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

Rothwell’s Mansion

The city thins out slowly, then all at once. Glass towers give way to trees, then to walls, then to nothing but road and dark fields on either side.

Adrian doesn't try to fill the silence. He keeps his eyes on the road, one hand loose on the wheel, and lets me have whatever this is.

I watch the last streetlights disappear behind us and start counting the ways this could go wrong.

What if Robert changes his mind. What if I can't sit through a single dinner without saying something wrong. What if this is the biggest mistake I've ever made, and I signed my name to it in my own kitchen with cold coffee going stale six feet away.

The car doesn't answer any of that. It just keeps driving.

I catch my own reflection in the window at one point, faint over the passing dark, and don't recognize the expression on my face.

“About twenty more minutes,” Adrian says eventually, the first thing he's said since we left the city.

“Thank you.”

He glances at me once in the mirror, like he's deciding whether to say something else, then doesn't.

The radio stays off the entire ride. I almost ask him to turn it on, just for something to fill the space, but I don't.

The gates appear before the house does.

Black iron, taller than I expect, set into a stone wall that runs off into the dark in both directions. The gates swing open before Adrian even slows, silent enough to make my stomach tighten.

The driveway stretches on longer than some streets I've lived on. Old trees line both sides, their branches meeting somewhere overhead. Somewhere past them, sprinklers hiss faintly over gardens too perfectly trimmed to be real.

A fountain sits in the center of a circular drive, lit from underneath, water catching the light in slow moving ribbons. Two men in dark jackets stand near the entrance, watching the car without watching it, the way people do when it's their job to notice everything.

The house sits well back from the drive, built from old stone and brick. Nothing about it screams for attention. It simply looks like it's been standing there long enough to earn respect.

Every window on the ground floor is lit. I count them without meaning to, and lose track somewhere past a dozen.

Near the side entrance, half hidden by a hedge, someone has left a child's umbrella stand out in the rain, rusted at the base. It's the only thing on the entire property that looks like it wasn't cleaned this week.

This wasn't a house.

It was a family empire, and I was about to live inside it.

A housekeeper opens the front door before Adrian even reaches for it. She's maybe sixty, silver hair pinned back, dressed simply but sharply.

“Mrs. Rothwell,” she says, and it takes me a second to understand she means me.

“Ariella is fine.”

She nods once, filing it away without comment, and doesn't use either name again.

No one smiles too wide. No one stares. Every person I pass in the entryway seems to already know exactly who I am, and none of them ask a single question about it.

That's the strange part. Not that they know my name. That they know my situation, and have clearly decided their job is to treat it as ordinary.

A young man in a plain uniform takes my suitcases without being asked. Another woman passes through the hall with an armful of folders, glances at me, then keeps walking, unbothered.

A grandfather clock somewhere down the hall ticks louder than it has any business ticking. Someone has left a scuff mark on the bottom stair rail, small and dark, the one imperfect thing in a house that otherwise looks scrubbed clean.

I wonder how many other women have stood exactly where I'm standing.

The marble under my feet is cold even through my shoes, and the ceiling stretches up two full stories, a chandelier hanging somewhere near the top that must take an entire afternoon to dust.

Robert comes down the main staircase a few minutes later, still in his work clothes, jacket slung over one arm, tie loosened as if he'd only just pulled it free.

“You made it,” he says.

“I made it.”

His eyes drop briefly to the two suitcases by my feet. “Was the drive comfortable?”

“Adrian's a good driver.”

“He is.”

That's it. No embrace, no grand welcome, nothing that would look right in a magazine spread. Just two people standing in a marble entryway, taking stock of each other.

Without the chandeliers and the noise of that ballroom, he looks different. Older around the eyes. More tired than I remember, as though the man I met on the sidewalk had already been running on some kind of reserve.

He also looks sharper somehow, like a man who carries the weight of everything in this house whether he's standing in it or not.

“You didn't have to come down,” I say, mostly to fill the silence.

“I wanted to see you settle in before the staff started treating you like a guest instead of family.”

It's an odd thing to say. I let it sit there instead of answering it.

“You'll need to know your way around,” he says, and gestures toward the housekeeper. “Mrs. Calloway will show you.”

He doesn't offer to do it himself. I'm not sure if that's a relief or not.

Mrs. Calloway walks me through the ground floor first. A library with two full walls of books and a ladder that actually slides. A dining room long enough to seat twenty, though she says quietly that it's rarely used for more than four. Robert's study, door shut, which she doesn't open. A garden visible through glass doors at the back of the house, hedges cut into shapes I can't quite name.

