She Rejected Him First

Chapter 3

Chapter 3

The study on the third floor of Kingston Manor was the one room in the house that nobody entered without permission.

It was not a rule that had ever been written down or formally stated. It was simply understood, the way many things in the Kingston household were understood, through proximity to Lucian and the gradual absorption of his preferences. The door was always slightly ajar when he was inside and wanted company, and pulled completely shut when he did not. The children had learned this distinction early, and they respected it with the particular seriousness of children who loved a parent they were also a little afraid of.

At a few minutes past three, the door was ajar.

Odette knocked anyway, because she had also learned that from him.

"Come in."

She pushed the door open and Prince slipped in behind her, still wearing the slightly rumpled clothes from their night out, having refused to change despite Hannah's suggestions. Lucian was at his desk, jacket off, sleeves rolled to the elbow, a stack of documents spread across the surface in front of him with the kind of organized chaos that only made sense to him. His reading glasses were on, which meant he had been at this for a while.

He looked up when they came in and pushed the glasses up onto his head.

"Finished arguing with Hannah?" he asked.

"We weren't arguing," Prince said. "We were negotiating."

"About whether you needed a bath."

"About the timing of the bath."

Lucian looked at him for a moment with an expression that was not quite amusement and not quite exasperation, the specific expression he reserved for his son. Then he leaned back in his chair and set down his pen.

"What do you want?"

Odette climbed into the chair on the left side of his desk, the one that had unofficially been hers since she was small enough that her feet didn't reach the floor when she sat in it. Prince leaned against the bookshelf with his arms folded, affecting a casualness that looked very much like something he had copied from his father without realizing it.

"It's Mum's birthday," Odette said.

Lucian's expression shifted, just slightly. "I know."

"Did you call her?"

"Not yet."

"It's already three," Prince said.

"I'm aware of what time it is." He reached for his phone, which was sitting face down on the corner of the desk, and turned it over. "Her program location runs twenty-four hours behind us. If today is the twenty-eighth here, it is still the twenty-seventh there, which means it is still her birthday for another few hours."

Odette considered this with the focused expression she got when she was processing information she found genuinely interesting. "So she's still in yesterday."

"In a manner of speaking."

"That's strange."

"Time zones often are."

Prince pushed off from the bookshelf. "We want to call her too. After you."

Lucian looked between them. Something moved across his face that he did not name, a small thing, quiet and internal. He had already arranged her gifts through the mail service the program used for external correspondence, a set of things he had selected himself over the course of several weeks, because Celeste had particular tastes and generic gestures tended to land flat with her. He knew this. He had learned it slowly, over five years of watching her, the way she noticed specific details and was moved by the evidence of attention rather than the size of a gesture. The children had also sent gifts, small things they had chosen themselves, Odette's wrapped in three layers of tissue paper and tied with a ribbon she had redone four times, Prince's in a box that he had decorated on the outside with a marker because he had decided the wrapping was "not enough on its own."

She would be receiving them around now, if the timing had worked out the way he had planned.

He picked up his phone and dialed.

It rang once. Twice. Three times. Four. He pulled the phone from his ear and looked at the screen, then dialed again.

This time it connected on the second ring.

"Hello?"

Her voice was there, present and clear, but something about the quality of it was different. Lucian could not have said immediately what it was. Not the line. Not distance. Something underneath.

"Happy birthday," he said.

A pause. Brief, almost imperceptible.

"Thank you," Celeste said.

He waited a beat, because normally this was the point where she would say something else. Pick up the thread of it and run with it, because Celeste talked, it was one of the things about her, she filled silences with an ease that he had spent years pretending not to appreciate. She would ask him how he was, ask about the children, ask something entirely unrelated that would turn into a conversation that lasted longer than either of them had planned.

She said nothing else.

"The gifts should be arriving today," he said. "The timing was designed to line up with the morning on your end."

"Yes," she said. "They arrived."

"Good."

Another pause.

"How is the program?" he asked.

"It's finished," she said. "I completed it."

"I know. I meant in retrospect." He was watching the window across the room, the afternoon light coming through it in long flat angles. "You worked hard for it."

"I did," she agreed, and her voice was not cold exactly, but it was contained. Measured in a way that Celeste's voice when she spoke to him was not usually measured.

He frowned, very slightly, to himself.

"Are you feeling well?"

"I'm fine."

"You don't sound like yourself."

A short silence. "I'm just tired. It was a long program."

From the doorway, where Odette had drifted to stand without him noticing, he caught his daughter's eye. She was watching him with her brows drawn together slightly, that expression she had picked up from him that looked strange and familiar on her smaller face. She had heard the exchange, or enough of it, and she had noticed what he had noticed.

Prince appeared at her shoulder a moment later, having also migrated toward the sound of their mother's voice with the unconscious pull of children and phones.

"The children want to speak with you," Lucian said.

"Put them on," Celeste said, and for the first time something shifted in her voice, the smallest opening.