and he's not far from the university."

Damien sat with his coffee and listened to all of it with the attentive composure he brought to everything. "You don't have to worry," he said, at the point in the conversation where my mother's expression had shifted into the one she wore when she was trying not to visibly worry. "I'll make sure she's safe."

Safe.

I noted the word and filed it.

Not comfortable. Not happy. Not that she'll enjoy herself or that it will be fine or any of the warmer alternatives. Safe. The precise, practical word of a man thinking about a responsibility rather than a person.

This was, I told myself with the determined rationality I applied to all thoughts about Damien Vale, exactly correct and entirely appropriate.

We stayed for lunch. My mother made things she wanted me to eat before I left, and we sat around the table, and the conversation was warm and ordinary, and I smiled at the right moments and contributed appropriately and felt, underneath all of it, the low continuous hum of the thing I was going to spend six months containing.

My parents hugged me for a long time in the driveway when we left.

My father held my face in his hands the way he had done when I was small, when I had looked bigger than I felt, and told me he was proud of me and that everything would be fine and that Damien was the best man he knew.

"I know," I said.

That was the problem.

The car was black and quiet and smelled of leather and that thing I had catalogued and refused to name, and I put my bag in the back and got into the passenger seat and Damien put my suitcase in the boot and came around to the driver's side and we pulled out of my parents' drive and onto the road, and the house got smaller in the mirror and then disappeared.

We were quiet for the first few minutes.

I looked at the road, and he drove, and the city moved around us in its usual Saturday afternoon way, and I tried to locate the version of myself that was competent and composed and not thinking about the fact that I was going to be living in the same house as this man for the next six months.

"How's work?" I said.

He glanced at me briefly. "Busy. We're closing a deal with a consortium in Zurich at the end of next month. It's been demanding."

"The European expansion?"

He looked at me again, slightly longer this time. "Your father mentioned it?"

"He mentioned you were working on something significant in Europe. I looked it up." I kept my eyes on the road. "Vale Holdings acquiring Meridian was all over the financial pages in June."

A pause. "You follow the financial pages."

"I follow things that are relevant to people I know," I said it lightly. "How close is the Zurich deal to closing?"

"Close enough that I'll need to travel before the end of the month." He said it with the brisk factuality of someone unused to being asked informed questions about his work by someone my age, and filed the information without commenting on it further. "What about you. Third year. Are you enjoying it?"

"Mostly. The Victorian literature module is better than I expected. The media ethics seminar is more interesting than it sounds." I turned my head slightly to look at him in profile. "I'm trying to decide between two dissertation topics. I keep going in circles."

"What are the two options?"

I told him. He listened, which was one of the things about him I had been in entirely the wrong relationship to appreciate for the past two years, the quality of his listening, total and focused, no performing of attention while actually thinking about something else.

He asked one question at the end that suggested he had heard everything and identified the core of the decision I was actually trying to make, which was not between two topics but between safety and ambition.

"The harder one," he said simply.

"It might be too much."

"The easier one will bore you by February."

I looked at him. He was looking at the road. He was, as far as I could tell, completely serious.

"You don't know that," I said.

"I know you," he said, in the plain, uncomplicated way he occasionally said things that landed considerably louder than he seemed to intend.

The conversation moved after that, easier than the silence, and by the time the mansion came into view, I had spent thirty minutes in a car with Damien Vale and managed to feel like a relatively normal person for most of them, which I counted as an early success.

The mansion was not what I had built in my imagination over the years, though I should have been able to predict it would not be. Not cold, which was what I had expected from a building that housed him and only him and his carefully managed life. Warm, actually, in the way of old houses that had absorbed the light of many years, with high ceilings and the kind of wood that had been there long enough to have developed its own quality. The garden visible through the front windows was well-kept but not severe. The entrance hall had a warmth to it that the kitchen of his life did not, which was interesting.

The staff was two people, Maria, who managed the domestic arrangements, and Morrison, who did everything else, both of whom greeted me with genuine pleasantness and offered to show me to my room.

Damien picked up my suitcase.

"You don't need to," I said.

"I know," he said, and carried it upstairs.

