CHAPTER EIGHT- 2AM TRUTHS
1317 Words
He was standing by the window.
Not sitting, not pacing — standing. Like he'd been there since her message and hadn't moved. The city didn't exist out here, forty minutes from everything, so the window gave nothing but dark grounds and the outline of old trees against a darker sky.
He turned when she came through the door.
She didn't waste time.
"Serena is working with Richard," she said. "I saw her coming from his end of the corridor twenty minutes ago. Not passing through — coming from. There's a difference."
Something shifted in his face. Not surprise exactly. More like confirmation of something he'd been refusing to land on.
"How long have you suspected?" she asked.
"Since dinner," he said. "The way she looked at him when you handled his question. It wasn't disappointment." He paused. "It was communication."
"And you didn't say anything."
"Neither did you."
She looked at him. Fair point.
She crossed the room and sat on the window seat — close enough to talk quietly, far enough to think clearly. He stayed standing. The room was dark except for the lamp on the desk and the whole thing felt less like a strategy meeting and more like something she didn't have a name for yet.
"What does Richard want?" she said.
"Control of the company. He's always wanted it." Ethan's voice was even. "My grandmother holds twenty percent of Robinson Enterprises in trust. When she dies it transfers — either to me outright or split between family members depending on her current directive." He looked at the window. "She updates that directive every two years. The next update is in six weeks."
Fina went very still.
"If Eleanor believes you're settled," she said slowly. "Stable. That the company passes to you without complication —"
"She updates in my favour," he said. "Richard gets nothing beyond what he already has."
"And if she has doubts about you." Fina's mind was moving fast. "About us. About whether you're actually —"
"She might split it," he said. "To protect the company from what she'd see as instability."
"So Richard needs Eleanor to doubt you before six weeks," Fina said. "And Serena is his way in because Eleanor trusts her completely." She looked at him. "This was never just about the family gathering. It's about the inheritance."
"Yes," he said.
"You knew this before we came here."
A pause.
"I suspected it," he said.
"Ethan." She held his gaze. "Did you bring me here knowing I was walking into something bigger than a fake relationship?"
The silence that followed was the kind that answered the question before he did.
"Yes," he said.
She looked at him for a long moment.
She should have been angry. Part of her was — the part that had signed a contract and packed a bag and walked into this house in good faith. The part that had spent forty minutes arranging dinner seating and talking to Eleanor in a sitting room and doing everything right without knowing what right actually meant in this context.
But underneath the anger was something else.
He'd told her. Right now, at two in the morning, when he could have kept managing it. He'd told her.
"The fifty thousand," she said. "It was never just girlfriend money."
"No," he said quietly. "It was insurance money. The most convincing version of this story needed someone real. Someone Eleanor would actually believe." He looked at her directly. "Someone I couldn't perform with even if I tried."
She absorbed that.
"So what do we do?" she said.
He crossed the room and sat in the chair across from her — close now, the lamp between them, the window at his back. She could see his face properly and he looked like a man who had been carrying something alone for long enough that putting it down felt strange.
"We stay ahead of them," he said. "Serena will go to Eleanor with something in the next forty eight hours. Something that sounds like concern. Something that plants doubt about you specifically." He paused. "We need Eleanor so solidly convinced before that happens that whatever Serena says lands wrong."
"How?"
"We stop performing," he said simply.
She looked at him.
"Not the contract," he said quickly. "The performance within it. The careful distance. The managed touches." He held her gaze. "Eleanor doesn't need to see a perfect couple. She needs to see a real one. Real ones are messy and uncertain and —"
"Real," Fina said.
"Real," he said.
The lamp threw warm light between them. Outside the old trees moved in whatever wind had found them. The house was completely silent.
"You said something earlier," she said. "Before Serena knocked."
He didn't pretend not to know what she meant.
"I meant it," he said.
"Say it properly," she said. "Not around it. Not almost."
He looked at her — those blue eyes in the lamplight, stripped of the CEO and the controlled face and all the careful management she'd spent six weeks watching him maintain.
"I think about you when there's no reason to," he said. "I notice things about you that have nothing to do with the arrangement. The way you make decisions fast because you've been making them alone since you were seventeen. The way you laugh when Lucas says something stupid and then immediately check if I saw it." He paused. "I put my hand on your back in the entrance hall because I wanted to. Not for Diana. Not for anyone."
The window seat was very small.
She wasn't sure when the distance between them had changed.
"We have forty four days left," she said. Her voice came out quieter than she intended.
"I know," he said.
"The contract ends and I go back to my apartment and my two jobs and my siblings and you go back to your penthouse and your company and none of this —"
"Fina." Her name in his mouth at two in the morning.
"What?"
"Stop telling yourself the story where this ends," he said quietly. "Just — stop. For tonight."
She looked at him.
She had been telling herself that story since the bar. Since the card. Since the contract and the charity dinner and the jacket and the hand under the table and the bench in Eleanor's garden and every single moment that was supposed to be pretend and kept insisting on being real.
She was so tired of telling herself that story.
"Okay," she said softly. "Not tonight."
He reached over slowly — giving her every opportunity to pull back — and pushed a strand of hair from her face with the same careful precision he gave everything.
She didn't pull back.
"Get some sleep," he said. His hand dropped. "Tomorrow we deal with Richard and Serena and all of it."
"And us?" she said.
"Us too," he said. "When there's daylight and you've slept and you still want to."
She stood. Moved to the connecting door. Stopped.
"Ethan." He looked up. "For the record —" she held his gaze — "I already know I'll still want to."
She went through the door.
Lay in her bed.
Smiled at the ceiling like an i***t for approximately four minutes.
Then her phone buzzed.
Unknown number. No name. One message.
You should ask Ethan what really happened to his father's company before he inherited it. Ask him why the last person who got too close to him disappeared. Ask him who Mara is.
— A friend.
Fina sat up in the dark.
Stared at the message.
Read it three times.
Who is Mara.
She looked at the connecting door. At the warm light still visible underneath it.
She looked back at the message.
And for the first time since she walked into this house Fina Tesla felt the ground shift under her feet.
- Writer
