Somewhere Between Us

Chapter 14: The Stepbrother's Office

Zoey found Dylan on the balcony two nights after the stove-side lie, staring out at the city with a glass of scotch he wasn't drinking, and something about the particular stillness of him, the same stillness she'd learned to recognize from the night of his father's story, the night he'd first let her see past the smirk, made her stop in the doorway instead of retreating.

"You're doing the thing," she said. "Where you disappear into your own head and pretend the view is what's interesting."

"Caught me." He didn't turn around. "I keep thinking about the brakes. About Julian. About whether I'm losing my mind or whether I'm finally seeing something I should've seen years ago."

"You're not losing your mind."

"Then that leaves the other option, and I don't love it much better." He finally looked at her, and there was none of the earlier hurt in his face now, just a tired, honest exhaustion that made her chest ache in a way she wasn't fully prepared for.

"I'm sorry I've been distant. It's not fair to you, and it's not fair to pretend I don't notice you noticing."

"I'm not trying to interrogate you."

"I know. That's almost worse." She managed a small, tired smile. "It'd be easier if you were the type to demand answers. You just wait, patiently, like I'll get there on my own eventually."

"Will you?"

"I don't know yet," she admitted, which was as close to honest as she could let herself be. "But I don't want the distance. I want, this. Whatever this is, standing out here not really talking about anything."

Something in his shoulders eased, and he held out his hand, and she took it, letting him pull her gently against his side, the two of them looking out at the same skyline in a silence that felt, for the first time in days, comfortable rather than strained.

"Okay," he said, quiet, into her hair. "I can work with that."

The question about the café came up two mornings later, unprompted, over coffee neither of them had finished.

"I've been meaning to ask," Dylan said, glancing at her outfit, the apron half-folded over her bag, the sensible shoes she wore for a ten-hour shift on her feet. "Do you seriously still have to work there?"

"Excuse me?"

"I don't mean it like that." He held up a hand, backpedaling slightly at her expression. "I just mean, you're married to me. You don't need the money from a café shift. It's not exactly discreet, either, having reporters occasionally catch a photo of Mrs. Sterling steaming milk. Halloway's mentioned it twice now, delicately, like he thinks I should say something."

"So say something. You just did."

"I'm saying it badly, apparently." He rubbed the back of his neck, some genuine discomfort in the gesture. "I just don't understand why you'd keep doing it, when you don't have to."

Zoey set her mug down, more carefully than the moment required, buying herself a second to find the right words. "Because it's mine," she said finally. "Everything else about this year, the apartment, the money, even the marriage, it's yours. I signed onto your life. The café is the one thing that's still just mine, that existed before any of this and doesn't depend on you or the contract or what happens when the year's up."

"The year's up, you go back to your life either way. The money makes sure of that."

"The money makes sure I'm not desperate. It doesn't make sure I still know who I am." She looked at him, steady. "I've spent a decade being the person who holds everything together for everyone else. I don't know what happens to me if I let go of every single thread of that at once, even the ones I don't strictly need anymore. Priya needs the extra hands on Saturdays. I like the ten a.m. regulars. It's mine, Dylan. I'd like to keep one thing that's mine."

He was quiet for a long moment, something recalibrating behind his eyes. "That's fair," he said finally, and meant it, she could tell. "I still don't love the photo risk. But I get it."

"I'll be careful about the photos."

"You'd better. Halloway's already had to spin one 'humble billionaire's wife' headline into something usable." But he was smiling now, some of the earlier tension gone, and reached across the table to squeeze her hand once before standing to leave for the office. "Keep your job. Keep your regulars. Just maybe wear a hat."

"I'm not wearing a hat, Dylan."

"Worth a try," he said, and kissed the top of her head on his way out, easy and unthinking, the kind of gesture that had stopped being performance weeks ago and neither of them had quite acknowledged out loud.

It was three days later, running an errand for Dylan that required dropping papers at the Sterling family's private estate office, a converted carriage house on the edge of the property that Marguerite used for correspondence and Julian, apparently, used for something else entirely, that Zoey found herself standing in a hallway she had no real reason to be in, holding a folder she'd been asked to leave at the front desk, when Julian's voice carried sharp and low through a half-open door.

"I don't care what the market did today, I need the rest of it liquidated by Friday. I can't keep bleeding out slowly, I need it done and I need it quiet." A pause, the creak of a chair. "No. Absolutely not, don't call the estate accountant, he reports everything to my mother eventually, I don't care how discreet he claims to be. Use the broker in the city, the one who doesn't ask questions."

Zoey stood very still, the folder clutched against her chest, some instinct telling her to leave before he noticed her and some other, more insistent instinct keeping her rooted to the spot.

"If Dylan finds out how bad this actually is," Julian continued, voice dropping further, rougher now, something almost raw underneath the usual polish, "it's over for me. I mean that. Not the money, I don't care about the money anymore, I care about what it means, what it's always meant, that I can't do one single thing without it turning into proof of what everyone already thinks of me."

Another pause, longer this time, and when he spoke again his voice had gone quiet in a different way, defeated rather than desperate.

"I know. I know what I said. I'll figure it out. I always figure it out, that's the joke, isn't it, I've spent my whole life figuring things out quietly so nobody has to watch me fail out loud."

Zoey backed away from the door as carefully as she could manage, heart pounding, and made it to the front desk with the folder before her hands started shaking. She left the estate without seeing Julian at all, and sat in her car in the long gravel driveway for several minutes before she trusted herself to drive.

It wasn't proof of anything sinister. She turned it over the whole way home, trying to be fair to what she'd actually heard rather than what fear wanted to make of it. It sounded, more than anything, like a man in genuine financial free fall, terrified less of the debt itself than of what it would confirm about him in front of the one person he'd apparently spent years being measured against. That he can't do one single thing without it turning into proof of what everyone already thinks of him. It was an ugly, human kind of desperation, the kind she recognized from her own life in a dozen smaller ways, the specific exhaustion of being defined by your worst moments before anyone gave you credit for trying.

But it also sat, uncomfortably, beside the brake line and the trust clause and the tense hushed calls that kept multiplying every time she got close enough to overhear one, and she couldn't quite make herself dismiss it entirely, no matter how much the more compassionate part of her wanted to.

She told Dylan a version of it that night, not everything, not the raw, wounded honesty underneath Julian's words, which felt too much like something private to hand over secondhand, but enough.

"I overheard Julian at the estate office today. He's selling off more shares. Sounded like he's in deeper trouble than either of us realized."

Dylan's jaw tightened, the familiar tension returning. "How much deeper?"

"I don't know exactly. But it sounded bad. Sounded like he's scared." She hesitated, then added, carefully, "He also said something about you finding out being 'over for him.' I don't know what that means. It could mean a dozen things."

"It could," Dylan agreed, though his voice had gone flat, controlled, the sound of a man trying very hard not to leap to the worst version of a sentence. "I don't want to think it means what it sounds like it could mean."

"I don't either." She meant it, more than she expected to. "For what it's worth, it didn't sound like a man plotting something. It sounded like a man drowning and ashamed of it."

"Those aren't mutually exclusive," Dylan said quietly, and she had no answer for that, because he wasn't wrong, and because some small, unshakeable part of her still couldn't fully close the door on either possibility, no matter how much she wanted to believe the better one.

They sat with it together for a while, the two of them on the same side of an uncertainty neither could resolve, and when Dylan finally reached for her hand, she let him take it, grateful, at least, for that much honesty between them, even as the larger secret about Meridian and Ashgrove and a fire meant for someone else stayed locked exactly where she'd left it.