Falling For The Politician's Son

The Landlord

CAITLYN

I made the soup twice.

The first batch I poured down the drain because something about the seasoning felt slightly off, and I stood over the pot with the ladle in my hand and thought about what he had said. It tastes like something my mother used to make. I did not know why that sentence had stayed with me through the night and followed me into the kitchen this morning, but it had, and I was not willing to hand him a bowl that was anything less than exactly right.

The second batch was better. I could tell by the smell of it.

I carried it upstairs on a tray, knocked twice, and waited.

"Come in."

He was sitting up in bed this time, which was already an improvement from last night. The cold towels I had left on his forehead were folded neatly on the nightstand, and the dim, feverish look that had frightened me the evening before had softened slightly, though he was still pale and his voice still had that rough, scraped quality that sickness leaves behind. He watched me cross the room without saying anything, his gray eyes tracking my movement the way they always did, like he was cataloguing information he might need later.

I set the tray on the nightstand and stepped back.

He looked at the bowl. Then at me.

"I made it the same way," I said, before he could ask.

He picked up the spoon himself this time, which told me he was feeling better, and I was glad for that because kneeling on his bedroom floor two nights in a row would have done my knees no favours. He was quiet while he ate, and I stood at a respectful distance with my hands clasped in front of me and looked at the window and tried not to feel like I was intruding on something private.

When the bowl was nearly empty he said, without looking up, "What is your name?"

I blinked. After everything, after two days of sir and maid and the cold precision with which he had spoken to me since the moment he caught me in his study, he was asking my name.

"Caitlyn," I said. "Caitlyn Clark, sir."

He didn't respond. Didn't repeat it. Just set the spoon down in the empty bowl and leaned back against the headboard and closed his eyes, and I took that as my cue to collect the tray and leave.

"Good night, Mr. Morningstar," I said at the door.

He said nothing.

I went to my room, changed into my sleep clothes, and lay in the dark staring at the ceiling.

I told myself I was fine. I told myself to sleep. I told myself that he was a grown man who had presumably managed his own health for twenty-five years without any help from me and that my job was to keep the house clean and stay out of his way, not to lie awake listening for sounds through a closed door like some kind of anxious parent.

I lasted forty minutes.

I could not explain it, the worry. It did not make logical sense. I had known this man for less than forty-eight hours and the majority of that time he had been either cold, dismissive, or actively trying to get rid of me. But there was something about finding him on that bathroom floor last night, the way he had looked sitting there with his back against the wall, too proud to call for help and too sick to get up on his own, that had settled somewhere in my chest and refused to move.

I slid out of bed.

I was not going in. I was just going to listen at the door, just for a moment, just long enough to satisfy myself that nothing was wrong, and then I was going to go back to my room and sleep like a sensible person.

I sat on the floor of the hallway outside his door with my back against the wall and my knees pulled to my chest and I listened to the quiet of the house and told myself I would only stay for a few minutes.

I fell asleep there.

"Caitlyn."

My name pulled me up from sleep like a hand reaching into water.

My head snapped up. My neck ached. The hallway was full of morning light and Grant Morningstar was standing in his doorway looking down at me with an expression I could not immediately classify, somewhere between baffled and something else I did not have a word for yet.

He was shirtless.

I stood up so fast I nearly lost my balance, pressing the back of my hand against my mouth to cover the embarrassing sound I made, and then I smoothed my clothes down and tried to arrange my face into something that looked intentional rather than caught.

"Sir," I managed. "Good morning."

He looked at me for a long moment. His colour was back. The fever flush was gone, replaced by the sharp, clear complexion he'd had the first night in the study, and his eyes had their edge again, that particular gray alertness that made you feel like every word you said was being carefully weighed.

I stepped toward him and reached up to press my hand to his forehead before my manners could catch up with my instincts.

He went very still at the contact but he did not pull away.

Normal. Completely normal. The fever had broken overnight.

"You're better," I said, and I could not keep the relief out of my voice entirely.

"You're loud," he said.

I dropped my hand and stepped back. "Sorry."

He looked at the wall beside my head for a moment, then back at me. "Did you sleep out here?"

"I was worried," I said. "I wanted to check on you but I didn't want to come in without permission and make things worse, so I just—" I gestured vaguely at the floor. "I sat down for a minute."

Something shifted in his expression. "You sat on the floor of the hallway all night."

"I fell asleep," I clarified, as though that made it more reasonable. "I didn't plan to."

He studied me in that unsettling way he had, like he was trying to determine whether I was telling the whole truth or just the presentable version of it. Then he rubbed his eyes with the heel of his hand and turned back toward the room.

"What is there for breakfast?" he asked, like the previous conversation had simply concluded itself.

"The cook doesn't officially start for another day," I said. "But I can make something."

He picked his shirt up from the bed and smelled it, decided against it, and held it out behind him without turning around.

I stared at the shirt hanging in the air between us.

He glanced back. "I need a different one."

I crossed into his bedroom and took the shirt from his hand and went to the wardrobe, running my fingers along the hangers until I found a clean white one that looked like the same size. When I turned back he was sitting on the edge of the bed scrolling through his phone, and I held the shirt out and he took it and pulled it over his head without ceremony.

"Pancakes," he said to his phone screen. "Can you make them?"

"Yes, sir."

He looked up at me and something behind his eyes went briefly thoughtful, and then he said, in a tone that was almost but not quite casual, "What happened to your mother's shop."

