I Am Luna

"William, I'm Luna."

The words left my mouth before I could cage them, and the moment they did, the study went so silent I could hear the old clock in the corridor ticking off the seconds of my life. My hands were shaking. I pressed them flat against my thighs, but the silk of the dress betrayed every tremor.

William didn't move. He stood by the window, one hand braced on the frame, the city's evening light cutting a hard line down his jaw. For five seconds — I counted — he simply looked at me. Then he set down his glass with a care that terrified me more than any slam would have.

"Say it again," he said quietly.

"I'm Luna." My voice cracked on the second syllable. "The photos weren't me. The name wasn't mine. But the voice — every night, for six months, that was me. The piano videos. The song I played at the gala, the one everyone said sounded like random noise — that was the piece I used to send you at two in the morning when you couldn't sleep. *Étude*—"

"*Étude in E minor*," he finished for me. "Chopin. You told me your mother used to play it in the kitchen while she cooked."

I nodded, and my throat closed so tight I couldn't speak. He remembered. Of course he remembered. He'd built a whole house in his head for a woman who didn't exist.

"Nikki." He crossed the room. I flinched — eight months of instinct, bracing for the recoil, the disgust, the *you lied to me* — and he stopped a pace away, close enough that I could smell his cologne, cedar and something sharper underneath. "Look at me."

"I can't."

"You can."

"I catfished you." The words came out ugly, and I made myself say the rest of it, because he deserved that much. "I used someone else's face. I made you fall in love with a stranger. And then I panicked and blocked you, because I knew — I *knew* — that the second you saw me in person you'd—"

"Finish the sentence."

"You'd be disappointed."

He was quiet for a long moment. Then he did the thing I hadn't prepared for. He laughed. A low, disbelieving sound, more breath than humour, and it broke something loose in my chest.

"I wondered," he said, "the first time I heard your voice at the gala. You were arguing with a waiter about the wine, and I stood twenty feet away and felt the floor tilt. I told myself it was coincidence. Voices repeat. Half the city sounds like someone else." He reached out and, very slowly, so I could stop him, took my chin between his thumb and forefinger and lifted my face to his. "Then you played that piano. And I knew."

"You knew?" My eyes burned. "You *knew*, and you said nothing? You let me sit at your table, night after night, dying inside, and you just—"

"Yes."

"Why?"

"Because it wasn't mine to take." His thumb brushed once along my jaw, feather-light, and his grey eyes held mine without a flicker of the coldness I'd seen him turn on other people. "You gave me a name that wasn't yours, Nikki. You gave me six months of your voice and not one true detail, and I understood why. I've spent my life being looked at — for the name, for the money, for what the Duca family can do for people. You were the first person who ever spoke to me as if none of that existed."

"That's because I didn't know who you were."

"I know." A smile ghosted at the corner of his mouth. "That was the gift. And when I worked out who you were, I could have cornered you in the first week. I chose not to."

I pulled back, needing the distance to think. The fire had burned low. Outside, a car passed and its headlights swept the ceiling.

"So this whole time," I said slowly, "you've been waiting."

"I've been waiting for you to trust me with it." He straightened, and for once he looked almost uncertain, which was somehow worse than his stillness. "I won't pretend it cost me nothing. There were nights I nearly asked you outright. But if I'd dragged it out of you, you'd have run. You've been running from this since the day you set foot in my house. I'd rather have waited a year than watch you bolt."

I thought about the east wing. The doors I wasn't meant to open. All those evenings I'd sat across from him with my heart in my mouth, certain that the truth would detonate everything — and he'd been sitting there the whole time, holding the fuse, refusing to light it.

"That's an enormous thing to carry," I whispered.

"It's yours to decide what happens next." He stepped back, giving me the room I'd asked for with my body. "I'm not going to tell you it doesn't matter. It matters. You lied to me, and I've spent eight months loving a ghost and a girl in the same house, and I'm tired, Nikki. I'm tired of both of us pretending." His voice roughened. "But I'm not angry. I never was. What I am is *here* — and I've been here the entire time."

The tears finally came. Not the delicate kind. The ugly kind, hot and fast, and I didn't bother to hide them because there was no point left in hiding anything.

"I thought you'd hate me," I managed.

"I know you did."

"I thought—" I swiped at my face with the back of my hand. "I thought if you saw me properly, the real me, you'd realise you'd been sold a lie and you'd want it undone. I've been so scared, William. Every day. Every single day in this house."

He crossed back to me then, and this time he didn't stop at a pace away. He pulled me into his chest, one hand cradling the back of my head, and I stood there in my borrowed silk and let myself be held by the man I'd been lying to for eight months, and it should have felt like defeat. It didn't. It felt like putting down something I'd been carrying since I was fourteen years old and a boy at a school dance had looked straight through me.

"I see you," he said into my hair. "I've seen you since the gala. That's the whole trouble."

I laughed — a wet, broken, ridiculous sound — and his arms tightened.

Somewhere in the corridor, the clock struck the hour, and neither of us moved.