RUINED BY DESIGN

The room

The locked room

It was a Wednesday afternoon, grey sky outside, the sea was flat and colourless, and my mother was in town with a friend, Dorian was supposedly in his study, and me, I was cross-legged in the armchair with a book I hadn't been reading for the past forty minutes because I'd been listening to the house instead.

Listening for him, specifically, and I hated that I was listening for him.

Then the door opened and there he was, his jacket was off, and his shirt sleeves rolled to the elbow, and he looked at me the way he always looked at me with that steady, unhurried assessment that never quite became anything I could name, and I felt my stomach turned.

"You're supposed to be working," I said.

"I finished." He moved to the shelves. "Don't let me interrupt."

"You already interrupted."

"Then I may as well stay."

He didn't wait for a yes or no, he just pulled out a chair and sat in the chaaair opposite mine, close enough that when he crossed one leg over, the other his knee was a foot from mine, close enough that I could smell him. He smelled of cedar and cigar. I couldn't concentrate, I looked back at my book and read the same line four times.

I was acutely and embarrassingly aware of every small movement he made, from the turn of a page to the slight shift of his weight, and the moment he reached up and pushed a hand through his hair with the absentminded ease of someone completely comfortable in their own body.

I looked up without meaning to and he was already looking at me. He had possibly been looking at me for a while.

"What," I said.

"Nothing." He looked back down.

"You were staring."

"I was looking." A pause, the faintest suggestion of something at the corner of his mouth. "There's a difference."

I felt heat move up my neck and hated myself completely for it, "there really isn't," I said.

"One is rude," he said, still reading, "the other is simply paying attention."

"And which were you doing."

He looked up again, those grey-green eyes direct and unhurried, "paying attention," he said, "I always pay attention to you."

The words landed somewhere they had no business landing. I looked back at my book. My heart was doing something unreasonable, and the room felt smaller than it had ten minutes ago. He was just sitting there reading like he hadn't said anything, like he hadn't just placed those words in the room and left them there to do whatever they wanted.

"That's an odd thing to say to your fiancée's daughter," I said.

"Perhaps."

"It should bother you more than it does."

He turned a page, "should it," he said, not as a question.

I put my book down, "yes," I said, "it should."

He closed his book then, slowly, looked at me fully, and I made the mistake of holding his gaze because I refused to be the one who looked away first, and for a long moment neither of us moved, the fire of useless desires between us, the distance between our chairs approximately one bad decision's worth of space.

"Sera," he said, quietly, like a word he was used to saying.

"Don't," I said.

"I haven't done anything."

"Don't," I said again.

He looked at me for one more moment, in a steady and patient manner, then he opened his book and went back to reading, and I sat there with my pulse in my throat, my hands flat on my thighs and the specific fury of a person who has just lost an exchange they didn't agree to have.

I left ten minutes later, thankfully, he didn't try to stop me, he didn't need to.

***

I found a key that same evening, it was not hidden, that was the thing that stopped me cold, it wasn't hidden at all, it was sitting on the windowsill outside my bedroom door, small, brass and old, placed there deliberately, placed there for me, without a note, and without explanation, just the key sitting in the last of the evening light like an instruction.

I picked it up and turned it over in my fingers, and my thought fell back to the photograph from Edinburgh. The roses with no note and the gates that opened before we arrived.came to my mind, but I quickly brushed them aside.

I took a few clues from the key and found out that the room was on the fourth floor. I quickly found three doors, and since I didn't know which, I tried the key in all three with my heart climbing my throat, the first two nothing, the third one giving a heavy deliberate click that echoed in the silence, and I pushed it open and swept my phone's torch across the room.

In the room were shelves, hard drives and folders. An organised, methodical record room, nothing alarming, and then my hand found the switch and the light hit the wall directly opposite and I stopped breathing.

There were photographs from floor to ceiling pinned in rows with the precision of someone who never second-guessed a single decision, and below each cluster a date in black ink, small and exact in his handwriting.

Me on a university campus, me in a Lisbon café, me on the coast path outside this town in a jacket I threw away two years ago, me in cities I thought I'd moved through freely, in moments I thought were only mine.

My phone torch shook and I heard his footsteps hit the stairs.

He didn't seem in a hurry, it was that same measured unhurried climb, one floor, two floors, and I spun around and the light swung across all those years of me and I thought move, run, go and I didn't move.

He stepped into the room, looked at me, looked at the wall and looked back at me. There was not a single thing in his face that showed surprise or remorse or the fear of being caught.