Sloane pov
The warning comes at breakfast. Caelan appears in the doorway of the morning room at eight-fifteen with his jacket already on and his coffee already finished.
"Gerald Holt will be here at two," he says, not looking up from his phone. "Keep it for an hour."
I pause with my teacup halfway to my lips. "Gerald Holt?"
Caelan's gaze flicks up, sharp and brief. "Yes."
I set the cup down. "Oh. My father."
The words land strangely even to my own ears. My father. Technically correct in this body, completely alien in my mouth.
Caelan looks at me then. "You just called your own father by his full name."
A beat of silence stretches across the table, Emmet pauses mid-chew as Jasper's fork hovers. Even Rowe glances up from his notebook.
I laugh quickly, and wave a hand like I can brush the awkwardness away. "Force of habit. He's always been Gerald in my head when I'm annoyed with him. Old habit from… well, you know how he is."
Caelan's eyes narrow slightly, studying me with that unnerving intensity. "An hour," he repeats. "No more."
"He's my father."
"He's a man who makes poor decisions and then requires other people to manage the consequences." He puts his phone in his pocket. "An hour."
He leaves before I can answer, which is a habit of his I am beginning to find genuinely irritating.
Emmet looks up from his toast. "Gerald's coming?"
"Apparently."
"He brings sweets," Emmet says with great seriousness. "The good ones, not the healthy kind Uncle Caelan approves of."
"I'll keep that in mind."
Rowe turns a page of his notebook without looking up. "Uncle Caelan doesn't like him,".
"I noticed."
"He gets angry when Gerald's name comes up," Jasper says from across the table, precise as always. "The same way he gets angry when someone says something at a board meeting that he knows is wrong but cannot correct yet."
I look at Jasper as Jasper looks back at me with the expression of a child who has catalogued considerably more than anyone has given him credit for.
"That's very observant," I say.
"I know," he says, and goes back to his breakfast.
Gerald Holt arrives at five past two and the first thing he does when he walks through the door is open his arms and say, "There she is," with such uncomplicated warmth that something in my chest does something I wasn't prepared for.
I walk into the embrace because Vivienne would and because, standing here in Vivienne's body with Vivienne's history pressing in from all sides, I find I cannot entirely refuse it.
He smells like cedar and expensive cologne that my body recognizes before my mind does, and he holds on for a moment longer than a performative greeting requires.
"Let me look at you," he says, pulling back, his hands on my shoulders, studying Vivienne's face with the specific relief of a man who has been worried and is trying not to show it. "You look well. Better than I expected, honestly."
"It's going fine," I say, which is true from a certain angle.
"Good." He squeezes my shoulders once and releases me, and his eyes move to the entrance hall, the high ceilings. "Cold house," he says quietly, more to himself than to me.
"It warms up," I say, which surprises me slightly because I think I mean it.
Caelan appears from the direction of the study with the specific quality of a man who has timed his entrance to the minute. He shakes Gerald's hand with perfect courtesy, says the right things in the right order, and the two of them in the same entrance hall have an aura I clock immediately — the aura of two people maintaining a performance for an audience of one, both of them aware of it, neither acknowledging it.
Gerald is warm, loud, and larger-than-life—the kind of man who fills a room to cover up his insecurities. Caelan is precise, proper, and completely unreadable, which means he's working much harder than he seems.
"We'll use the sitting room," I say, before either of them can arrange the afternoon into something more uncomfortable.
Caelan's eyes move to me. Then: "I'll be in the study."
It isn't permission and it isn't a warning. It's something in between, as I shrug it off and move on.
The triplets find Gerald within minutes, drawn by instinct or the smell of the sweets he produces from his coat pocket with the practiced guilt of a grandfather who knows exactly what he's doing.
Emmet takes three and immediately begins negotiating for a fourth. Rowe accepts one gravely, like receiving a formal gift. Jasper takes one, examines it, and says, "These aren't the ones from last time."
"Better ones," Gerald says, delighted.
"I'll reserve judgment," Jasper says, and eats it with great seriousness.
Gerald watches the children with warm, uncomplicated affection—the kind of man who finds kids easier than adults. I watch him watching them and think about what I know: his weak choices, the laundering scheme, the bad decisions he calls "bad luck."
I remember how he said "there she is" in the doorway, and I can't make the two sides of him fit together.
He loves her. He loved Vivienne without reservation. Watching him laugh openly at something Emmet said, his whole face unguarded, I believe it completely.
Weak men can love genuinely. That's what makes them complicated.
Once the triplets are sent back upstairs with the rest of the sweets and Mrs. Albright's reluctant approval, Gerald settles into his chair and looks at me like a man who's been waiting to speak.
"I want you to know," he says, "that you have something of your own in this. I made sure of it."
I keep my face neutral. "What do you mean?"
"The shares." He says it with quiet pride, a man presenting evidence of good fathering. "Holt family holdings in two Maddox subsidiaries — legacy position, goes back years ago, I had it structured so it transferred with the marriage, so it's yours regardless of how the contract resolves." He pauses. "You have access. Portfolio review rights, account level. I wanted you to have something that was yours, not contingent on him."
He says it like a gift. I look at my father's face, Vivienne's father, I correct myself, but the correction is getting slower and I say, "Thank you, Gerald," and mean it in ways he will never fully understand.
He stays for an hour and twenty minutes, which is twenty minutes longer than Caelan specified and I cannot bring myself to care. When he leaves he hugs me again in the doorway, the same cedar-and-cologne warmth, and says quietly into my hair, "You're stronger than you think you are, sweetheart, you always have been."