It was not a question. It was the kind of statement that opens a door and waits to see if you will walk through it.

I looked at my hands. "We lost the bigger part of the store a while back. Couldn't keep up with the rent. The section that sold breakfast in the mornings had to close." I paused. "The coffee shop is still open but we are six months behind. The landlord has been—" I stopped. Pressed my lips together. "He has been coming around."

He said nothing. But he had put his phone down.

"Last time he came he broke some of the furniture." My voice was steady. I had told this story in my head enough times that I could tell it now without it showing on my face too much. "And he hit my mother."

The room was very quiet.

"She just—" I stopped again. There was the back of my throat doing the thing it did whenever I thought about that afternoon, that particular tightening that meant tears were negotiating for an exit. I was not going to cry in his bedroom. Not after everything else. "We are managing," I said, and turned for the door. "I will start on the pancakes."

He did not call me back.

I made the pancakes and left them on the table with a glass of orange juice and went to wash up the kitchen while he ate, keeping my back to the room and my hands busy and my mind carefully focused on the sound of running water.

I heard his chair push back when he was done.

I heard him walk to the door.

And then I heard him come back, and something was set on the table behind me with a quiet, solid sound.

I turned around.

Three gold watches sat on the kitchen table. They caught the morning light in a way that made them look almost unreasonably out of place next to the butter dish and the empty plate.

"Pawn them," he said simply. "Pay your rent."

I stared at them. "Sir—"

"They are yours."

I picked one up with both hands like it might shatter. It was heavy in a way that real things are, substantial and certain, warm from being in his coat. "Are these actually gold?"

"Do I look like I wear imitations?"

I looked up at him. His expression was flat and unapologetic, but underneath the flatness something had shifted, something almost imperceptible, and when our eyes met he looked away first.

"I'm sorry," he said, quieter. "Yes. They are real."

He moved toward the door, sliding his jacket on, raking one hand through his hair. "I have somewhere to be. Don't linger."

The door closed behind him.

I stood in the kitchen holding a twenty-five thousand dollar watch with dish soap still on my fingers and tried to remember how to breathe.

He had not returned by six o'clock that evening.

I told myself I would wait until morning to show my mother. I told myself that multiple times with decreasing conviction before I put the watches carefully into my bag, pulled on my coat, and headed out into the early evening before I could talk myself out of it.

The walk to Aldridge Street took fifteen minutes. I spent most of it running through what I would say, how I would explain the watches without making the whole thing sound insane, how I would look at my mother's face when she understood what they meant for the rent and the shop and all the months of quiet, grinding worry that neither of us had known how to put down.

I was still working through it when I looked through the window of the coffee shop and stopped walking.

My mother was on her knees.

Sherman stood over her, broad-shouldered and loud, his face red with the particular rage of a man who believed that volume was the same thing as authority. Glasses were already broken on the floor around her, and as I watched he reached back and swept another one off the counter with his forearm and it exploded against the tiles and my mother flinched and pressed both hands to her ears.

I was through the door before I had decided to move.

"Mom." I crossed the room and reached for her arm. "Mom, get up. I have money, I can pay him, get up."

"Caitlyn." Her voice was barely there. She had been crying for a while. Her eyes were swollen and her hands were shaking and she looked at me the way she always looked at me when things had gone past the point she knew how to manage, like I was the last solid thing in the room.

"You and your mother are out of here tonight." Sherman's voice filled the whole shop. "Both of you. Tonight."

"I have the money." I stood up and reached into my bag. "I can pay what we owe, every cent, just give me a second—"

He moved before I saw it coming. One hard shove with both hands, open-palmed against my shoulders, and I went backward into the broken glass on the floor and hit it hard on my hands and the side of my leg and the pain was immediate and sharp and specific in the way that glass is, not dull but precise, a dozen small points of it.

I sucked in a breath.

I stood up.

My palms were bleeding but I stood up because there was nothing else to do, and I looked at him and said, loudly and clearly, "Stop. I will pay you every cent. Stop breaking things."

He looked at me with something ugly in his eyes and raised his hand.

"If that hand moves another inch," said a voice from the doorway, low and absolutely certain, the kind of voice that had never once in its life needed to be raised to be heard, "you will regret it for the rest of your life."

Everything in the room stopped.

I turned.

Grant Morningstar stood in the doorway of my mother's coffee shop in his black coat, his gray eyes fixed on Sherman with an expression that was not anger exactly but something colder and more deliberate than anger, the kind of expression that comes from a person who has already decided how this ends and is simply waiting for everyone else to catch up.

Sherman's hand dropped.

The room was completely silent except for the sound of my mother's quiet, unsteady breathing behind me.

Grant stepped inside.

My heart was doing something loud and disorganized in my chest, partly from the fall, partly from the pain in my hands, and partly from something I was not ready to name yet, something that had started in a dark hallway two nights ago and had been quietly growing ever since.

He was looking at Sherman with the complete, unhurried focus of a man who had never once in his life been the most powerless person in the room.

And Sherman, for the first time since I had known him, looked uncertain.

"Who are you?" Sherman said, but the bluster had gone out of his voice.

Grant did not answer immediately. He looked around the shop slowly, taking in the broken glass, my mother on the floor, the blood on my hands, with the calm and methodical attention of someone building a complete picture before they speak.

Then he looked back at Sherman.

"I'm the person who is about to make you a very straightforward offer," he said quietly. "And I strongly suggest you listen carefully, because I will only say it once."