Somewhere Between Us

Chapter 11: Too Close to Comfort

The call came at 8:47 in the morning, and Zoey would remember the exact time for a long while afterward, the number burned into her the way important, terrible numbers tend to be.

"Ms. Sterling?" The driver's voice was too fast, too tight. " There has been an incident. on the way to the office.You need to come."

She was already moving before he finished the sentence, coat half-on, keys forgotten twice before she remembered to grab them, the drive across town a blur of red lights she didn't fully stop for and a fear so total it left no room for anything else, not grief, not confusion, just a single, narrow channel of get there.

By the time she arrived, the car was already being loaded onto a flatbed, the front end crumpled against what had clearly, recently, been a guardrail, and Dylan was standing on the sidewalk in a torn suit jacket, a shallow cut above his eyebrow, looking remarkably, infuriatingly composed for a man who had nearly died an hour ago.

"You're supposed to be at home," he said, when he saw her running toward him. "This is embarrassing. I don't need a rescue."

"Shut up." She grabbed his face in both hands, checking the cut, checking his eyes, checking for anything wrong that the paramedics standing three feet away might have missed. "What happened?"

"Brakes went out on the hill by the overpass. Nothing I could do but steer into the guardrail instead of the intersection." He said it lightly, like he was describing a mildly inconvenient traffic delay, and something about the ease of it made her want to shake him. "I'm fine. Bruised, not broken. The car took the worst of it."

"You could have died."

"I didn't."

"That's not the same thing as being fine." Her voice cracked, unexpectedly, and she hated how much it revealed, standing there on a sidewalk with her hands still on his face like she could hold him together through sheer force of will. "You don't get to make jokes right now."

Something shifted in Dylan's expression, the easy deflection faltering, just slightly, replaced by something more startled, more real. "Hey." His hand came up to cover hers, warm despite the morning chill. "I mean it. I'm okay. You don't have to look like that."

"I'll look however I want. I just watched them load your car onto a truck like a piece of scrap metal."

"Fair," he said, quieter now, and for a moment neither of them moved, the paramedics and the flatbed and the small gathering crowd all fading into something distant and unimportant, the whole world narrowed down to the two of them standing too close on a sidewalk that smelled like burnt rubber and adrenaline.

He let her drive him home, which she understood, without being told, was its own small concession, Dylan Sterling did not, as a rule, let other people take the wheel of anything. He was quiet for most of the ride, staring out the window with an expression she was learning to recognize as him working through something privately before deciding whether to share it.

"The mechanic called," he said finally, once they were home, once she'd made him sit on the couch with an ice pack he kept trying to put down. "Preliminary look at the brake line. Said the wear pattern's unusual for a car that age. Not conclusive yet. Could be a manufacturing defect. Could be normal deterioration nobody caught in time."

"Could be," Zoey repeated, and heard, in her own voice, the same careful non-committal tone she'd used about the fire report, about the phone call in the car, about the trust clause she still hadn't mentioned. "Or it could be something else."

Dylan didn't answer right away. He turned the ice pack over in his hands, jaw working, and when he finally spoke, his voice had lost all its earlier lightness. "I don't want to think that. I really don't. But I'd be an i***t not to consider it, given everything."

"Given what, exactly?"

He hesitated, and she watched him decide, visibly, how much to say. "There's a standard succession clause in the trust. If I died without an heir of my own before the estate's fully settled, a chunk of it passes to Julian. My father knew about it, reviewed it, kept it, because you need some fallback for a trust this size, and it's not like he was wrong to leave it in. It's not sinister on its own. It's just paperwork." He exhaled. "But paperwork doesn't feel abstract anymore, not after this morning."

"I already knew," Zoey admitted, quiet. "I overheard Halloway at the dinner. I didn't tell you because I didn't know what to do with it."

Something flickered across Dylan's face, not anger, exactly, more like a tired recognition, the specific weariness of two people independently carrying the same uneasy secret. "You should have told me."

"I know. I'm sorry." She sat beside him, careful of the bruise blooming along his ribs, close enough that their shoulders touched. "I didn't want to be the reason you started suspecting your own brother over something that might mean nothing."

"I've been suspecting him privately for longer than you'd think," Dylan admitted, low, like the words cost him something to say out loud. "I hate that I do. I keep telling myself it's just money trouble, just resentment, just Julian being Julian. But he had access to that car. He knew my schedule. And now there's a real, standing reason on paper for wanting me gone, one that's been sitting there the entire time, and I can't make myself un-know that, no matter how much I'd like to."

"You don't have to decide anything right now."

"No," he agreed, "but I also can't pretend I don't see it." He set the ice pack down, finally, and turned to look at her properly, something raw and unguarded in his face that had nothing to do with the accident and everything to do with the particular loneliness of being suspicious of the people who were supposed to love you. "I'm glad you were there this morning. On the sidewalk. I know it's not in the contract."

"Nothing about today was in the contract."

"No," he said, softer now, "it wasn't." His hand found hers again, slower this time, more deliberate, and the space between them narrowed the way it had on the terrace weeks ago, the same charged, unfinished quiet settling over the room. She was aware of his pulse under her fingers, steady, alive, of how close his mouth was to hers, of the particular fear that morning that had stripped away every careful boundary she'd built since the wedding.

"Dylan," she started, not entirely sure what she meant to say next.

His phone rang, loud and sudden in the quiet apartment, and they both startled back half an inch, the moment scattering like something too fragile to survive interruption. He glanced at the screen, exhaled, and answered it with visible reluctance.

"Halloway. Yeah. No, I'm fine, banged up but fine." A pause, his expression sharpening. "You're sure about the wear pattern? Send me the full report. I want to see it before anyone else does."

Zoey watched him listen, watched the careful, controlled way his face rearranged itself into something unreadable, and understood, without needing the details spelled out, that whatever the mechanic had found, it wasn't nothing after all.

"Thanks," Dylan said finally, ending the call, and looked at her with an expression she hadn't seen on him before, not fear, exactly, something colder and more contained than that. "The report's inconclusive on cause. But the mechanic flagged it as unusual enough to warrant a second inspection. Someone from insurance is going to want a look."

"What does that mean?"

"It means," Dylan said slowly, "that I'm going to have to start paying much closer attention to who's around me, and I really, really don't want the first name on that list to be my own brother."