His Sons Girl

What He Doesn’t Tell People

I ended up back at the Sterling penthouse two weeks later for a reason that had nothing to do with romance and everything to do with a broken water heater in my own apartment, Ethan insisting, over my objections, that I stay in the guest suite until the building’s maintenance sorted itself out.

“It’s one bedroom in an apartment with fourteen of them,” he said, already carrying my bag toward the elevator before I could argue further. “Dad won’t even notice you’re there. He’s barely home most nights anyway.”

Ethan turned out to be right about the second part and catastrophically wrong about the first.

I ran into Julian on my second night there, well past eleven, both of us apparently drawn to the penthouse kitchen by the same restless inability to sleep. He was standing at the counter in a t-shirt and sweatpants that made him look younger and considerably less armored than the tailored suits I’d only ever seen him in, a glass of scotch in one hand, staring out at the skyline like it owed him an explanation for something.

“Didn’t expect company,” he said, when he noticed me in the doorway, though something in his voice suggested he wasn’t entirely displeased by it.

“Sorry. I can go back upstairs.”

“Don’t.” He said it quickly, quietly, and gestured toward the second stool at the counter with something almost like vulnerability under the usual controlled precision. “Stay. If you want tea, the kettle’s in the cabinet behind you. I’d offer scotch, but I suspect Ethan would object to me corrupting his girlfriend’s sleep schedule.”

I made the tea, mostly for something to do with my hands, and settled onto the stool beside him with a careful foot of distance I was increasingly aware of maintaining on purpose.

“Can’t sleep?” I asked.

“Rarely can, this time of year.” He turned his glass slowly on the counter, not quite looking at me. “Divorce finalized six years ago this month. Some anniversaries you’d think would stop mattering eventually. This one hasn’t.”

“I’m sorry. I didn’t know.”

“Most people don’t. Ethan barely remembers it clearly — he was still in college, more focused on his own life than his parents’ unraveling one, which was frankly a relief at the time.” Something in his voice had gone quieter, more unguarded than I’d heard from him yet, in dinner or at the gala or anywhere else. “Marissa and I were wrong for each other for the better part of two decades before either of us admitted it out loud. I think I stayed longer than I should have because I was terrified of exactly this — being the reason my son’s family fell apart.”

“That’s not the same as being the reason it did.”

“Isn’t it?” He looked at me directly then, something raw in his expression that made my chest ache in a way I had no business feeling for my boyfriend’s father at eleven-thirty at night in an empty kitchen. “I built an empire, Harper. I know how to read a room, close a deal, win almost any negotiation I walk into. I could not, for the life of me, figure out how to be present enough for a marriage, or honest enough with myself about wanting more than the version of a life I’d built.”

“You’re being pretty honest right now.”

Something flickered across his face — surprise, maybe, or a kind of wry acknowledgment. “I don’t usually talk about this. Vivian gets the occasional unguarded moment. Ethan gets almost nothing, mostly to protect him from it.” He studied me for a long moment, and the intensity of his attention did the same dangerous thing it had done at dinner, at the gala, every single time he looked at me like I was the only interesting thing in the room. “I don’t entirely know why I’m telling you.”

“Maybe you needed to tell someone.”

“Maybe.” His voice had dropped low enough that I had to lean in slightly to hear it over the quiet hum of the kitchen appliances. “Or maybe it’s you specifically. I’ve been trying not to examine that possibility too closely.”

The air in that kitchen went very still. I understood, with a clarity that scared me, exactly what he was almost saying, and some reckless, unguarded part of me wanted, badly, to let the conversation go exactly where it was heading.

“Julian.” My voice came out unsteady. “I’m with Ethan.”

“I know.” He said it immediately, firmly, like a man reminding himself as much as me. “I am acutely, constantly aware of that fact, Harper, believe me. I have spent every single interaction we’ve had since that first dinner reminding myself of it, and it hasn’t made a single conversation with you feel any less like the first honest thing I’ve said to anyone in years.”

“You can’t say things like that to me.”

“I know that too.” He set the scotch down, untouched for the last several minutes, and rubbed a hand over his face, the gesture of a man exhausted by his own restraint. “I’m not going to act on this, Harper. I want you to understand that clearly. I would never do that to my son, whatever this is that keeps happening every time we’re in a room together. But I’m also not going to sit here and lie to you about what it is, because you deserve better than that, and frankly, so do I.”

I sat there in that quiet kitchen, tea going cold in my hands, caught between the sensible, urgent instinct to leave immediately and a much less sensible pull to stay exactly where I was, close enough to a man I had absolutely no right to want this badly.

“I should go back upstairs,” I said, finally, my voice barely above a whisper.

“You should,” he agreed, not moving, not breaking eye contact, making no effort at all to make the leaving easier for either of us.

I didn’t move for a long moment. Neither did he. And in the silence between us, thick with everything neither of us was willing to say out loud a second time, I understood that whatever careful, sensible boundary I’d been telling myself still existed between us had just quietly, irrevocably, stopped being true.