Chapter 3 Three

Damian Vale calls me before I've even made it back to the house.

I don't recognize the number, but I recognize the voice the second he speaks, low and unhurried, like he's got all the time in the world and wants me to notice that I don't.

"Doubling my offer was a mistake," he says, no hello, nothing.

"Is that a threat or a compliment?"

"An observation. You don't know what those parcels are worth. You just knew I wanted them, and that was enough for you."

I stop walking, right there on the sidewalk outside the title office, because he's not wrong and I hate that he's not wrong. "Maybe I know exactly what they're worth."

"Then tell me what they're worth."

"No."

A pause. Somewhere behind him I can hear traffic, a city being ordinary. "Fair enough," he says, and there's something almost like approval in it, which annoys me more than if he'd laughed at me outright. "Here's my counter, Ms. Sterling. I split the parcels with you. Two and two. You take the two on the east side, I take the two on the west, and neither of us bankrupts ourselves proving a point in a title office."

"Why would I agree to that?"

"Because you don't actually want all four. You want to make sure I don't have all four. There's a difference, and it's an expensive one if we keep pretending there isn't."

He's right about that too, and it makes my skin prickle, because six hours ago I would have said nobody alive could read me that precisely on a first meeting. "How do you know I don't want all four?"

"Because if you wanted them for the reason I think you want them," he says, and his voice drops just slightly, just enough that I understand he's chosen every word of this sentence on purpose, "you'd know that two parcels facing the river road are worth more to you than four facing away from it. You'd have known that this morning. You didn't. You bid on instinct, not on a plan."

I don't answer right away, because I'm too busy recalculating exactly how much this man might already know.

"Two and two," I say finally. "East side's mine. And you tell me why you want the west parcels."

"No," he says, pleasant as anything, echoing my own word back at me, and hangs up before I can decide whether I'm furious or something worse than furious.

*

Julian comes for dinner that night, the way he does every Thursday, and watching him walk through my front door is like watching a photograph of a man I used to love.

"There she is." He kisses my cheek, easy, warm, exactly the way he's kissed my cheek every Thursday for the last year. "Your father tells me you had opinions about the trust this morning."

"I had opinions about a lot of things this morning."

"Good ones, I hope." He says it like a joke, already moving past me into the dining room, already greeting Celeste with the same easy warmth he just gave me, and I watch it happen this time instead of just living inside it - the exact half-second too long his hand stays on her shoulder, the exact way her eyes go to him and then away, quick, before either of them thinks anyone's counting.

Nobody at this table thinks anyone's counting. I've spent a year not counting.

"You've gone quiet," Julian says to me, over the second course, and there's real attention in it, real warmth, the kind of warmth that used to make me think I could grow to love a man I'd been assigned instead of chosen. "Everything all right?"

"Just thinking about the wedding," I say, and it isn't even a lie.

"Don't think too hard. That's what I'm for." He smiles the smile I used to find charming and now find unbearable to look at directly, and reaches over to squeeze my hand, and under the table, not two feet from where his hand is holding mine, Celeste's phone buzzes against her thigh.

She glances down at it. Just once. Fast.

I watch her face do something small and private that she thinks nobody at this table is built to notice.

I am, now. I am exactly built to notice it.

*

I find her an hour later, after Julian's gone home and my father's retreated to his study and the house has gone quiet in the particular way it does at night when everyone's decided the day is officially over. She's on the back terrace, phone pressed to her ear, and she doesn't hear the door behind her because she's not expecting anyone to be listening. Nobody ever expects Celeste to be watched. That's always been the whole architecture of her - invisible enough to get away with things, charming enough that no one looks twice.

I used to be the same way, before I died once and came back paying attention.

"-no, she doesn't know anything," Celeste is saying, low, fast, her free hand pressed against her collarbone the way she does when she's nervous and thinks no one can see it. "I told you, the timeline's fine, we just need the board vote to go through before anyone starts asking about the Route 9 data. If Marcus finds out I pulled those files before the audit-"

She stops.

I don't know if she heard the door, or felt the air change, or just has the animal instinct our whole family seems to run on when something's gone wrong in a room. But she turns around, phone still pressed to her ear, and she sees me standing in the doorway in my bare feet, and every warm thing on her face goes out at once like someone's found the switch.

"I'll call you back," she says into the phone, very quietly, and hangs up before whoever's on the other end can answer.

Neither of us says anything for a second that stretches out longer than it has any right to.

"How long have you been standing there," she says.

"Long enough," I say, "to hear you talk about pulling files before an audit. Marcus Ashford's audit."

Her face does three things in quick succession - fear, calculation, and then something that settles into a smile so practiced I almost believe it, almost the way I would have believed it four months ago, standing on the wrong side of a locked gate.

"It's nothing," she says. "Company stuff. Boring stuff. You know how Dad gets about the merger, everybody's covering themselves for the audit, it's not-"

"Route 9," I say. "That's what you said. Route 9 data."

The smile doesn't move, but something behind her eyes goes very still, the way water goes still right before something underneath it decides to break the surface.

"You're imagining things," she says. "Go to bed, Ivy. Big day tomorrow."

She walks past me into the house without waiting to see if I believe her, and I stand there on the cold terrace tile in my bare feet, listening to her footsteps recede up the stairs, thinking about four warehouses on a stretch of road nobody in this city has cared about in a decade, and a woman on the other end of a phone call who apparently cares about it very much indeed.