Chapter 43: Caught Looking
The knock at the office door came soft and measured, three even taps that somehow still carried authority.
After Isabella answered, a woman in her thirties stepped inside with a neatly organized stack of files in her arms. Her makeup was light, almost understated, and her appearance matched the rest of her perfectly: polished without trying to impress, attractive without seeming aware of it.
"Ms. Lowell, these are the documents you asked for. I had everything sorted."
She set the files down on the broad desk with practiced care.
Sunlight had long since faded from Ashford City, and the floor to ceiling windows behind Isabella now reflected a sea of glass towers, moving headlights, and the blurred glow of evening traffic. Steam curled from the coffee beside her laptop. On the screen was her wallpaper, an old photo of her and Julian together, taken so early on that he had still looked untouched by the world.
"From now on, just call me Isabella, Morgan," she said. "You're not just my assistant. You're older than me, and you've been around long enough that formalities feel silly."
Morgan Hale hesitated, then gave a small smile. "All right. Isabella."
Her expression shifted after that, something quieter taking its place.
"As for the boy, there wasn't much anyone could call eventful after you came back. A few years later, his father worked himself to death. Up until he finished middle school, he mostly kept to himself. The details are all in there. You can read the rest yourself."
She straightened. "If that's all, I'll go finish arranging your afternoon schedule. Are you heading back tonight?"
"Yes," Isabella said. "Thanks, Morgan."
Morgan nodded once and left, shutting the door behind her.
Silence settled over the office.
Isabella lowered her gaze to the files. The first pages were mostly dry, the sort of assembled summary someone built from school records, neighborhood rumors, and the kind of details people only noticed once they were asked to look closely enough. She turned the pages slowly, but her thoughts were no longer in the room.
She was remembering winter.
The first winter.
Julian had been so clean then, so painfully clean that the memory of him still looked pale against everything else in her mind, like a snowflake that had drifted into the wrong place and somehow survived long enough for her to notice it. He had been sweet without knowing it, soft in all the ways the world usually punished first.
It had punished him too.
Only the two of them had not broken in the same direction.
Pain had put wounds inside him that never really closed, but it had left him quiet, fragile, hesitant. Pain had done something uglier to her. It had fed the hatred already taking root, hardened her, taught her how little pity was worth. The selfish thing in her heart had long since grown claws. She could be cruel to people who stood in her way. She could destroy people who deserved it. She could take what she loved and refuse to give it back.
By the time she reached the end of the report, there were more names.
Girls.
The final page belonged to Margaret Monroe.
There was a photograph attached. Margaret's beauty held its own without effort. Calm, pale, reserved. The sort of face people misread as harmless because it stayed still too easily. Her eyes were worse. Quiet, watchful, almost cold enough to make the page feel poisonous in Isabella's hands.
Isabella looked at the photo for a long time.
If she did not start taking things back, someone else might get there first.
——
By the time Julian ended the chat, the apartment had gone still around him.
Margaret: Go to sleep early, okay? If you nod off during morning reading again, I'm not keeping watch for you.
Julian: Okay, okay. I'm logging off. Good night.
Margaret: Good night.
No new messages came after that.
Julian scrolled up through the conversation anyway, smiling faintly at the clutter of it. There was nothing important in most of those messages if anyone else looked at them. A joke here. A complaint about class there. A reminder about homework. A good night before bed. Yet the whole thing was threaded through with something warm and secret that made his chest feel lighter every time he reread it.
Margaret's profile picture was the back view of a pink haired anime girl. Everything else about her account was plain. Default font. Default chat bubble. Minimal profile info. It should have made her seem easy to read, but it never did. She felt clean and lovely and strangely difficult to understand, all at once.
(A/N: Pink hair…I wonder who it is?)
Julian still remembered the time she had let him rest against her lap.
He remembered every accidental brush after that too. Every closeness. Every fleeting contact that had felt bigger than it should have. Margaret was the kind of girl no one really touched. Too distant. Too pretty. Too self-contained. Yet somehow he had become the one orbiting nearest to her, and the realization kept pulling him back no matter how often he tried to act normal about it.
The water in the plastic basin at his feet had already gone cold.
He dried off, carried the basin to pour it out, then paused by the window when a bright set of headlights flashed across the lot outside. The beams blinked once, twice, and then went dark.
He stood there for a moment, staring without thinking, until a familiar knock came at the door.
Steady. Unhurried. Almost gentle.
Julian opened it and froze.
Isabella stood outside with a smile on her face, dressed beautifully even at that hour, the faint trace of perfume around her soft and rich as a rose opened in warm air.
"Good evening, Jules. Your big sister's back." Her voice wrapped around the words as easily as ever. "You're still awake?"
