Gerald had been gone for exactly four minutes before I started exploring.
I left the signed contract on the kitchen island, took my coffee, and walked through the penthouse slowly and deliberately the way you walk through a space you are trying to understand. Not snooping. Assessing. There is a difference and I am always on the right side of it.
What I found was this: the penthouse was beautiful the way a museum is beautiful.
Everything in its place. Everything intentional. Every surface clean and considered and entirely, perfectly empty of anything that suggested a human being actually lived here and had feelings about it. There were no takeaway menus shoved in a kitchen drawer. No coat thrown over a chair. No half-finished book left face-down on a cushion. No evidence anywhere of a man who ever got home at the end of a long day and simply put something down without thinking.
It was the most expensive and most quietly suffocating place I had ever been in my life.
I texted Lila a photograph of the living room. She replied in under ten seconds: this is a serial killer's apartment but make it luxury. I sent back a thumbs up. She replied: babe are you okay in there. I replied: define okay.
Lucien showed me around himself, which I had not expected. I had imagined some composed housekeeper walking me through the rooms with the detached efficiency of a hotel concierge. Instead Lucien appeared at nine in the morning in a grey shirt with his sleeves already rolled up, no jacket, no armour, which was the most human I had seen him look, and said simply, "I'll show you the east wing."
I followed him.
He walked like he moved through every space, like he had already measured it and found it acceptable. He didn't point things out so much as acknowledge them, a door here, a light switch there, the kind of tour that communicates I am fulfilling an obligation and not I want you to feel welcome. Which was fine. I wasn't here to feel welcome. I was here to feel at home eventually, which is a different thing entirely and takes longer.
The east wing was mine. He said it without ceremony, without making it generous, just stated it the way he stated everything. Three rooms, a bathroom that was honestly embarrassing in how beautiful it was, and a study with a window that looked over the whole city like the city had been arranged specifically for the view.
"The ground rules," he said, still facing the window.
Here we go, I thought.
"We don't enter each other's private spaces without asking. Breakfast is at seven-thirty if you want it. I don't do noise before eight in the morning." He turned. "And whatever you find in this building, you bring to me first. Not to lawyers, not to the press. Me."
I looked at him. "That last one wasn't in the contract."
"No," he said. "It wasn't."
We held that for a moment. Then I said, "Same rule applies to you."
Something shifted in his face. Not quite agreement. More like the expression of a man recalibrating exactly who he is dealing with. He gave me a single nod and walked out of the east wing without another word.
I stood at the window with the whole city below me and thought, well. This is my life now.
I unpacked methodically. Everything in its logical place, wardrobe organized by function not color because I am a practical person and not, as Lila once described me, a Pinterest board. I set up my work files on the study desk. I made the space mine in the quiet efficient way I make everything mine, without drama and without asking permission.
Then I got to the bottom of my second bag and took out the photograph.
The one of the two of us. Me at four years old on his shoulders, both of us laughing at something outside the frame. His hands were raised to hold my ankles and he looked like a man who had, for one afternoon at least, put down every heavy thing he was carrying.
I stood with it for a long moment. Long enough that Lila would have said something if she had been there. Long enough that I had to remind myself, gently and firmly, that grief was allocated and I had already used my window.
Then I walked to the wall above the study desk and hung it there. Small. Slightly crooked. The only personal object in an entire wing of a penthouse designed specifically to contain none.
I stepped back and looked at it.
It looked, honestly, a little defiant hanging there on that perfect empty wall.
Which felt exactly right.
That night I lay in the enormous bed and listened to the particular silence of a very expensive building, which is different from ordinary silence the way expensive cologne is different from deodorant. It has layers. It is deliberate.
Past midnight, I heard footsteps in the hallway outside my door.
They slowed. Stopped. Right outside.
I lay completely still, eyes open, listening. Not afraid. Just alert the way I am always alert when something unexpected happens near me. The footsteps had the rhythm of someone who had not planned to stop, who had been walking past and then, for some reason they apparently hadn't decided yet, hadn't.
I counted. Eight seconds. Nine. Ten.
Then the footsteps moved away, quiet and unhurried, back the way they came.
I stared at the ceiling for a long time after that.
Lucien Cross had walked past my door at midnight and stopped for ten seconds without knocking, without speaking, without any logical reason I could identify for pausing at all.
I was not going to think about that.
Absolutely, completely, one hundred percent not going to think about that.
I thought about it for another forty minutes before I finally fell asleep.
Tomorrow was going to be interesting.