Loving the Enemy's Son

Chapter Three: Too Close

The gallery opening Sophia mentioned turned out to be smaller than Ethan expected—a private preview, invitation-only, the kind of event where everyone in the room could recite everyone else's net worth without trying. He hadn't planned on attending. Technically, he hadn't been invited, but his father's assistant had a standing policy of RSVPing Ethan to anything that might contain a "useful contact," and by the time Ethan noticed the calendar invite, it was easier to show up than to explain his way out of it.

He almost didn't go in. He stood on the sidewalk outside the gallery for a full minute, coat collar turned up against a wind that smelled like rain, some instinct telling him to turn around and go home. He didn't understand the instinct; he went in anyway.

The room was all white walls and expensive lighting, sculpture pedestals, and quiet clusters of people murmuring about brushstrokes they didn't care about. Ethan took a glass of wine he didn't want and found a corner to disappear into, which was where he was standing when he heard her laugh.

He knew that laugh. He had spent three Tuesdays learning the exact sound of it—surprised out of her, a little too loud for polite company, the kind of laugh that didn't know how to be careful. His whole body turned toward it before his mind caught up.

Sophia stood near the center of the room in a green dress, her hair pinned up in a way that made her look older, more polished, and more like the kind of woman who belonged at events like this—and less, for one disorienting second, like the girl who curled up on a bookstore window seat with her knees tucked under her and rain still drying in her hair. A tall woman stood beside her, composed and sharp-eyed, one hand resting possessively on Sophia's shoulder while she spoke to a cluster of investors.

Ethan didn't need an introduction to know that was her mother. Something about the woman's posture—the absolute certainty of someone accustomed to being obeyed—made his stomach tighten in a way he didn't want to examine.

He should have left. He knew that even as his feet carried him closer instead.

Sophia saw him before he reached her. Her eyes widened—not with the delight he had hoped for, but with something closer to panic, quick and sharp and gone in an instant, replaced by a careful blankness he had never seen on her before. It was the first time he had watched her put on a mask, and it unsettled him more than he expected.

"Ethan," she said too evenly when he reached her. "I didn't know you were here."

"Neither did I, technically." He tried for lightness. "Small city."

Her mother's gaze had already found him, assessing, cataloging—the particular attention of someone filing away a name to look up later. "And you are?"

Sophia's hand found his sleeve, light and quick—a warning disguised as a touch. "A friend from the bookstore club I mentioned," she said smoothly before he could answer. "Ethan, this is my mother, Elena Reyes."

Reyes.

The word landed in Ethan's chest like a stone dropped into still water, rings spreading out slow and cold. He heard his father's voice from the night before — "There's a Reyes girl seen around the city" — and felt every piece of the last three weeks rearrange itself into a shape he didn't want to look at directly.

He must have hesitated too long because Elena's eyes sharpened further. "You look familiar," she said, in the tone of someone who never spoke idly. "Wade, isn't it? Richard Wade's boy?"

The room didn't go silent — the party continued exactly as it had, oblivious — but for Ethan, every other sound simply stopped mattering. He watched Sophia's face carefully now, observing the moment the name landed for her too, witnessing her expression flicker through confusion, recognition, and something that looked disturbingly like betrayal, all in the space of half a second before the mask slid back into place.

"Yes," Ethan said because there was nothing else to say. "Ethan Wade."

Elena's smile didn't change, but something behind her eyes turned winter cold. "How interesting," she said, "that my daughter's little book club includes Wade." She pronounced the name as some people might say a diagnosis. "Sophia, darling, come—the Kensingtons are asking for you."

Sophia let herself be steered away without a backward glance, her spine straight, her chin level, every inch the daughter her mother had raised her to be. It was only as she was almost out of earshot that Ethan saw her throw one look back at him—quick, unreadable, gone before he could interpret it—and he didn't know if it was an apology or an accusation.

He left without finishing his wine.

He didn't sleep that night. He lay in the dark, turning over three weeks of Tuesdays, replaying every conversation for a clue he should have caught—the careful way she had deflected questions about her family, the flash of something guarded whenever he asked about her mother's work, the instinctive silence they had both maintained without ever discussing it. It hadn't been a coincidence. Some part of both of them had already known or feared exactly what they were building toward.

Reyes. The name his father spat like a curse at least twice a week. The name behind every story Ethan had grown up hearing about betrayal, about ruin, about a decade-old wound that had never been allowed to close. And he had fallen for her anyway. He was falling for her still, even now, with her name sitting in his chest like a wound of its own.

Across the city, in a bedroom three times the size of the one she had grown up dreaming smaller dreams in, Sophia sat by her window with her knees pulled to her chest, staring out at a sky that had finally, after weeks of storms, gone clear and starless and calm. Wade. The name her mother said with the particular venom reserved for the architect of every hardship their family had ever survived. The name is attached to every story about her father's decline, though no one had ever told her the details—only that the Wades were the reason, that the Wades could never be trusted, that the Wades had taken something from them that could never be given back.

And she had let one of them hold her hand under a bookstore awning while it rained. She didn't cry. Instead, she sat very still, feeling something in her chest that was too large and too complicated to have a single name—grief and fear; and underneath both of those, stubborn, quiet, and refusing to be reasoned away, something that still felt exactly like hope. Tomorrow, she knew, everything would be different. Tonight, she allowed herself to remember one more time what it had felt like before she knew his name would cost her everything.