"I was just about to sleep." He stepped back a little to let her in, then blinked. "Why are you back so late?"
"I just finished dealing with work. The second I was done, I came straight home." She tilted her head and looked at him with teasing warmth. "Come here. Let me hold you for a second. It's been days. Didn't you miss me?"
She did not wait for permission.
She pulled him into her arms with the same affectionate certainty she had always used, pressing close enough that he could barely keep his balance before her chin came to rest against his shoulder. She held him there, breathing him in, and Julian could feel how little intention she had of letting go quickly.
He laughed awkwardly, already warm from embarrassment. "Of course I missed you. You're hugging way too hard."
"Sorry." She eased back at last, though only enough to touch his hair and smooth it down with her hand. "Did they fix the heat in your room yet? If not, come sleep at my place tonight."
"I don't need to, really. I can just stay here."
He barely finished the sentence before she caught his wrist and drew him across the hall into her apartment with quiet force. The door shut behind them with a click that made refusal feel suddenly theoretical.
"Jules can't say no to me." She tapped his forehead lightly, but the look in her eyes held more insistence than the gesture did. "You'll hurt my feelings."
"My light's still on."
"I'll turn it off for you." She gave him a small, satisfied smile. "Go lie down."
It already felt pointless to argue.
Julian walked into her bedroom on tired feet and looked around while he waited. The room was clean in the severe, deliberate way everything of Isabella's always seemed to be. Closet. Desk. Chair. Bed. Nothing unnecessary, nothing soft enough to call girlish. The whole place felt mature, controlled, and somehow more personal for how little it revealed.
He sat on the edge of the bed, hands braced beside him, trying not to think too hard about what he was doing there.
The door opened again not long after.
Isabella had taken off her coat and switched on the heat before looking over at him with mild amusement. "Why aren't you asleep yet? You know you'll be miserable tomorrow if you stay up like this."
He hesitated, then asked the thing that had been bothering him since she dragged him over. "Are you sleeping in here too?"
"Of course." She sounded almost entertained by the question. "The other room isn't set up."
"That's not a good idea." He stood. "I should go back."
He only got as far as shifting his weight forward before Isabella pushed him backward onto the bed.
The movement was too fast for him to resist cleanly. One second he was standing, the next he was flat on the mattress with her pinning him down through sheer certainty, her expression still warm enough to look kind if someone ignored the rest.
"I already told you not to refuse your big sister." Her hand came up to his face, fingers brushing his cheek with an intimacy that did not fit the strength she was using. "Do you really want to make me sad?"
"This isn't appropriate, Isabella. I'm almost eighteen. I'm not a little kid anymore."
"So what?" Her tone stayed gentle. "We're just sleeping. Your room is freezing, and I'm not letting you spend the night shivering."
"My blanket's thick. I'm fine."
"If you keep saying no, I might cry." Her voice softened further, nearly fragile, but the hand against his face did not loosen in the slightest. "Would you really do that to me?"
Julian lasted a few more seconds before the fight went out of him.
"All right," he said quietly. "We can sleep here."
The answer seemed to please her immediately.
To Isabella, he suspected, some part of him had never really grown up. She still spoke to him like he was younger than he was, like he belonged in the span of her attention by default, like caution was something she was allowed to have for him even when he did not know what to do with it.
Julian lay down and pulled the blanket over himself, giving her most of the bed and instinctively shifting as far from her side as he could without making the distance obvious. Sharing a bed with a woman was embarrassing enough already. Sharing it with Isabella, who never seemed embarrassed by anything that left him flustered, made the whole thing worse.
She crossed the room, peeled off the last parts of her day, and disappeared into the bathroom to wash up.
When she came back, her makeup was gone. Her face looked cleaner, younger in some ways, though none of that took away from how striking she still was. She stood beside the bed with her back to him and began changing into her pajamas as naturally as if he were not there at all.
Julian's breath caught.
He caught a glimpse of pale skin before panic hit him hard enough to make him jerk his gaze away.
"Issa, wait, wait, wait, what are you doing?" he blurted, voice going thin with embarrassment. "I'm still here."
She did not even sound flustered. "Changing into pajamas. It's not a big deal if you see me, Jules. I don't mind."
That only made it worse.
Julian shoved himself deeper beneath the blanket and turned his face away, heat crawling up the back of his neck until he was sure even his ears had gone red. He could hear the rustle of fabric behind him and hated that the sound alone was enough to make him feel trapped inside his own body.
A moment later the mattress dipped.
He looked up carefully.
Isabella was lying on her side, close enough that he could feel the warmth of her through the blanket, her face turned toward his with a smile so soft it would have looked harmless on almost anyone else.
"Did you peek just now?" she asked.
There was unmistakable amusement in her voice.
Julian swallowed.
"I saw a little."