“Breakfast is at seven,” she tells me as we walk. “Mr. Rothwell prefers it early. You're welcome to sleep in if you'd rather, the kitchen keeps something warm.”

“Does anyone else eat breakfast with him?”

She hesitates just slightly. “Xavier, when he's home. Not often lately.”

The question dies before it reaches my tongue.

We pass a hallway lined with portraits, none of them recent, faces I can't place to any name. Mrs. Calloway doesn't slow down for them, and I get the sense she's walked this route enough times to stop noticing the faces on the wall.

Upstairs, she shows me a guest wing I'm told not to worry about, then finally stops in front of a door near the end of a long hallway.

“Your room,” she says, and opens it.

I expected something like a nice hotel room. What I get is a suite bigger than my old apartment, with a sitting area, a fireplace I doubt gets used, and a bed that could fit four people comfortably.

I grew up sharing a room with my sister until I was seventeen. This much space for one person feels less like luxury and more like something I have to grow into.

There's a private bathroom through one door, a walk-in closet through another, empty except for a row of bare hangers waiting for someone to use them.

Mrs. Calloway leaves me to unpack. I open the smaller suitcase first, and the first thing I take out is the framed photo of my parents on their wedding day, my father with all his hair, my mother's dress not quite fitting right.

I set it on the nightstand before anything else, straightening the frame twice until it sits right.

I unpack the rest slowly, hanging clothes in a closet built for three times what I own, arranging the few books I brought on an empty shelf that swallows them without effort.

When I'm done, the room still looks mostly empty. I try not to think about what that says about how little I actually own, or how much space I now have to fill.

A knock comes about twenty minutes later. Not a push of the door, just three knuckles against wood, waiting.

“Come in.”

Robert steps in, still holding his jacket. “Settling in?”

“Working on it.”

His eyes move once around the room, brief and unreadable, then he holds out an envelope.

“For you.”

Inside is a printed schedule. A meeting with the family lawyer on Thursday. An etiquette dinner Friday evening. A date circled for photographs. The wedding itself, three weeks out, timed down to the hour.

“You plan everything,” I say.

“It's easier than the alternative.”

I look up at that. “What's the alternative?”

He doesn't answer right away. “Feeling my way through it.”

I turn the envelope over in my hands. “Is that what you did with your first marriage? Planned everything?”

Something flickers across his face, there and gone. “No,” he says. “That one I didn't plan at all.”

He doesn't say anything else about it. I leave the subject alone.

Neither of us says anything for a moment. The house is quiet enough that I can hear a clock somewhere down the hall.

“Do you ever wonder if this is a mistake?” I ask, before I can stop myself.

He doesn't answer right away. His hand goes to his cufflink, adjusting it though it doesn't need adjusting, and his eyes drift toward the window.

“Several times today.”

That isn't the answer I expect. I thought he'd say no, or nothing at all, the way he answers most things.

“That's not very reassuring.”

“I'm not in the business of reassurance, Ariella. I'm in the business of getting through things.”

“Is that supposed to help?”

“We're both allowed to be uncertain,” he says. “I'd trust either of us less if we weren't.”

It's the most human thing he's said to me since the sidewalk. It wasn't warmth. It was honesty, plain and uncomplicated, and somehow that surprised me more.

“What happens if it doesn't work?” I ask. “The marriage. The whole arrangement.”

“Then we handle that too, when it happens. Not before.”

“You really do plan everything except the important part.”

For the first time all night, something close to a smile crosses his face. “The important part rarely survives planning anyway.”

“That sounds like something you learned the hard way.”

“Most things worth knowing are.”

He doesn't elaborate. I let the question go this time. There will be time for the rest of it, or there won't, and either way tonight isn't the night to find out.

He leaves not long after that, the door clicking shut behind him.

I sit on the edge of the bed once he's gone and finally let my shoulders drop. The envelope sits open beside me, the schedule staring up like a countdown.

For a moment, just a moment, the house feels almost quiet enough to breathe in.

I change out of my travel clothes and into something softer, and I'm halfway through brushing out my hair when headlights sweep across the curtains, sliding slow across the far wall before cutting out.

A car door shuts somewhere below. Footsteps on gravel, unhurried, familiar in a way that makes my stomach tighten before I even understand why.

I set the brush down and listen.

Voices drift up from the entryway, too far away to make out words, just tone. One of them low and easy, like a man walking into a house he's walked into a thousand times before.

A voice drifts up through the hallway a moment later, one of the staff, low and matter-of-fact, like this happens every night.

“Mr. Xavier Rothwell is home.”

I don't move from the edge of the bed. I just sit there, listening to footsteps I used to know the sound of, somewhere on the other side of a very large house that now belongs to both of us in completely different ways.