Page 4 of Dark Billionaire Predator

"She just has this way of making everything about her," Rebecca says. She's sitting cross-legged on the couch, shoes off, picking at a thread on her sleeve. "Like, I called to tell her about the promotion, and within five minutes she was talking about her hip replacement."

"How did that make you feel?"

I ask the question gently, knowing how much my profession is mocked for this exact phrase. But it works. It works because most people have never been asked—really, sincerely, with full attention—how something made them feel.

Rebecca's jaw tightens. "Invisible," she says. Then, quieter: "Small."

There it is. The center.

"Can you sit with that for a moment?"

She nods. Her eyes are wet. She doesn't wipe them—she's learned not to, in here. This room is the one place Rebeccaallows herself to be messy, and I guard that permission like something precious.

We sit in the feeling together. The clock ticks. Outside, a siren wails down Sixth Avenue and fades.

I hold the space. It's what I do. It's what I've always done, ever since I was seventeen years old, sitting next to my mother's hospital bed, holding her hand through the last weeks of the ovarian cancer that took her in eighteen months flat, understanding somehow that the most important thing I could offer wasn't words but presence. Just being there. Just staying.

Dad lasted three more years without her. A high school history teacher, gentle and bookish, more comfortable with dead presidents than living people—but he held us together after Mom died through sheer force of will. For Ava and me. Because we needed him. And then one afternoon, he had a heart attack in the middle of sixth period, teaching a unit on the Civil War. Dead before he hit the floor, they told us, like that was supposed to be a comfort. Ava was twenty-two. I was twenty. We stood at the graveside holding hands the way we always had—her grip fierce, protective, the older sister who'd been shielding me from the world since the day I was born.

I thought we'd always be like that. Ava and Lucy against everything.

Rebecca takes a breath, a deep one that shudders on the way out, and says, "I just wanted her to be proud of me. Just once."

"I hear you," I say. And I mean it.

We use the remaining minutes to bring her back to stable ground. A breathing exercise, a reminder that she's done brave work today. She leaves looking lighter—not healed, never healed in a single session, but unburdened by a fraction.

The door closes, and I'm alone.

The office is small. I chose it for that reason—I didn't want the intimidating expanse of leather and mahogany that some therapists favor. This is a room designed to feel safe. Warm walls, soft lighting, two comfortable chairs. A bookshelf crammed with texts I've read twice and novels I've read more. A window that looks out onto a quiet stretch of West 10th Street, where afternoon light filters through a ginkgo tree that turns gold every October.

I love this office. Some days it's the only place I feel fully myself—not performing, not caretaking, not managing anyone's expectations. Just present. Just doing the work I was built to do.

I eat lunch at my desk. A salad from the deli on the corner, the same one I get three days a week. My phone buzzes while I'm chasing a cherry tomato around the container.

Ava.

A photo—her and Josiah on the balcony of what looks like a hotel in the south of France. Ava is laughing, hair wind-blown, looking more relaxed than I've seen her in years. Josiah stands behind her with his arms wrapped around her waist, his face half-buried in her neck.

Miss you already. How's everything? Are you eating real food or just desk salads?

I smile. Ava knows me too well.

Desk salad. Obviously. You look happy.

I am happy. It's terrifying.

That makes me laugh—a real laugh, the kind that echoes in the empty office. That's Ava in a sentence: brave enough to build a life with a man whose family makes her old prosecutorialtargets look like jaywalkers, but honest enough to admit it scares her.

I'm happy for her. I need to be clear about that, even to myself, because the feeling that lives next to the happiness is one I'm not proud of. It's not jealousy. It's more like vertigo. The disorientation of a landscape shifting beneath your feet.

For my whole life, Ava was the constant. Mom got sick, and Ava was there. Dad died, and Ava was there. Every crisis, every three-in-the-morning phone call when the grief hit so hard I couldn't breathe—Ava answered. She held me together with the sheer force of her will and the steady grip of her hands.

Now Ava has Josiah. The manor, the family, the whole sprawling Ambrose universe that I've been allowed to glimpse but never fully understand. She's not gone—she texts every day, calls twice a week, insisted I come to the wedding even when I was still wary of the whole thing. She's still my sister. Still my person.

But there's a wall now. Thin, transparent, almost imperceptible—but there. The things she can't tell me. The questions I've learned not to ask. The careful way she steers conversations away from certain topics, her eyes going flat in a way that tells me she's choosing between the truth and my safety.

I hate that wall. And I understand it. And I hate that I understand it, because understanding means I've accepted it, and accepting it means I've let my sister disappear behind a door I can't follow her through.