The Blackwell house was less a home than a statement. The kind carved in stone, with columns that suggested you'd be small on purpose in front of them. Emma wore her bravest dress and Sophie's bravest lipstick. She rehearsed not apologizing in the mirror until the mirror looked tired of her.
Ethan met her at the gate. For once, he looked nervous, which was worse than arrogant. He touched her elbow as they walked, a tether he didn't realize he needed.
Inside: a dining table that could host negotiations, not meals. Charles at the head, already drinking something older than Emma's ambitions. A woman to his right whose smile was an accessory.
"Emma," Charles said like he was reading it off a document. "Welcome to the experiment."
"Thank you," Emma said, sitting beside Ethan, who slid her chair in with gentle care that Charles registered as rebellion.
Dinner was an exercise in civilized hostility. Questions that weren't questions. Statements disguised as concern. At some point, Charles asked Emma what she thought about legacy. She said it meant leaving rooms kinder than you found them. He said it meant leaving rooms profitable. They both drank water as if it were a weapon.
Ethan didn't raise his voice. He didn't have to. He kept reaching for Emma's hand under the table, and each time he found it, the conversation shifted by an inch in their direction.
After, Charles asked to speak to Ethan alone. Emma wandered the hall with the pictures that told the version of this family that made sense to investors. A child in a suit. A woman cropped out at the waist. A man shaking hands with a prime minister.
In the study, voices. She didn't mean to hear. She didn't walk away either.
"You will end this," Charles said. "She is a distraction you cannot afford."
"She is a person," Ethan said. "And I am not for sale."
"You are always for sale," Charles said, clinical. "You are just too romantic to admit the price. Forty-eight hours, Ethan. Or I end her scholarship and the little safety nets she thinks she has. I will cut her clean out of your radius."
Silence. Emma put her hand on the wood paneling because the floor had a new angle she wasn't prepared for.
"You won't touch her," Ethan said, deadly calm.
"I will touch what I own," Charles said. "Forty-eight hours."
Emma moved before thinking. She stepped away from the door and into the hall, counted to eight like a coward, and went toward the front. She wanted the air and the night and a city that hadn't been built to trap her.
Ethan caught up at the steps. "Emma—"
She turned. "You have forty-eight hours to decide whether you're a person," she said. "Not whether you want me. Whether you want you."
"Don't go," he said, and for the first time, there was panic under the polish.
"Choose," she said. "Out loud." Her throat hurt. "Or we become a story I will not let myself reread."
He didn't grab her. He didn't beg. He didn't calculate. He stood very still and said nothing, which told her everything.
She walked down the drive, past the tastefully lit trees, past the gate that opened because money had told it to, and out into a night that smelled like rain deciding whether to fall.
Behind her, Ethan stood on the steps and closed his eyes.
Inside, Charles poured himself another drink and thought he had won.
Somewhere else in the city, Sienna stared at her reflection and wondered when the game had stopped being fun.
And in Emma's pocket, her phone vibrated with a new email—from the editor in the glittering atrium who had said "send me something." She opened it with shaking fingers.
Subject: Your voice.
Body: I meant it. Send me something real. Storms welcome.
Emma looked up at the sky.
"Alright," she whispered to the weather. "Let's see what you can make of me."
—End of Chapter 10—