Your Dad’s My Husband Now, Back Off, Ex!

The Morning After

I don't know where I am.

The ceiling is wrong. Too high, too white, no water stain in the corner where mine always leaked. The room is too quiet, no traffic outside, no upstairs neighbor dragging furniture at seven a.m. The curtains are heavier than anything I've ever owned, blocking out enough light that I can't even tell what time it is.

I lie perfectly still, waiting for my body to catch up with wherever my mind has landed. The mattress gives too easily under me, softer than it has any business being.

Then it comes back in pieces. The car. The gates. Xavier's name drifting up through the hallway last night before I fell asleep still half dressed.

I sit up too fast and have to wait for the room to settle.

I reach for my phone on the nightstand, still not fully convinced any of it happened.

Lena: Still alive?

Mom: Morning, sweetheart

Nothing from Xavier.

I sit with that for longer than I want to admit. Some small, stubborn part of me was hoping for a text, an apology, anything, and finding nothing there annoys me more than his silence ever could.

Crying doesn't even occur to me. I get out of bed instead.

The curtains turn out to be motorized, a small panel of buttons built into the wall that I mistake for a light switch, a thermostat, and finally, after three tries, the actual curtains. They part slowly, evenly, without a sound, and morning fills the room, soft and steady.

I stand at the window for a minute, looking out over gardens I only saw last night in headlights. In daylight they look even more deliberate, every hedge trimmed to the same height, not a single leaf out of place.

By the time I make it downstairs, I've talked myself in and out of going at least twice.

I take the stairs slower than I need to, half expecting someone to stop me and ask where I think I'm going. Nobody does. A young woman polishing the banister nods a good morning and keeps working.

Robert is already at the table. Not reading a newspaper, which is somehow what I expected. A tablet sits propped beside his plate, coffee cooling next to it. He glances at something on the screen, taps out a reply with two fingers, then sets it face down the moment I walk in.

“Good morning,” he says, and it's the first time all his attention has landed on me at once.

“Morning.”

I hover near the empty chair across from him for a second too long before sitting, unsure if there's a version of this that isn't awkward.

“Did you sleep?”

“Eventually.”

“The mattress is too soft. I've meant to replace it for two years.”

I blink at him. Somehow the last thing I expected from Robert Rothwell over breakfast was a complaint about a mattress.

“Everyone complains,” he adds, and goes back to his coffee as if that settles it.

I almost laugh. It surprises me more than anything he's said since the sidewalk.

Mrs. Calloway appears a moment later with a tray, sets down toast and eggs, then a small pot of tea instead of coffee, without being asked.

“You don't drink coffee,” Robert says, not quite a question.

“You remembered that?”

“You declined it. At the café. I remember most things people decline.”

It's such a small thing. I pour the tea myself and don't say anything else.

“Is that a strategy?” I ask. “Noticing what people say no to?”

“I've noticed people are usually honest about the things they refuse.”

I pour myself more tea and don't say anything else about it.

The rest of breakfast passes in short, easy silences. He doesn't fill them with small talk, and somehow that makes the silences easier instead of harder.

At one point his tablet buzzes, screen lighting up against the tablecloth. He glances at it, doesn't reach for it, and looks back at me instead.

He stands to leave before I've finished, jacket already back on, tablet tucked under one arm.

“The house isn't a hotel,” he says, pausing at the doorway.

My stomach drops. I run through the last ten minutes looking for whatever mistake I made. Overslept, sat in the wrong chair, used the wrong cup.

“You don't need permission to use any room,” he continues. “The library, the garden, the kitchen after hours. Consider it yours as much as mine.”

“Oh,” I say, feeling a little foolish. “Thank you.”

“There's a difference between staying somewhere and living somewhere,” he adds. “I'd rather you did the second one.”

“I'll try.”

He almost smiles at that, or close enough to it that I second guess whether I imagined it.

“I have a call in eleven minutes,” he says, and he's gone before I can say anything else.

Once he leaves, the house feels oddly empty. Maybe it isn't any quieter than before. I just notice the silence more.

I wander instead of asking anyone to show me around. The library first, since I already know where it is, then further, into rooms I haven't seen yet.

The library smells like old paper and something faintly cedar. I run a finger along a shelf of spines, most of them unfamiliar, a few titles in languages I don't read.

The music room has a piano nobody seems to play, dust visible on the lid. I press one key, just to hear it, and the sound is too loud in a room this empty.

The greenhouse is warm and smells like wet soil. Someone's left a pair of gardening gloves on the potting bench, mismatched, one green and one blue.

The terrace looks out over gardens I only saw in headlights last night, hedges cut into shapes that make more sense in daylight. A stone bench sits at the far end, the middle of it worn smooth from years of use.

Photographs line one hallway near the back stairs, ordinary in a way nothing else in this house is. A much younger Robert, dark haired, laughing at something outside the frame. A woman I don't recognize, must be Xavier's mother, holding a baby that's probably him. Xavier at maybe twelve, gap toothed, squinting into the sun.

