Chapter 3

Rain struck my bedroom window hard enough to wake me.

The scream was what made me sit upright.

Mine.

For a few seconds I did not know where I was. My breath came too fast, the room dim and unfamiliar until the blue walls emerged from the dark and the alarm clock glowed red beside the bed.

5:47 a.m.

Saturday.

The date.

“Mom,” I whispered.

In the dream she had been standing on the edge of a cliff in a white dress, storm wind pulling at the fabric. I had run toward her, shouting, but she never heard me. When she finally turned, her face had looked far away—already gone.

Then she fell.

I pressed both hands over my eyes until the image faded.

The dreams had followed me since childhood. Recently they had become vivid again, perhaps because Dad’s health had turned every ordinary silence into a threat.

Glow-in-the-dark stars still clung to my ceiling from when I was seven. Mom had put them there herself.

I stared at them until my breathing steadied.

My bedroom was soundproofed, officially because I had begged Dad for privacy. Unofficially because the first time one of my nightmares sent him running upstairs, his blood pressure had climbed high enough to frighten both of us.

Protecting him from stress had become a reflex.

By breakfast, the rain had softened.

Dad was in the kitchen flipping pancakes.

“Big day,” he said.

I stabbed mine with unnecessary force. “Don’t remind me.”

He laughed, but his hand trembled as he reached for his coffee.

I noticed.

I always noticed.

“Alexander is a good man,” he said.

“You keep saying that as though repetition will make him less frightening.”

“Thirty-two. Distinguished career. Graduate of the highest command academy—”

I nearly choked on orange juice. “Thirty-two?”

Dad blinked. “I hadn’t mentioned that?”

“No. You forgot the small detail that he has a decade of adulthood on me.”

“Ten years is not a scandal.”

“I’m memorizing pediatric dosages. He’s commanding armies.”

“Technically—”

“Please do not make it worse.”

He hid a smile.

When I stood to leave for Saturday pharmacology, he stopped me.

“Grace.”

I turned.

“Keep an open mind. That’s all.”

The tiredness around his eyes softened my answer.

“I’ll try.”

Mia was waiting at campus under an aggressively yellow umbrella.

The second she saw me, she announced, “Emergency shopping after class.”

“Absolutely not.”

“Lucious is the kind of restaurant where they use tweezers to arrange dinner. You are not wearing your usual black flats.”

“I like my black flats.”

“They like you too much. That is the problem.”

After four hours of pharmacology, she dragged me downtown before I could escape.

The dress she chose was midnight blue silk, simple through the neckline and fitted without being revealing. I stepped out of the dressing room and did not immediately recognize myself.

Mia’s expression went still.

“Oh, Grace.”

“Too much?”

“Exactly enough.”

I looked again.

The color made my eyes seem brighter. The shape made me stand straighter.

A small, unfamiliar thread of confidence moved through me.

Then Mia held up silver heels.

“No.”

“Yes.”

“I will die.”

“You’ll look excellent doing it.”

By late afternoon I had a dress, shoes, simple earrings, and considerably less money on my father’s card than Mia would have spent if given full authority.

On the taxi ride home, I kept telling myself the same thing.

Dinner. Conversation. Goodbye.

Alexander Reeves lived in a world of national briefings and armed convoys. I lived in scrubs, lecture halls, and a house where my father overwatered the basil on the windowsill.

There was no reason for our paths to cross more than once.

I believed that right up until I met him.