“Sorry,” she said, the word coming out breathless. “I have to-“
She stepped away and answered, turning her back on Sterling’s impatience.
“Marlowe, where are you?” Rowan’s voice was raw, urgent, stripped of its usual laziness. “Come home. Now.”
Her heart slammed against her ribs. Rowan didn’t sound like this. Rowan, who handled everything with the same unflappable calm, who’d raised her since their parents died with a shrug and a “we’ll figure it out” – Rowan sounded afraid.
“I’m on my way.”
She hung up and turned back to Sterling. He was watching her with an expression she couldn’t read – annoyance, certainly, but something else too. Something colder.
“It’s Rowan. Something’s wrong.”
“You’re leaving.” Not a question.
“He’s my brother, Sterling.”
She said it the way you state a law of physics – not because it needed defending, but because it was simply true. She grabbed her purse and moved toward the door without waiting for his permission.
The night air hit her face like cold water. She drove home with both hands tight on the wheel, her mind building and demolishing worst-case scenarios faster than she could process them. Rowan hurt. Rowan in trouble. Rowan sick. The thoughts spiraled, each one darker than the last, until she pulled into their driveway and saw the house – lights on, front door closed, no ambulance, no police – and felt relief and confusion collide in her chest.
She found him on the couch. Not bleeding. Not dying. Just sitting there with his hands folded in his lap, looking calmer than any man who’d just made a frantic phone call had a right to look. There was something in his expression – guilt, maybe, or the beginning of an apology he hadn’t figured out how to shape yet.
“What happened?” she demanded, still out of breath, her heart still hammering. “Are you okay? Are you hurt?”
“I just needed you here.” He said it simply, the way you’d say “pass the salt,” as though yanking her out of her boyfriend’s birthday party was the most reasonable thing in the world.
“You – what?”
“Go to bed, Marlowe.” He stood, not meeting her eyes. “We’ll talk in the morning.”
She stared at him. A hundred questions pressed against her teeth – why, what’s going on, who’s in trouble, why did you sound like the world was ending – but something in his face, in the careful way he avoided her gaze, told her that pressing him tonight would get her nothing.
“Fine,” she said, though nothing about this was fine.
She climbed the stairs to her room, kicked off her shoes, hung the seven-dollar dress on the back of her door, and lay in bed staring at the ceiling while the questions ate at her like slow acid.
She dreamed of mansions with doors that opened into empty rooms.
The next morning, Marlowe descended the stairs still half-asleep, still replaying the strangeness of the night before, and stopped dead on the third step from the bottom.
A man was sitting at their kitchen table. Not Rowan. A stranger – or almost a stranger. There was something vaguely familiar about him, like a face from a crowd you can’t quite place. He was tall even while seated, with the kind of posture that suggested either military training or extreme self-possession. Dark suit. Dark eyes. The trace of a smile that wasn’t quite friendly and wasn’t quite threatening but was undeniably the smile of a man who was used to being in rooms he owned.
He looked up at her and the almost-smile became a real one.
Marlowe gripped the banister and thought: What exactly did I agree to come home for?
I woke up that morning the way you wake up from a good dream – slowly, reluctantly, clinging to the last dissolving images like a child clutching at soap bubbles. The pillow was warm. The sheets still smelled of the lavender fabric softener Rowan bought in bulk. And somewhere behind my closed eyelids, Sterling was still looking at me the way he had at the party, before the conversation in the study, before the phone call, before everything went sideways. In my half-awake version of reality, we were still standing in that room full of leather and old books, and he was telling me I was beautiful, and this time I believed him completely.
Then the ceiling came into focus, and real life returned like a bill in the mail.
I sat up. Stretched. Told myself that last night’s awkwardness with Sterling was fixable. He was upset – fine. People got upset. I’d call him later, apologize for running out, explain that Rowan had scared me half to death for reasons that were still maddeningly unclear. Sterling would understand. Sterling, despite his flaws (and I was learning he had a few more than advertised), was not unreasonable. Probably.
I padded into the bathroom, turned on the shower, and stood under the water longer than necessary, letting the heat unknot the tension between my shoulder blades. I thought about Sterling while I washed my hair. I thought about him while I brushed my teeth. I thought about him while I stood in front of the foggy mirror toweling off, and somewhere in the middle of grooming my eyebrows – a task that required zero emotional involvement – I caught myself imagining him standing behind me, his arms around my waist, chin resting on my shoulder, and a stupid, involuntary smile spread across my face.
God. I had it bad. The kind of bad that makes you embarrassed on behalf of your own dignity.
New Book: Back Home to Marry Off Myself
Loredana’s father left the family for his mistress, leaving them to fend for themselves abroad. When life was at its toughest, her father showed up with “good news” after 8 years of absence: To marry off Loredana to a paralyzed son of the wealthy Mendelsohn family.