The Tutor of Two Rivals

Chapter 4: Two Days of Silence

Two days had never felt so long.

Mira went through Friday and Saturday on autopilot, diner shifts blurring into homework blurring into a Saturday tutoring session with a ninth grader who couldn't focus on fractions any better than Mira could focus on anything that wasn't Julian's unfinished sentence sitting in her chest like a stone.

You're going to want to hear it when there's no one else around to hear it with you.

She turned it over so many times the words stopped meaning anything, the way any word does if you say it enough. She built theories and knocked them down just as fast. Maybe her mother had worked for the Voss family once, years ago, some forgotten housekeeping job that had left an impression. Maybe it was nothing at all, some strange power move designed to make her curious enough to keep showing up. Boys like that don't play by the same rules as everyone else, Priya had said, and Mira hated how much that warning kept surfacing at two in the morning when she couldn't sleep.

She didn't tell her mother any of it. Elena Delgado had enough weighing on her without Mira adding a mystery about a family she'd apparently never mentioned once in seventeen years.

By Sunday night, Mira had almost convinced herself Julian had been messing with her. A dramatic exit line, nothing behind it, the kind of thing rich boys said for effect because they'd never once had to live with the consequences of a sentence left hanging.

Almost.

She still walked to the bus stop Thursday with her stomach in knots.

The gate at Cole Manor swung open the same silent way it had the first time, and Mira found herself hesitating at the end of the driveway for exactly three seconds before she made herself keep walking. She'd made a decision in that study a week ago, and she wasn't about to let two boys' family drama shake her resolve now, not when the envelope needed every dollar this arrangement could give her.

The housekeeper let her in again, and this time led her not to the study but to a smaller room off the main hall, a library with a long table already set with two laptops, a stack of textbooks, and, notably, only one boy.

Julian looked up the second she walked in, and something in his posture eased, like he'd been holding his breath waiting for her to actually show.

"You're early," he said.

"You're alone."

"Ezra's running late. Some meeting with his father he couldn't get out of." Julian gestured to the chair across from him. "Which means we've got maybe ten minutes before he walks in. I told you I'd tell you before he got here. I meant it."

Mira sat, slowly, backpack still on one shoulder, every instinct in her telling her to brace for something. "So tell me."

Julian exhaled, and for the first time since she'd met him, he looked genuinely nervous, none of the easy charm anywhere in sight. "My dad didn't just hire a random tutor off some list, Mira. He asked around specifically for you. By name."

"It's not about your tutoring reputation." Julian's fingers tapped once against the table, a nervous habit she hadn't seen from him before. "My dad grew up here. Ashcombe, I mean, not the manor version, the actual town. Before Voss Media was anything. Before any of this." He gestured vaguely at the room, the house, the whole gleaming weight of it. "He and Adrian Cole grew up two streets over from each other. And there was a girl."

Something cold slid down Mira's spine, slow and certain, before he'd even said the next part.

"A girl they were both in love with," Julian said. "Best friends, both of them, and both of them in love with the same girl, and from what I've pieced together over the years, nobody ever actually talks about this directly, she didn't pick either of them. She picked someone else entirely, and it broke something between my dad and Adrian that never really healed. That's the real story. Not a business deal gone bad. A girl."

Mira's mouth had gone dry. "Why are you telling me this like it has anything to do with me."

Julian looked at her steadily, and there was something almost gentle in the way he said it, like he already knew this next part would land hard. "Because when my dad found out your last name was Delgado, he went very quiet for about a minute, and then he told his assistant, very specifically, that he wanted you and only you for this job. Not the top-rated tutor in the county. You."

The room tilted slightly, or maybe that was just Mira's own pulse pounding too loud in her ears.

"That's not possible," she said, but even as she said it, pieces were assembling themselves somewhere in the back of her mind, uninvited. Her mother's careful silence about her own teenage years in this town. The way Elena's face sometimes went distant and far away whenever certain names came up on the local news, business openings, charity galas, names Mira had never thought twice about because they belonged to a world she didn't live in.

"Delgado's not exactly a rare name," she said, weaker than she meant it to sound.

"No. But my dad didn't ask for you because it's a common name. He asked for you because he recognized it." Julian leaned forward slightly, voice dropping even though they were alone in the room. "I don't know for sure, Mira. I want to be clear about that. I'm not saying I have proof of anything. But I've been doing the math since the second I heard your name on that intake sheet, and I think there's a real chance the girl my dad and Adrian Cole both loved, the one whose choice broke their friendship apart before either of our companies existed, might have been your mother."

Mira sat very still, hands flat on the table like she needed something solid to keep from sliding entirely off the chair.

"That's insane," she said. "My mom's never even mentioned either of your families. Not once. Not a single time in seventeen years."

"Would she have a reason to, if she spent this long trying to bury it?"

Mira didn't have an answer for that, and the silence stretched long enough that she could hear her own heartbeat, could hear the low tick of a clock somewhere in the house counting down toward whatever came next.

"I could be wrong," Julian said again, quieter now. "I really could be. It's a theory built out of my dad going quiet and a name on a piece of paper. But I couldn't sit across from you tonight and not tell you, knowing what I know, letting you walk into all of this blind while both our dads maybe know exactly who you are and you don't have the first idea."

"Why would either of them hire the daughter of a woman who broke their friendship apart to tutor their sons," Mira said, voice rising despite herself. "That doesn't make sense. That's not kindness, that's some kind of, I don't know, punishment, or test, or"

"Or neither of them can quite let go of her," Julian said softly. "And you're the closest thing either of them has had to a piece of her in seventeen years."

The words landed like a physical weight in Mira's chest, and for a second she couldn't say anything at all, couldn't do anything except sit there with her pulse hammering and her whole understanding of the last week rearranging itself into something she didn't recognize.

That was the moment the library door swung open, and Ezra walked in, blazer still on, tie perfectly straight, every inch the boy who'd never once in his life had to run to be anywhere on time.

He took one look at the two of them, Julian leaning in close across the table, Mira pale and frozen with her hands pressed flat against the wood, and his expression shifted instantly into something sharp and suspicious.

"What did I just walk into," Ezra said.

Neither of them answered fast enough, and Mira watched something harden behind his eyes, some conclusion forming that had nothing to do with the truth and everything to do with the two of them sitting close together looking exactly like people who'd been caught keeping a secret.

"Nothing," Julian said, too quickly, straightening back into his chair with the practiced ease of someone who'd spent a lifetime smoothing over exactly this kind of moment. "Just talking physics."

Ezra's gaze flicked to Mira, waiting, like he was giving her one chance to contradict that and tell him the truth.

Mira opened her mouth, and closed it again, because she didn't actually know what the truth was yet, not really, not enough to say it out loud in front of either of them. All she had was a theory built out of silence and a name, and underneath it, a question she suddenly needed answered more than she'd needed anything in a very long time.

She needed to ask her mother who Adrian Cole and Marcus Voss really were to her.

And judging by the look on Ezra's face as he set his bag down across the table, arms crossed, waiting for an explanation neither of them was giving him, she was going to have to figure out how to survive the next two hours first.