LIVING WITH MR.VALE

CHAPTER 1: THE MAN I SHOULD NEVER WANT

AUORORA

**Chapter 1**

**The Man I Should Never Want**

There are some people you're never supposed to fall in love with.

Mine just happened to be my father's best friend.

I had known this about myself for two years. Not the vague, shapeless knowing of something you suspect but won't look at directly, the kind you can maintain for a long time if you're careful about where you point your attention. The clear, specific knowing. The kind that arrives one ordinary afternoon and doesn't leave.

I folded a sweater into the suitcase and did not look at myself in the mirror.

The room around me was the one I had grown up in, not my campus apartment but the family home, the one with the window that faced the garden and the bookshelf that had not been reorganised since I was fifteen. I had been called back for the weekend for what my mother described on the phone as a family conversation, which was the particular phrase she used when something needed to be said in person.

I had assumed it was about the trip.

I had assumed incorrectly about what came next.

The suitcase was open on the bed because I had started packing for the drive back to campus tomorrow, and somewhere in the middle of folding things, I had stopped and sat on the edge of the bed and thought about the next several months of my life with the specific, quiet dread of someone who had been given information their body had not yet agreed to process.

I should start at the beginning.

My name is Aurora Sinclair. I am twenty years old, a third-year literature student, and by most available measures a person who has things reasonably organised. I have a flat near campus that I share with two people I like, a course load I can manage if I apply myself consistently, and a family that loves me in the warm, slightly distracted way of people whose professional lives are genuinely demanding and who make up for their absence in good intentions and the occasional expensive dinner.

My father, Richard Sinclair, is the kind of man who takes up a room without trying to. Not loudly. He simply has a presence, a warmth and steadiness that people gravitated toward without entirely understanding why. He was good at his work, whatever the current iteration of it happened to be, and he was better at being a father, which was rarer than he seemed to understand.

And his oldest friend, the person he trusted most in the world, the person who had been present at every significant occasion of our family life for as long as I could remember, was Damien Vale.

This is where the story becomes difficult to tell simply.

I thought about Damien the way I thought about things that were structurally important to my life and could not be changed. The way you thought about gravity, or weather, or the particular quality of morning light in the kitchen of the house you grew up in. He had always been there. He had been there before I was old enough to understand what it meant. A man who came to Sunday dinners and knew how my mother took her tea and remembered every school result I reported at a dinner table with the attentiveness of someone who was actually listening.

He had always been kind to me. That was the foundational thing, the one I had constructed every subsequent thing on top of. Not indulgently kind, not the performative warmth of adults who were kind to children because it cost nothing and looked well. Genuinely and consistently kind, the way people were kind when they actually paid attention.

When I was fourteen and convinced I had failed a history exam badly enough to derail my entire academic future, he had sat at this very kitchen table and gone through the content with me for two hours, calmly and without making me feel foolish, until I understood it. When I was seventeen and considering dropping the literature module that the university entrance counsellor had suggested was too ambitious, he had asked me one question. *Do you want to study it?* I had said yes. He had said *then study it.* The counsellor's advice, which had been sensible and well-intentioned, had not survived his four words.

He had remembered the birthday I had been convinced everyone had forgotten because my parents were both travelling. A card, a book, and a message that said *happy birthday, Aurora* with the simplicity of someone who did not overthink the things that mattered.

My feelings, for the record, had not started then. I want to be clear about this because the timeline matters to me. After all, the version of myself at fourteen or seventeen looking at Damien Vale was the version that saw him as simply and completely what he was: the constant adult presence in my life who was not my parent and was therefore trusted in a different and uncomplicated way.

It was not uncomplicated now.

What had happened was quieter than a moment. It had been more like a gradual shift, the way a room went from afternoon to evening without a specific instant you could point to and say: there, that was when it changed. I had come home for a holiday weekend two years ago, twenty years old and fresh from a semester that had taught me more than I had expected, and Damien had been at dinner, and he had asked about my thesis proposal with the same focused attention he always brought to things, and I had looked at him across the table and thought, simply and disastrously: *oh.*

That was it. That was the full extent of the revelation. One syllable, internal, unwitnessed.

It had been enough.

I picked up another sweater and folded it with more care than it required.

The family meeting had been at breakfast. My mother had made the good coffee, which was the first indicator that something significant was coming, and my father had arrived at the table with the expression he wore when he had news he was genuinely pleased about and was prepared to be patient about delivering.

The Singapore project, he had said. The one he had been consulting on for eighteen months. The board had accelerated the timeline. They wanted him on the ground for the implementation phase, not just the planning.

