Page 58 of Dark Billionaire Predator

"Really?" Genuine surprise. "You hate those things."

"I don't hate them. I'm cautious about them."

"Lucy, you once described the Ambrose manor as 'a beautiful house that makes you feel like you're being watched by the architecture.'"

"I stand by that assessment. I'm still coming."

Ava is quiet for a moment. The silence has a quality I recognize—my older sister reading me, sorting through the possible reasons, weighing them. Ava doesn't have my training, but she has instincts that run just as deep. She knows when I'm hiding something. She's always known.

"Does this have anything to do with whoever you're seeing?"

"What makes you think I'm seeing someone?"

"Monday at lunch you turned pink and adjusted your scarf when your phone buzzed. You looked like someone who just got a text from a man. A specific kind of text from a specific kind of man."

I close my eyes. Ava. Of course Ava noticed.

"It's new," I say carefully. "I'm not ready to talk about it."

"Okay. But Lucy—whoever he is. If he makes you do that thing where you disappear into someone else's damage and forget to take care of yourself—"

"I know."

"Because you do that. You've always done that. You find the most wounded person in the room, and you pour yourself into them until there's nothing left for you."

"I know, Ava."

"I just need you to hear me say it. Because I didn't listen when you said it to me about Josiah, and I should have. Not because you were wrong—because listening matters even when you're going to do the thing anyway."

Something in my chest tightens. My sister. Warning me the way I warned her. The roles reversed.

"I hear you," I say. "I'll be at the dinner on Saturday."

"Good. And bring whoever he is, if you want. Or don't. Whatever you need."

I can't bring him. She doesn't know that the man I'd bring is already at the table—not across from her, but at the other end, the brother no one fully knows, the one Josiah calls contained, the one who lives in a church and carries a knife and watched me for three weeks before he let me see him watching.

We hang up. I sit in my office with the phone in my hand and the scarf against my throat and my sister's voice echoing—you find the most wounded person in the room—and I think: she's right. She's completely right. I know the pattern. I've written papers about the pattern. I could give a lecture on the neurological and developmental origins of the pattern, cite the attachment literature, diagram the cycle on a whiteboard.

And none of it—none of the knowing, the understanding, the clinical expertise—none of it is going to stop me from going to that dinner on Saturday and standing in the house where Benedict Ambrose grew up and looking for the thing that made him what he is.

The afternoon passes. Sessions, notes, the careful administrative machinery of a practice that runs on my ability to be present for other people's pain. I'm present. I'm always present. The part of me that functions has never failed.

At four fifteen, between clients, my phone buzzes.

Benedict:What are you doing Saturday?

He doesn't know. Doesn't know I just told Ava I'd come to his family's dinner. The coincidence—or synchronicity, or whatever it is when two people are circling the same point from different directions—makes something flutter in my stomach.

Having dinner at the manor. Ava invited me.

A long pause. Longer than any pause he's given me. I watch the screen, waiting.

You're coming to dinner. At my family's home.

Yes.

You'll be sitting at a table with my brothers. With their wives. With me.