Somewhere Between Us

Chapter 9: Cracks in the Foundation

The bad day announced itself before Dylan even said a word. He came home well past nine, tie already loosened, jaw set in a way Zoey was starting to recognize as the specific tension of a board meeting that hadn't gone his way, and dropped onto the couch with none of his usual performance, none of the easy smirk he wore for company.

"Rough one?" she asked, setting aside the book she hadn't really been reading.

"The Whitfield deal's on shakier ground than anyone's admitting out loud. Feld's not wrong that people are watching how this plays out." He rubbed a hand over his face, and for a moment he looked younger than she'd ever seen him, some careful architecture sagging under its own weight. "Sorry. You don't need to hear about my day."

"I don't mind." She meant it, and something in her tone must have carried the sincerity, because he glanced at her with an expression that wasn't quite surprise but was adjacent to it, like he wasn't used to the offer being genuine.

"It's strange," he said, after a moment, "having someone in the apartment who asks that and actually waits for the answer."

"I'm a good waiter. Occupational hazard."

That got a small, real laugh out of him, and something in his shoulders eased. He reached for the bottle of wine she'd opened earlier, poured two glasses without asking, and settled deeper into the couch cushions like he'd decided, somewhere in the last thirty seconds, to stay a while.

"Can I ask you something?" she said, testing the ground carefully. "You don't have to answer."

"Ominous opener."

"Feld mentioned something at the gala. About you coming back after years away, taking over the company almost overnight." She kept her voice light, deliberately unhurried. "I wasn't trying to pry. It just stuck with me."

Dylan was quiet long enough that she thought he might deflect entirely, the way he usually did, circling the subject and steering them somewhere safer. Instead, he exhaled, slow, and looked at the wine in his glass rather than at her.

"My father sent my mother and me away when I was young and got married to a woman from a wealthy home," he said. "He abandoned us, I don't care what he told himself to make that easier to live with. That's just what it was."

"What do you mean?"

"He didn't disappear entirely, if that's what you're picturing. There were letters, sometimes. A visit here and there, mostly when I was small enough that the memories are mostly just impressions now, his coat, the sound of his car in the driveway, one time at a lake I couldn't tell you the name of if you paid me." Dylan turned the glass slowly, watching the wine catch the lamplight. "But it thinned out as I got older. Less frequent. Then almost nothing at all. I used to think, if he'd really wanted to be part of my life, letters and the occasional weekend weren't exactly proof of that."

"Do you remember anything he said? About why he was going?"

Something shifted in Dylan's face, old, worn territory, revisited too many times to still hurt cleanly. "Once. I must have been six, maybe seven. I asked him why he always had to leave again so soon, and he crouched down and told me it wasn't safe for me to be near him right now, and that I needed to trust him without asking why. Said it would make sense one day." He laughed, short and without humor. "I've spent over twenty years waiting for that day. Never came."

"That's a hard thing to carry."

"It's an easy thing to be angry about, which isn't quite the same." He glanced at her, something rawer than she'd seen from him before. "He died a few years ago. Left me the company, the properties, all of it, like the years of half-presence had never happened. I came back to deal with the estate, mostly out of obligation, and ended up staying because I was, apparently, good at running a company I'd never once been trained to run. Feld's not wrong that it looked sudden from the outside. It felt sudden from the inside too."

"Do you know why he sent you away in the first place?"

"No." The word came out flat, worn smooth from years of turning it over without ever finding an edge to grip. "I've had theories. None of them ever add up to anything I can prove. My mother never told me before she died, and I don't know if that's because she didn't know either, or because she was protecting me from something." He shook his head, like he was shaking off the weight of it. "I don't like not knowing things. It's probably why I run a company like I do, control what you can, since you clearly can't control everything."

Zoey said nothing for a moment, letting the silence hold the space he'd opened rather than rushing to fill it, the way she'd learned to do with her mother on the hard days. "That sounds lonely," she said finally.

"It was." He looked at her, surprised again by his own honesty, like the words had slipped out before he could catch them. "I don't usually talk about this."

"I noticed. You're very good at redirecting conversations away from anything real."

"Occupational hazard," he said, echoing her own words back at her, and for a moment something passed between them that felt entirely unlike performance, two people who'd each learned, independently, the exhausting art of managing what other people saw.

"Thank you," she said. "For telling me."

"Don't get used to it." But he said it gently, the deflection softened into something closer to affection than defense, and he reached over, briefly, to tuck a strand of hair behind her ear, an unthinking gesture, unrehearsed, gone almost as soon as it happened, though neither of them moved to erase the moment that followed it.

They sat like that for a while, the wine going warm in their glasses, the city humming faintly beyond the windows, until Dylan cleared his throat and sat up straighter, the wall sliding back into place with visible effort.

"Anyway," he said. "That's more than I've told anyone in years. I'd appreciate it staying between us."

"Of course."

"I mean it. Not Marguerite, not Julian, not anyone." Something tightened in his voice, brief but unmistakable. "It's not that I don't trust you. It's that some things aren't safe to say out loud in that family, even the true ones. Especially the true ones."

The comment landed oddly, sitting apart from the rest of the conversation like a stone dropped in still water, ripples spreading further than the words themselves seemed to warrant. Zoey filed it away, the same instinct that had catalogued the phone call in the car and Feld's careless gossip, though she said only, "I won't say anything."

"I know." He managed a small smile, the first real one since he'd walked through the door. "That's the strange part. I actually believe that."

They finished the wine in comfortable quiet after that, the conversation drifting to safer things, her mother's stubborn refusal to use the new recliner properly, his genuine and slightly absurd inability to load a dishwasher correctly, but underneath the ease, Zoey found herself turning the earlier moment over and over, the particular weight in his voice when he'd said especially the true ones, and wondered, not for the first time, how many more locked rooms existed inside the man she'd married for money and was beginning, despite every rule she'd set for herself, to actually want to know.