My mother's position had been extended simultaneously, which was either a coincidence or the particular efficiency of two people who had spent thirty years making their lives work alongside each other.

Six months, he said. Possibly seven.

I had done the mental arithmetic immediately. The end of my second semester. Most of the following term. I had nodded and said that sounded like an important opportunity, which it was, and asked whether they had found somewhere good to stay, which they had.

"And obviously," my mother had said, with the tone of someone concluding a matter already resolved, "we've sorted out where you'll be."

I had assumed my campus apartment. The assumption had lasted approximately four seconds.

"Damien has been very generous," my father said, in the warm, straightforward way he said things that seemed obvious to him. "He has the space, and he's not far from campus. You'll stay with him until we're back."

The coffee cup in my hand had not moved.

Something in the kitchen had gone very still, or perhaps that was only me, only the specific quality of my own stillness in the moment before I located the appropriate response and produced it.

"That's kind of him," I said.

My father smiled. The uncomplicated smile of a man whose trust was intact. "Damien has looked out for this family for years. You'll be safe with him."

Safe.

I thought, with the specific and private irony of someone containing a great deal: *safety is the last thing I feel.*

My mother was already talking about the logistics, the schedule, the arrangement, and I let her talk, and I nodded at appropriate intervals and held my coffee cup and thought about six months.

Six months in Damien Vale's house.

Six months of shared breakfasts and shared evenings and the particular closeness of two people living in the same space, which I had spent two years carefully avoiding by ensuring that my time around him remained bounded by the natural structure of family dinners and occasional encounters that had clear start and end points.

There were no start and end points in a house.

There were kitchens at midnight and hallways in the morning and the slow, accumulated proximity of ordinary life, which was the specific condition I had understood, without articulating it precisely, that I could not manage.

Apparently, I was going to manage it.

I put the second sweater in the suitcase and sat back down on the edge of the bed.

The window faced the garden, and the garden was ordinary and autumnal and entirely indifferent to my situation, and I looked at it and tried to locate the rational version of myself, the one who could organise this into something sensible.

The rational version said: he is your father's best friend. He is seventeen years older than you. He has known you since you were an infant and regards you as someone to be protected rather than anything else. Your feelings are yours; they belong to you and no one else, and you have managed them successfully for two years, and you will continue to manage them because the alternative is not available.

The rational version was entirely correct.

The irrational version, which had been living in the same chest as the rational one for two years and knew all the same information and found it insufficient, said nothing. It just sat there, warm and inconvenient and entirely unimpressed by good arguments.

I had a rule about Damien Vale.

It was simple. One rule, practised consistently, maintained through seventeen family dinners and six accidental encounters and one extraordinarily difficult Tuesday afternoon when he had appeared unexpectedly at my parents' house while I was there and had been wearing a grey shirt with the sleeves pushed up and had asked about my thesis with that particular focused attention and I had excused myself to get water and stood at the kitchen sink for four minutes discussing with myself the complete impracticality of everything.

The rule was: do not think about him more than twice a day.

I broke it every single morning before I was properly awake.

I closed the suitcase.

Downstairs, my parents were discussing the timeline, their voices carrying up in the warm, familiar way of voices in a house you had grown up in, and I sat in the room I had slept in since childhood and thought about six months and what they would require of me.

Everything, probably. They would require everything I had.

I reached for my phone and checked the time.

And then from the direction of the front of the house, the sound I had been unconsciously waiting for since the moment my father had said the name at breakfast. Tyres on the drive. An engine is cutting. A door.

My father's voice below, warm and immediate, was the specific warmth he reserved for the people he genuinely loved.

And then a voice in return, low and measured and entirely, immediately recognisable.

My heart did what it had been doing for two years in the presence of that voice, which was the thing I was going to spend the next six months pretending it wasn't doing.

I stood up.

I walked to the bedroom door and opened it, and stood at the top of the stairs.

Below, in the hallway, my father was already shaking his hand. My mother was coming from the kitchen. And Damien Vale was standing in the entrance of our house with his jacket over his arm and his eyes moving around the hallway with the attentiveness he brought to everything.

Then he looked up.

He found me at the top of the stairs and held my gaze with the steady, calm attention that had never once in two years been anything other than exactly what it appeared to be, the uncomplicated regard of a man who saw someone he had known since childhood and registered her presence as simply and completely as he registered everything else.

"Aurora," he said. My name in his voice, even and plain.

"Hey," I said.

And somewhere in the quiet space between those two words, in the ordinary hallway of my family home on an ordinary Saturday morning, I understood with complete and terrible clarity what the next six months were going to require.

Everything.

And I was not sure I had it.