In that one, Robert's hand rests on his shoulder. Both of them are smiling, easily, the kind of smile that isn't posed for anyone.

I stand there longer than I mean to. Whatever I expected to find in this hallway, it wasn't that.

There's a gap further down the wall, a slightly lighter rectangle where a frame used to hang and doesn't anymore. I don't ask anyone about it.

I find Mrs. Calloway in the kitchen afterward, washing my own mug out of habit before I even think about it.

“Miss—” she starts, then stops herself, reaching for the mug as if to take it back. “Old habits,” she says instead, and lets me finish.

I laugh, and something in her expression loosens.

“You don't have to let me do that,” I say.

“I know. It's just not usually how it goes around here.”

She takes the mug from the rack anyway and dries it, more out of habit than necessity, setting it back exactly where it belongs.

“How long have you worked here?” I ask.

“Twenty-eight years this spring.”

“That's a long time.”

“Long enough to see quite a lot come and go.”

She dries a plate that's already dry. “Mr. Rothwell hasn't brought anyone home since his wife passed. Not once in all that—”

She stops herself again, more sharply this time, and busies her hands with the cabinet.

“More tea?” she asks, already reaching for the kettle before I can answer.

A phone rings somewhere down the hall before I get the chance to say yes or no. She's gone before the second ring, leaving the kettle half filled on the counter.

I'm still holding the second cup when I come around the corner near the east hallway, distracted by a painting I hadn't noticed before, and walk straight into someone.

Tea goes everywhere. Down my sleeve, across the floor, across whoever I just hit.

“Seriously?”

I know that voice before I even look up.

Xavier stands there in yesterday's jacket, tea soaking into his shirt, staring at me as if his mind hasn't finished processing what it's looking at.

Neither of us says anything for a long moment.

He looks like he hasn't slept, hair a mess, dark circles under his eyes that weren't there at the café. Whatever flight or drive got him home last night clearly ended somewhere rough.

His eyes move over me slowly. My clothes, too casual to be a guest's. The hallway behind me, too familiar for someone just passing through. The tea now soaked into his shirt.

“...Why are you here?”

Neither of us moves. Somewhere down the hall, a clock ticks, indifferent to whatever is happening in this exact spot.

“I could ask you the same thing,” I say, mostly to buy time.

“I live here, Ariella. That's not really a question.”

He grabs a folded napkin off a side table and presses it against his shirt, wincing slightly, though I doubt the tea was hot enough to burn.

“You could help, you know,” he says, gesturing at the mess with his free hand.

“It's tea, Xavier. It'll dry.”

“That's not really what I meant.”

I don't answer that. Starting this conversation in a hallway with tea-stained floorboards doesn't feel like the way to do it.

I open my mouth, and nothing useful comes out.

“I can explain,” I say, which isn't actually an explanation at all.

“I've heard that before.”

“Xavier—”

“Are you working for him? Is that it? Some kind of consultant thing?”

He says it slowly, testing whether the theory holds together, and some small, cowardly part of me almost lets him believe it.

Footsteps sound from the far end of the hallway before I can answer. Robert, tablet gone now, watching the two of us with an expression that gives away nothing at all.

He takes in the tea on the floor, the napkin pressed to Xavier's shirt, the look on both our faces, and doesn't ask what happened. He doesn't need to.

“I was going to tell you this morning,” Robert says.

Xavier laughs once, short and disbelieving, the sound of someone who already knows he isn't going to like whatever comes next.

“Tell me what?”

“Ariella is going to be living here.”

Xavier's face shifts through something confused, then almost relieved, his mind clearly reaching for the easiest explanation available. A consultant. Some project of his father's. Anything simpler than the truth.

“Living here,” he repeats slowly, “as what?”

He looks at me when he says it, waiting, hoping I'll fill in the blank myself and hand him something that makes sense.

I don't say anything. It isn't mine to say first.

Robert doesn't answer right away. He looks at me first, just briefly, then back at his son.

“We'll discuss it after breakfast.”

“I already had breakfast,” Xavier says. “With her, apparently, judging by the tea.”

Robert doesn't rise to it.

He turns and walks away, unhurried, the same way he walked away from the café, from the sidewalk, from every conversation he's decided is over before the other person agrees it is.

Xavier stares after him, jaw tight, tea still darkening the front of his shirt. When he finally looks back at me, there's something almost pleading underneath the anger.

“Ariella. What is going on.”

It isn't really a question anymore. It's closer to a demand, though his voice doesn't quite have the strength to land it as one.

I open my mouth to answer, and find I still don't know how to say it out loud, not here, not to him, not with tea cooling on the floorboards between us.

“After breakfast,” I say instead, and it feels like a betrayal even as I say it.

He doesn't follow when I walk away. I can feel him standing there anyway, all the way down the hall.