"I thought I was your responsibility," I said, following him. "Not your guest."

He paused at the top of the stairs, just briefly, a single held beat.

Then he continued to my room without turning around.

He set the suitcase inside the door and showed me the bathroom and the wardrobe and the window that overlooked the garden, and I thanked him and said everything was lovely because it was, and he said to come down when I was ready, there was something he wanted to go over.

The study was on the ground floor, a room that reflected him precisely. Books that had been read were not arranged. A desk that had the particular order of someone who knew where everything was rather than someone who wanted it to look organised. The lamp was already on even though it was still afternoon.

He sat across from me and folded his hands on the desk and looked at me with the measured, attentive expression of a man who had thought about what he was going to say in advance.

"While you're here," he said, "there are a few things I'd like us to agree on."

I waited.

He went through them. Let him know if she is going to be home late. No strangers in the house without telling him first. Keep her focus on her studies. Tell him if she plans to travel. Lock her bedroom door. Call him if anything feels wrong, regardless of the hour.

He said all of it calmly and without the tone of someone issuing commands. More like someone who had thought about what was reasonable and was presenting it as a starting point for a conversation.

I let him finish.

"I'm twenty years old, Damien," I said.

"I know how old you are."

"Then you know I've been managing my own life for a while. I have a flat near campus. I have a schedule and a routine, and I'm not in the habit of needing someone to track my whereabouts."

"I'm not asking to track your whereabouts," he said. His voice stayed even. "I'm asking you to extend the basic courtesy of keeping me informed so that if something goes wrong, I'm not the last person to know."

"Most people would call that surveillance."

"Most people aren't responsible for their best friend's daughter." He held my gaze. "Your father trusted me with something significant. I take that seriously."

"I'm not something," I said. "I'm someone."

A pause. "Yes," he said quietly. "That's exactly the point."

I looked at him. "Would you make these rules for anyone else?"

He held my gaze for a moment. Then: "Only for someone whose parents trusted me with something I could never afford to lose."

The study was very quiet.

I sat with that sentence and what it contained, the weight of my father's trust and what it looked like from his side of it, the specific responsibility of a man who had agreed to something significant and intended to keep the agreement.

"I'm not a child," I said. Less combatively than before.

"I know."

"I want to be treated like an adult while I'm here."

He looked at me across the desk, and his expression did something I had not seen it do before, not the standard composed version, something more considered.

"That," he said, his voice lower and more careful than it had been, "is exactly the problem."

I frowned. "What does that mean?"

"You're not a little girl anymore, Aurora."

The room went very still.

He said it plainly, without drama, as a simple statement of something true, and I sat across from him in the lamplight of his study and felt the sentence arrive in me the way sentences arrived when they meant something you had not expected them to mean, landing somewhere deeper than the surface of its words.

Then he sat back.

The composed version returned, settled back into place like a door finding its frame, and he looked at his desk briefly and then at me.

"Get some rest," he said. "Tomorrow will be your first full day here."

He stood.

The conversation was over in the specific way that Damien ended things when he had decided they were finished, not rudely but completely, and I sat for a second before I understood I was supposed to stand too, and I did, and he held the study door open, and I walked through it, and he did not follow me into the hallway.

I went upstairs.

I changed into something comfortable and sat on the bed in my new room in his house. The garden was dark outside, and the house was quiet, and I looked at the ceiling and thought about the sentence.

*You're not a little girl anymore.*

He had said it as a statement. A fact. Something he had been accounting for in some internal calculation I did not have access to.

Or he had said it as something else.

I could not determine which, and the not-determining was its own kind of difficulty.

I whispered into the dark of the ceiling, very quietly, to no one.

"Then why won't you look at me like a woman?"

The house was quiet around me.

I picked up my phone to check the time and paused.

At the far end of the corridor, beneath his study door, a strip of warm light.

2:17 in the morning.

I lay back on the bed and looked at the ceiling again and thought about two people in the same house who were both awake at 2:17 in the morning on the first night of an arrangement that was going to last six months, and wondered if he was finding it as difficult as I was.

I told myself probably not.

I told myself this without any real conviction.