Never Mine

Part 3: A House That Wasn't Mine

The iron gates opened without a sound, like they'd been expecting us for longer than we'd been alive.

The mansion was worse up close — too many lights, too much symmetry, the kind of place designed by someone who had never once planned to actually live inside it. Manicured hedges lined the long drive like soldiers standing at attention. Decorative fountains glistened, trying too hard to look effortless. Even the grass looked expensive, cut straighter than anything that had ever existed in my life before tonight.

I didn't belong here. Not in that car. Not in that dress. And certainly not in the house waiting at the end of this too-perfect path, glowing like it had been lit specifically to make me feel small.

The driver pulled up at the base of the steps, and the car eased to a stop with the same eerie silence as everything else in this world. I reached for the handle, paused. Finn was already out, already moving toward the house without waiting to see if I followed. I followed anyway, slower, like my body hadn't fully agreed to the plan yet.

Another car pulled up behind us — the wedding car, ribbons still fluttering on its hood like it had crashed straight out of a craft store and into someone's fantasy.

My mother stepped out first, glowing like she'd just won something enormous. James followed, both of them looking like they'd stepped directly out of a magazine spread, filtered and lit from some angle that made real life look like a rough draft.

"Come on, Valerie," my mother said, looping her arm through mine before I had the chance to flinch away from it. "Let me show you your room. I had all your things brought up — you're going to love it. It's gorgeous. "

I didn't say anything. I let her pull me up the steps, pretending my legs weren't screaming at me to turn and run the other direction, back down the drive, back through the gates, back to anywhere that felt like it belonged to me.

The floors were marble, cold and echoing beneath our heels. Dozens of wall sconces flickered along the corridor like ghosts trying very hard to be helpful. Door after door after door, all of them closed, all of them identical, like the house itself couldn't decide which version of itself to show me.

"This way," she chirped, tugging me down the hall like a woman unveiling a magic trick she was certain would delight me.

When we reached the room, she opened the door the way you'd unveil a prize on a game show.

The ceiling soared. The windows stretched floor to nearly-ceiling. Everything gleamed, polished within an inch of its life. The bed could have slept four of me comfortably, with room left over.

It looked like a showroom. Not a bedroom. Definitely not mine, no matter how many of my things had been folded and placed inside it.

"This is... a lot," I said, because it was the only honest thing I could manage.

"It's everything you deserve," she replied, and something about the certainty in her voice made my skin prickle.

She followed me inside and shut the door behind her, and the click of the latch alone was enough to set off every alarm bell I had left in me.

"Your face was like a thundercloud all night. What is going on with you, Valerie?" she snapped, the warmth draining out of her voice in an instant. "Are you trying to ruin this?"

I crossed my arms, my only available armor. "Was I supposed to be happy?"

"Don't cause problems."

"I'm moving in with Dad," I said flatly, the decision solidifying into fact the moment it left my mouth. "Tomorrow."

Her eyes narrowed, the smile gone entirely now, stripped away to reveal whatever had been underneath it the whole time. "You can't," she said. "He can barely support himself, let alone you. And I can't explain that to James right now. You're staying."

"You didn't even ask me."

"You're part of this family now. That means new expectations, a new standard to live up to. Get used to it."

And with that, she turned on her heel and walked out, the door slamming shut behind her hard enough to rattle something in the wall.

I stood there for a long time afterward, not moving, barely breathing. The room didn't feel like mine. It felt like a dollhouse someone had built around a girl who didn't actually exist yet, furniture arranged for a life I hadn't agreed to live. The wardrobe cast a long, deep shadow across the far wall — like a second door, one that led somewhere darker than the rest of the house dared admit to.

I crossed the room and touched it. Cool, smooth wood beneath my palm. Solid. Still here, at least, even if nothing else in this room was.

I turned away and kicked over one of the suitcases by the door, unzipping it with more force than it deserved. At least she'd brought all my things. I'd half expected her to burn them and start fresh, the way she seemed to want to do with everything else about me.

My laptop sat inside, dead as usual, the battery long since given up. I changed into my softest pajamas, the ones that still smelled faintly like my old apartment, and tossed the black dress onto the nearest chair like it had personally offended me by existing.

Normally, when I felt this hollow, I wrote my way out of it — into other worlds, worlds that didn't ask so much of me, that let me be someone other than the girl caught between two families who'd never once asked what she wanted.

But tonight my mind stayed static, refusing to cooperate. Every time I tried to focus, it circled back to one thing.

Finn.

Specifically, the particular quiet he carried, like he'd trained himself out of ever needing anyone to fill a silence for him. The way his stillness felt less like calm and more like something held very carefully in place, the way you hold a door shut against wind.

I got up and crossed to the window. The room had its own balcony — French doors, barely latched. I slid one open and stepped out into air that was colder here, cleaner, carrying the smell of pine and turned earth instead of lemon polish and money.

To my left, the balcony curved around a corner, and from the other side of it, a glow.

Finn was leaning against his own railing, a cigarette lit, barely visible in the dark except for the curve of his profile and the tension sitting in his shoulders like something he hadn't set down all night.

He exhaled — slow and tired, the exhale of someone who'd been holding his breath longer than he meant to.

Then he turned and saw me. Our eyes met across the space between the balconies. His didn't change. Not even a flicker. But he stubbed the cigarette out against the wall without looking away from me, then turned and went back inside.

The sound of his door closing was louder than it needed to be, louder than the moment strictly required, and somehow that was the part that stayed with me.

Of course he hated me. And honestly, I couldn't say he was wrong to. I couldn't even say I cared enough to argue the point.

I was leaving soon anyway. That was the plan, the whole plan, the only plan I was allowing myself to hold onto.

I went back inside and opened my laptop, navigating to the folder where I kept my writing — unfinished poems, stories I'd never shown a single living soul, scraps of other lives that felt kinder than the one currently happening to me.

I opened a blank document, wanting badly to lose myself in someone else's world for even a few minutes.

But the page stayed white.

Nothing came. Only one image filled the space where words should have been —

Finn.

Not the version who'd sat across from me at dinner, cold and unreachable, but the one from the parking lot. The first version. The one who'd asked if I was okay like the answer actually mattered to him, like he hadn't yet decided what I was worth.

His eyes.

Not one color so much as an argument between colors, shifting depending on the light, on his mood, on whatever was moving behind them that he never let all the way to the surface. Calm. And underneath the calm, something you didn't notice was dangerous until you were already too far inside it to turn back.