Chapter 1
The morning my father tried to arrange my future, I was thinking about freedom.
Final exams were close enough that every notebook on my desk had begun to feel temporary. Soon there would be no more lectures before sunrise, no more pharmacology cards tucked into coat pockets, no more classmates discussing residencies and job applications as if adulthood were a train already leaving the platform.
I tied my hair into a ponytail, grabbed my bag, and headed downstairs humming to myself.
Halfway down, I stopped.
The house was too quiet.
My gaze went automatically to the framed photograph on the wall. Mom, caught forever in warm afternoon light, smiling at whoever had stood behind the camera.
“Morning, Mom,” I murmured.
She had died when I was young enough to remember the shape of her absence more clearly than the details of her voice. Some mornings I still spoke to the photograph. Dad did too, though he pretended he didn’t.
“Dad?”
No answer.
A familiar coldness opened beneath my ribs.
His health had been unreliable for months. A cough that lasted too long. Hospital appointments he dismissed as routine. Afternoons when he sat down halfway through a task and claimed he was only taking a break.
“Dad?”
I found him in the living room with a cup of tea balanced between both hands.
Relief left me so quickly it came out as irritation. “There you are.”
He glanced up. “Looking for me already?”
“Don’t disappear without answering me.”
His smile softened. “I’m not going anywhere yet.”
Yet.
He had begun using words like that lately. Soon. Someday. When the time comes. As though death were an appointment on his calendar and he was trying to make me comfortable with the date.
I hated it.
I dropped my bag beside the sofa and sat next to him. “What is it?”
“What makes you think something is wrong?”
“You’re smiling like a man who has already committed a crime.”
His shoulders shook with a quiet laugh. Then he set down his tea.
“Grace Zane.”
I closed my eyes. “Absolutely not.”
“I haven’t asked anything yet.”
“You used my full name. The answer is no on principle.”
“Humour your ageing father.”
“Emotional manipulation before eight in the morning. Impressive.”
He laughed again, but the sound ended in a breath that seemed to cost him more than it should have.
That was enough to make me listen.
“You remember my old friend Richard Reeves?”
“The retired military officer? The one you’ve been telling stories about since I was old enough to pretend to understand government contracts?”
“That one. His son is back in town.”
“Good for him.”
Dad’s eyes brightened with entirely too much satisfaction. “I want you to have dinner with him.”
I stared.
He stared back.
“Dinner,” I repeated.
“A date, technically.”
I nearly inhaled my own tongue. “Dad.”
“One date.”
“His son is Alexander Reeves.”
“Yes.”
“General Alexander Reeves.”
“Yes.”
“The man who looks like he could issue a court-martial with his eyebrows.”
Dad began laughing hard enough that I had to reach for his teacup before he spilt it.
“I am serious,” I said.
“So am I. Alexander is a good man.”
“He’s terrifying.”
“Those are not mutually exclusive qualities.”
“That is not reassuring.”
Images from television surfaced uninvited: a dark uniform, a hard profile, an expression that never seemed to soften for cameras. He was famous in the peculiar way military men became famous—respected, discussed, rarely understood. Every photograph made him look as if he had somewhere more important to be.
And my father wanted me to spend an evening sitting across from him.
“I’ll faint before dessert,” I muttered.
Dad’s amusement faded.
“Gracie.”
That tone had been defeating me since childhood.
I looked at him.
Really looked.
The skin beneath his eyes had gone thin and shadowed. His hands, once steady enough to repair anything in the house, trembled faintly around the porcelain cup.
“I worry about you,” he said.
My throat tightened. “Then don’t.”
“I don’t know how.”
“You’ll be here.”
His expression changed in a way I did not want to understand.
“I hope so.”
“You will be.”
He reached for my hand. “I want to know that if life becomes difficult, you won’t have to face everything alone.”
My eyes burned.
“Dad.”
“Just meet him. That’s all I’m asking. One dinner. One conversation. If you hate him, you never have to see him again.”
I pulled my hand away long enough to point at him. “This is emotional blackmail.”
“Yes.”
I blinked. “You’re admitting it?”
“I’m too old to waste time pretending.”
A laugh escaped me despite myself.
There it was: the hopeful look he had been trying to hide beneath jokes. And beneath that, fear.
Not fear for himself.
For me.
I exhaled. “Fine.”
His face lit so quickly it made me regret speaking.
“One date,” I warned.
“One date.”
“If he scares me, I’m leaving.”
“Fair.”
“And this is the last time you arrange my love life.”
“Of course.”
“You said that suspiciously fast.”
He only smiled.
I grabbed my bag and headed toward the front door before he could add conditions.
Outside, the morning air was cool against my face. I stood on the porch for a moment with my phone in my hand and the strange certainty that somewhere in the same city, a man I had never spoken to had just been placed on a collision course with my life.
I told myself it was only dinner.
I did not yet know how badly I would underestimate that sentence.
