Page 63 of Devotion
Nothing. I waited. Then I tried the handle because I was Miley Torres and I had never in my life been capable of leaving well enough alone, and the door opened because he’d probably forgotten to lock it.
The room was dark. The bed was made. Pillows perfect. Duvet smooth. The same untouched look I’d seen that first morning weeks ago when I came looking for him, found an empty room, and a man who appeared from nowhere carrying a pillow.
I heard something faint—breathing, coming from the closet.
The closet door was slightly open, just a crack. Something in my gut pulled me forward.
I opened the door slowly, quietly.
Christopher Vale was on the floor.
Curled on his side. Back against the wall. Knees drawn up. A pillow under his head, a throw blanket pulled to his chin. In the faint light from the bedroom, he looked smaller than he’d ever looked. Smaller than a man who was six-foot-four had any right to look. Like he’d folded himself into the smallest version of himself he could manage and pressed himself into the corner where the walls met.
I stood in the doorway holding a bowl of chocolate mousse and my brain did the math.
The morning I’d knocked and he appeared from nowhere. The bed that was always made. He wasn’t coming from the bathroom that morning. He was coming from here.
My eyes burned. My throat burned. Everything burned.
I backed out of the room, closing the door without a sound.
I didn’t ask about the closet.
I wanted to. Every morning when he walked past me with his coffee and his composure and that face that gave away nothing, the question sat right behind my teeth.
Why the closet? How long? Does it help? Are you okay?
But I’d been the teenager in Aunt Eliza’s storage room, sharing a mattress with Vicky, staring at the ceiling and wondering if anyone would notice if I wasn’t there. And the one thing I knew about wounds like that was that you couldn’t fix them for someone else. You could only be close enough that they knew you were there when they were ready.
So I didn’t ask.
The public appearances kept going. A lunch where Christopher pulled my chair out.
“I have arms, you know,” I said.
“Noted. Should I also stop opening doors?”
“Only if you wanna stop showing off in front of the paps.”
The photographer got us mid-laugh and the photo trended for two days.
A bookstore where I disappeared into the cookbook section for fifteen minutes and forgot he existed. When I finally resurfaced, he was standing three shelves away, arms crossed, watching me with an unreadable expression I caught in a mirrorbetween the stacks. A fan snapped a candid that went viral with the captionthe way he looks at her.
I saw it that night and stared at it for way too long before I finally shut my phone off. Went to bed, dreamed about blue eyes, and woke up feeling like I'd been emotionally mugged.
I was starting to notice things about him that had nothing to do with the contract. The way he held a coffee cup with both hands like he was trying to absorb warmth through the ceramic. The way his voice dropped lower when he was tired. The way he stood slightly behind me in public, never in front, like he was used to letting other people have the spotlight while he watched from the edges.
I told myself to stop. I reminded myself of the kiwi. The manipulation. I held onto the anger like a guardrail because without it I was standing at the edge of something I could not afford to fall into.
Then Elspeth called.
“Aunt Eliza fell. Broke her hip. She’s in the hospital.” A pause—then the sweetness curdled, predictable as always. “It would be nice if you and your sister could stop being heartless for five minutes.”
I hung up. Sat on the bed. Pressed my palms into my thighs and breathed.
I hadn’t spoken to Eliza since the trust fund fight, hadn’t been in that house since the night I packed a bag and left. But Eliza raised me. Badly, coldly, with conditions attached to every scrap of care. But she raised me. And I wasn’t a person who could ignore a broken hip, no matter whose hip it was.
I was putting on my jacket when Christopher appeared in the hallway.
