Chapter Two: A Stranger Who Already Knows
1314 Words
He introduced himself in the foyer like a man who had rehearsed it a hundred times and still made it sound effortless.
"Alexander Lee." He shook Richard Blackstone's hand first, because of course he did, protocol before curiosity, and Wendy watched from the hallway with a stack of coats she suddenly had no memory of being asked to carry. "Thank you for having me on short notice."
"Anything for the Lee family." Richard's smile was the kind that took up a room and left nothing for anyone else. "Your father speaks very highly of you."
"He speaks very highly of very few people. I try not to disappoint him."
Sofia, pressed against Wendy's side in the shadow of the doorway, made a small strangled sound. "He's funny too. That should be illegal. Handsome men aren't supposed to also have jokes, it's a violation of natural balance."
"Go be normal somewhere else," Wendy muttered.
"I am being normal. I'm normally obsessed with beautiful men, this is very on brand for me."
Alexander's gaze slid sideways, toward the hallway, toward the two of them not hiding nearly as well as they thought they were. Wendy straightened before she could stop herself, chin up, coats forgotten halfway down her arm.
He didn't smile at her. That was the strange part. Other men who looked at her that long usually smiled, usually let their eyes do something obvious and easy to dismiss. Alexander just looked, steady and unreadable, like he was checking something against a memory of his own.
"You must be Wendy," he said.
The hallway went very quiet.
"I must be," she said carefully, "though I don't recall giving you my name."
"You didn't." A faint curve touched his mouth, gone again almost before it arrived. "Your employer mentioned the household staff on the drive over. I have a good memory for names."
It was a smooth answer. Too smooth. Wendy had spent five years learning to hear the difference between a truth and a very well-dressed lie, and this one wore a very nice suit.
"Well," she said, "welcome to the house, Mr. Lee. Try not to need anything from me directly. I bite."
Sofia choked on air.
Something flickered behind Alexander's eyes, amusement or surprise or possibly both, and for a second, just a second, he looked almost caught off guard, a man who did not get caught off guard often.
"I'll keep that in mind," he said, and let Richard steer him toward the study, toward numbers, toward whatever business had actually brought a Lee to a Blackstone's door on a Tuesday evening.
The moment they were gone, Sofia grabbed Wendy's arm with both hands. "You bite. You told a man you bite. Within thirty seconds of meeting him."
"It's true."
"It's insane, is what it is. Do you know who the Lees are? Real estate, shipping, half the port contracts on the east coast. That man could buy this house and use it as a garden shed and you told him you bite."
"If he wanted a garden shed he'd have better taste in gardens."
Sofia stared at her. "I don't know whether to be proud of you or start planning your funeral."
"Do both. Efficient use of your afternoon."
But even as she said it, lightly, easily, the old practiced ease that kept this house from swallowing her whole, Wendy's pulse hadn't quite settled. He'd known her name before anyone said it in front of him properly. He'd looked at her the way you look at a door you already know the other side of.
She didn't like that. She didn't like it at all, and she liked even less that some small traitorous part of her wanted to know why.
Later, carrying tea toward the study on Patricia's orders, she paused outside the door when she heard her own name again, quieter this time, meant for no one's ears but Richard's.
"...the nanny's daughter. Wendy." Richard's voice, low, almost thoughtful. "She's gotten bold lately. Comes and goes at odd hours. I don't like it."
"Bold how?" Alexander's voice, careful and even.
"My wife thinks it's nothing. I think a girl who grew up in this house watching her mother scrub my floors might have opinions about that arrangement. Opinions have a way of becoming problems."
Wendy's hand tightened around the tea tray hard enough that the porcelain rattled.
"You think she remembers something," Alexander said. Not a question. A test.
"I think memory is a dangerous thing to leave unattended." A pause, and something in Richard's tone shifted, turned colder, more familiar, the version of him that came out only behind closed doors. "Keep an eye on her for me while you're here, would you. Discreetly. You have a talent for discretion, I hear."
Wendy did not wait to hear the answer. She pushed through the door before her hands could shake enough to give her away, tea tray balanced, spine straight, the picture of a girl who hadn't heard a single word.
"Your tea," she said, setting it down with more care than the moment deserved.
Richard didn't so much as glance at her. Alexander did. Just once, just briefly, and there was something in it now that hadn't been there in the foyer, something almost like an apology, which made no sense at all, because he hadn't done anything to her yet.
Yet.
She left before either man could say another word, and outside the study door, once she was sure the hallway was empty, she finally let her hands shake the way they'd wanted to since she heard her own name in Richard Blackstone's mouth.
Keep an eye on her. Discreetly.
She'd known, in the vague animal way you know a storm is coming before the sky changes color, that something about this house had never quite been what it pretended to be. Now she had a sentence to hang it on. A man watching her on Richard's orders. A reason.
She found Sofia in the kitchen an hour later, peeling potatoes with the enthusiasm of someone who resented every single one of them personally.
"You look like you've seen a ghost," Sofia said.
"Worse. I think I've seen a plan."
"Whose plan?"
"Richard's. About me." Wendy dropped into the chair across from her, voice low even though the kitchen was empty. "He asked Alexander Lee to watch me. Discreetly, he said, like that word makes it less insane."
Sofia's peeler stopped. "Watch you why?"
"He thinks I might remember something. Something about my mother, maybe, or before her, I don't know. He didn't say what. Just that opinions become problems." Wendy stared at the scarred wood of the table, at nothing, at the shape of a fear she didn't have words for yet. "Sofia. What if there's something to remember?"
Sofia set the potato down very carefully, the joke finally, mercifully, gone from her face. "Wendy. What do you actually know about before? Before your mama got sick. Before all this."
"Nothing." The word came out rougher than she meant it to. "That's the problem. I don't remember a single day of my life before I was sixteen years old, and nobody in this house has ever once offered to fill in the blanks."
The kitchen door creaked.
Both of them turned. Alexander stood in the frame, one hand still on the handle, and whatever he'd come to say died somewhere behind his teeth the moment he saw Wendy's face.
"I'm sorry," he said slowly. "I didn't mean to interrupt."
"How much did you hear?" Wendy asked.
He didn't answer right away. And in the silence before he did, in the careful, deliberate way he was choosing his next words, Wendy understood with sudden, ice-cold clarity that he had heard enough. More than enough.
That he knew something about her before that she didn't know herself.
- Writer
