CHAPTER EIGHT
1063 Words
Nora's POV
Lena Blackwood arrived on a Tuesday without warning and announced herself by walking into my bedroom and sitting on the edge of my bed like we had known each other for years.
I was reading. I looked up. She smiled.
"I'm Lena," she said. "I've been curious about you."
She was younger than Ethan by about five years and looked nothing like the rest of her family. Where they were composed and architectural she was bright and restless, like someone had accidentally planted a sunflower in a formal garden.
"Nora," I said.
"I know." She looked around the room with open curiosity. "You've made it very plain here. Did they not offer you the decorator?"
"They offered. I declined."
"Smart. The decorator Margaret uses makes everything look like a funeral home with better lighting." She tilted her head. "How are you actually doing? And I mean actually, not the version you give people who don't really want the answer."
I studied her for a moment. There was no performance in her face. Just direct, uncomplicated interest.
"I'm navigating," I said.
"That's diplomatic." She pulled one knee up. "Ethan's being awful to you, isn't he?"
"He's being what the contract requires him to be."
"That's a very generous reading of his behaviour."
"It's an accurate one."
She looked at me with something that was almost admiration. "He told me about the debt situation. The Helena thing." She paused. "He called me last night, which he almost never does, and he told me all of it. I think it bothered him more than he let on to you."
I didn't say anything. I filed that away somewhere quiet.
"He's not a bad person," Lena said. "He's just spent so long being what this family needed him to be that he forgot to figure out who he actually is underneath it." She paused. "You're the first person I've seen make him uncertain. He doesn't know what to do with you and it's driving him insane."
"I'm not trying to make him do anything."
"I know. That's the part that's driving him insane."
She stayed for two hours. We ordered food from a place she knew that delivered in under twenty minutes and ate it sitting on the floor because she claimed chairs were overrated and I found I didn't disagree. She asked me about my mother and my life before the contract and she listened without the particular type of pity that made me feel like a case study.
By the time she left I felt lighter than I had in weeks.
***************"
Ethan found me in the library that evening.
I had gravitated there early in my first week because it was the one room in the apartment that felt like it had been used by someone who actually needed it rather than assembled for display. The books had creases on their spines. Someone had read them.
He stopped in the doorway when he saw me. I had the lamp on and my legs tucked under me and I was halfway through something I'd pulled from the middle shelf without checking the title first.
"My sister called," he said.
"She mentioned she might."
He came in. He didn't sit — he stood near the bookshelf with his hands in his pockets and looked at me in the way he had developed recently. Concentrated. Like I was a problem he was genuinely interested in solving.
"She likes you," he said.
"I like her."
"She doesn't like most people."
"I got that impression." I looked at him. "Does that bother you?"
"No." He said it simply, without the pause I expected. "It surprises me."
"Because you expected her to take your side?"
"Because I expected you to be harder to know."
The room was quiet. The lamp made everything warm and close and I was too aware of how near he was standing. Close enough that if either of us moved slightly the distance would become something different.
"I'm not complicated," I said.
"You're the least complicated person in this building." Something in his voice dropped slightly. "That's not an insult."
"I know it isn't."
He pulled a book from the shelf without looking at it, turned it over, put it back. A restless gesture. Ethan Blackwood doing something without purpose — that was new.
"The legal team filed the review petition today," he said. "If the acquisition trail proves Helena's involvement we can restructure the original agreement. It would change the terms you're currently under."
I looked at him carefully. "Meaning what exactly?"
"Meaning you would have options you don't currently have." He met my eyes. "I'm not trying to get rid of you. I want to be clear about that. I'm trying to give you a choice you were never given."
Something moved through my chest. I pressed it flat.
"Why?" I asked.
He didn't answer immediately. He looked at the bookshelf, then back at me, and I watched him decide something.
"Because you turned a laptop around and showed me something that could have hurt me and you did it without a second thought," he said. "And I've been in rooms with very powerful people my entire life and I can count on one hand the number of times someone did something for me that cost them and asked for nothing back."
I didn't know what to do with that. So I stayed still and let it sit between us.
"You should have options," he said. "Everyone should."
"Ethan." His name came out quieter than I intended.
"Don't say it's fine," he said. "Don't tell me you're managing."
"I wasn't going to."
He looked at me. Really looked. And I felt it — that pull that had been building quietly under every careful conversation, every moment his eyes stayed on my face a second longer than necessary. It was patient and inconvenient and absolutely real.
"What were you going to say?" he asked.
"That it matters," I said. "What you just said. It matters to me."
He nodded once. His jaw tightened slightly like he was holding something back.
"Good," he said quietly.
He left the book in his hand on the table beside me and walked out.
I looked down at it. A worn copy of *Jane Eyre*.
I pressed my fingers against the cover and told my heart to behave.
- Writer
