Ava's POV
Eleven days in and I had started keeping a mental list.
Not intentionally. It just happened the way things happen when you are living in close quarters with someone you don't fully understand and your brain decides that cataloguing details is safer than sitting with the uncertainty of not knowing what any of them mean.
Damian drank his coffee black. No sugar, no milk, nothing. He watched me put three spoons of sugar in mine one morning and didn't say anything but his expression did something brief and confused that I found genuinely funny and did not tell him.
He was always the first one awake. Always the last one to stop working. Somewhere in the hours between he maintained a level of focus that made me feel lazy just being in the same room.
He had a lot of suits. Too many suits honestly. They were all dark and expensive and perfectly fitted and he wore them like he had been born in one which was impressive and also slightly exhausting.
He read books. Actual books. Real ones with broken spines and bent pages and that specific smell of something read many times. He left them face down on surfaces when his phone interrupted him, which was constantly.
He fed the birds.
I found this out on day nine. I came downstairs earlier than usual and looked out the kitchen window and he was just standing there in the garden in his shirtsleeves in January cold, hand out, completely still, while three sparrows ate directly from his palm. I stood at the window for a full minute. He came inside after, straightened his jacket, picked up his phone, and became himself again so completely that I would not have believed what I saw if I hadn't seen it with my own eyes.
We didn't talk about it. I don't know why. It just felt like something that belonged to him.
And he always knew where I was in the house. Not in a weird way. Just in the way that some people are always aware of the people around them without making a show of it. Like weather. You don't announce that you know it's raining. You just know.
Eleven days. Six things. I had a feeling I was barely started.
****
The second week found a rhythm I hadn't expected.
Not comfortable. But familiar. Breakfast at seven, the two of us existing in the same kitchen without quite sharing a morning. Work at Petals, which had become the place I went to remember who I was outside of all of this. Evenings that varied. Sometimes separate rooms. Sometimes the piano room. Sometimes dinner that went longer than necessary because neither of us moved to end it.
Jamie clocked the rhythm before I said a word about it.
"You seem less like you're about to snap in half," she said Wednesday morning while we were building centerpieces for a Valentine's consultation that felt premature by about three weeks.
"I'm adjusting."
"You're settling," she said. "There's a difference."
"It's temporary."
"Okay." She handed me a bundle of red roses. "How's the blanket situation."
I focused on trimming. "I don't know what you're referring to."
"The blanket. That appeared on you. In the piano room. That you didn't put there."
I had told her about the blanket in a moment of weakness and she had been holding it like currency ever since.
"The room gets cold," I said.
"Sure it does." She was quiet for a moment. "The weird feeling thing. Still happening?"
"Less." Which was true. The burning hadn't come back since the armchair night and I was not going to examine why because every explanation I had led somewhere I wasn't ready to go.
"And your eyes?"
I looked up. "What about my eyes."
"You keep checking them in the back mirror." She said it simply, not accusing, just stating. "I notice things Ava. It's a problem."
I put my scissors down. "Something is happening," I said. "I don't know what. Elena called me and asked about specific things without me bringing them up first and then refused to tell me anything useful until Thursday and told me not to tell Damian."
Jamie absorbed this. "Are you going to tell him?"
"I don't know yet."
She held the door open for me when we went back inside. "I think he already knows more than you do," she said. "The way he watches you. It's not random. He's watching for something specific."
I didn't respond to that. But I thought about it for the rest of the day.
****
Wednesday evening Adrian Hawthorne showed up.
Damian's cousin. I had heard the name once from Claire and once from Luca, both times in a tone that suggested something careful without specifying what. I had not formed much of an impression beyond aware that he existed somewhere in Damian's world.
He arrived at seven without warning as far as I could tell.
I was coming downstairs when I heard the front door and Luca's voice doing something it didn't usually do. Still professional. Just tight.
"Damian's expecting me," a voice said. Easy and smooth, the kind of easy that knows it's easy.
"Mr. Hawthorne didn't mention a meeting."
"We're family Luca. We don't need meetings."
I came around the bend of the staircase and got my first look at him. Slim, sharp featured, hair slightly longer than Damian's, suit expensive but worn with more awareness of how it looked than Damian ever bothered with. He noticed me immediately and his eyes did a quick sweep that was too thorough to be casual.
"You must be Ava." He smiled. Warm, immediate, practiced. "I'm Adrian. The charming one."
"Adrian." Damian's voice came from somewhere behind him. Even and controlled and carrying something underneath it. He'd appeared from the direction of his office. "I wasn't expecting you."
"Spontaneous visit." Adrian spread his hands open. It looked like openness. It wasn't. "I wanted to meet her." He looked at me again. "You're not what I pictured."
"What did you picture?" I asked.
He paused just slightly too long. "Someone more calculated."
Damian stepped forward. He didn't push anyone or say anything dramatic. He just moved, and suddenly he was between us in a way that looked like he was simply joining the conversation. "Come through," he said to Adrian.
He steered his cousin toward the sitting room without appearing to do anything at all. As he passed me his eyes met mine for about half a second. Something in that look said be careful and I'm sorry in the same breath.
I went to the kitchen and made tea I didn't want and stayed out of the sitting room because something in my gut said to.
They talked for forty minutes. I couldn't make out words, just the shapes. Damian's voice staying level no matter what Adrian threw at it. Adrian's voice trying different angles and not finding any of them landing the way he wanted.
Adrian left at eight. He didn't come find me before he left. I noticed that.
Damian appeared in the kitchen doorway a few minutes later. Same as always on the outside. Slightly tighter around the eyes.
"I should have warned you he might come," he said.
"What does he want?"
"What he's always wanted." He filled a glass of water and didn't elaborate. "Things that aren't his to want."
"Is he dangerous?"
"He's my cousin."
"That's not an answer."
He set the glass down. "Stay away from him. Not as an order. Just." He paused in a way that felt uncharacteristic. "He's good at making people feel like he's on their side. He's not on anyone's side but his own."
I thought about the way Adrian's eyes had moved over me. The word calculated chosen after a pause that was one beat too long.
"Okay," I said.
Damian looked at me for a moment across the kitchen. That expression again, the one that showed up when his guard slipped a fraction without him choosing to let it.
"You handled him well," he said.
"I barely said two sentences."
"I know." He picked his glass back up. "Goodnight Ava."
He left. I stood there with cold tea and thought about cousins who wanted things and husbands who moved without making a production of moving and the look that had passed between us in the hallway that I still didn't have a clean name for.
I went to bed thinking about it anyway.