THE DEVIL I LOVE

Chapter Eight — Lydia Sees

Lydia Sinclair was twenty years old and missed very little.

This was something people consistently underestimated about her — they saw the easy smile and the uncomplicated manner and assumed a corresponding simplicity of mind. Lydia found this useful and never corrected the impression. She simply watched and filed things away with the quiet efficiency of someone who had grown up in a house where information was currency.

She noticed the change in her sister on a Wednesday evening when they had dinner together at Aria's apartment.

It wasn't dramatic. It wasn't any single thing. It was the texture of Aria — looser somehow, more present, as though some constant low-level tension had eased slightly. She laughed more readily. She checked her phone twice during dinner with an expression Lydia had never seen on her sister's face before.

Lydia waited until dessert.

"Who is he?" she said.

Aria looked up. "What?"

"The person making you look like that." Lydia gestured vaguely at Aria's face. "Like you have a secret that's half terrifying and half wonderful."

Aria set down her spoon. "You're imagining things."

"I'm really not."

A pause. Aria picked her spoon back up, then set it down again. Lydia recognized the calculation happening behind her sister's careful expression — the weighing of disclosure against containment.

"You can't tell Dad," Aria said finally.

Lydia's eyebrows rose. "That bad?"

"It's not bad. It's just—" Aria stopped. Started again. "It's complicated."

"Complicated how?"

Aria looked at her for a long moment. Then: "His name is Damien Voss."

The name registered. Lydia was quiet for three full seconds, which for her was unusual.

"Voss," she repeated. "As in—"

"Yes."

"Aria."

"I know."

"Dad will—"

"I know, Lydia."

Lydia sat back in her chair and looked at her sister — really looked, the way she rarely needed to because Aria was usually so readable to her. What she saw was someone who was not confused about the situation. Someone who understood it entirely and was choosing anyway, with open eyes, which was somehow both more reassuring and more frightening than recklessness would have been.

"Is he good to you?" Lydia asked.

Aria considered the question with the seriousness it deserved. "Yes," she said. "He's honest. He actually listens." A pause. "He makes me feel like myself."

Lydia was quiet for a moment.

"Okay," she said.

"Okay?"

"I won't say anything." Lydia picked up her dessert spoon. "But Aria — be careful. Not because of Dad. Because you deserve something real, and I need to know that's what this actually is."

Aria looked at her sister across the small dinner table — this person she had spent a lifetime protecting and occasionally underestimating in return.

"I think it is," she said softly. "That's what frightens me."

Lydia nodded slowly. Outside the apartment window the city glittered in the dark, indifferent and enormous.

"Then be careful and be brave," Lydia said. "Both at the same time."