Tyler at the Door

Tyler didn't knock. He never had, not since we were seven and he'd climbed through my bedroom window because his parents were shouting again. He just appeared in the doorway of the Ducas' garden room, rain darkening the shoulders of his jacket, and said, "We need to talk."

I set down the cup I'd been holding for ten minutes without drinking from it. "Jessica know you're here?"

"Jessica knows where I am." He stepped inside and closed the door behind him, and the soft click of it felt like a lock turning. "That's not what I came about."

Outside, the last of the storm dragged itself across the lawn. The garden room smelled of cut stems and wet stone. I stayed where I was, half behind the sofa, as though furniture might serve as a witness.

"Then what?"

He looked at me for a long moment. Tyler had a way of doing that — of making you feel like the only lit window in a dark street. It had worked on me for four years. It was working now, which was precisely the problem.

"I don't like people messing with what's mine," he said.

"Am I yours, then?" The laugh came out sharper than I meant it to. "Because I missed the memo. And you've got a girlfriend, in case the last party slipped your mind."

His jaw moved. "That's not—"

"No, you don't get to do that. You don't get to stand in a house that isn't yours and start claiming things." My voice climbed, and I let it. "You showed up at my door at half eleven at night. What did you think was going to happen?"

Tyler exhaled and dragged a hand through his hair. For a second he looked less like the football captain and more like the boy who used to sit on my garden wall, kicking his heels against the brick, waiting for me to come out.

"There's a girl who owes me an explanation," he said quietly. "I keep thinking about her. Every bloody day. And she won't tell me what I did."

My stomach dropped. "Tyler—"

"You wrote me three pages, Nikki. Three pages, and then you stopped speaking to me for a year, and now you're living in the Ducas' house and flinching every time the man walks into a room." He took a step closer. "So which is it? Am I the one you wanted, or am I the one you're hiding from?"

The truth sat behind my teeth like a stone. I couldn't swallow it and I couldn't spit it out.

"You need to go home," I said.

"I'll go when I've said my piece." He folded his arms, and his voice went flat, businesslike — a tone I'd never heard from him before. "William already suspects you. Has done since the start."

The room tilted. "What?"

"He hasn't said it to me. He doesn't have to." Tyler's eyes didn't leave mine. "You think I didn't notice the way he watches you at that table? Like he's trying to place a face he's seen before. He asked Sophia about you. Twice. She told me."

"That's not—people ask about guests—"

"He doesn't ask about guests." Tyler let that land. "He doesn't ask about anyone, Nikki. He's the most closed-off man in this city and he's been asking about you without proof of a single thing. That's not curiosity. That's a man building a case."

I pressed my back against the sofa and made myself breathe. William, at the gala, saying *I wondered when I first heard your voice*. William in his study, telling me not to call him Mr Duca. I had spent months telling myself I was invisible in this house. I had been anything but.

"What do you want from me?" I heard how thin my voice had gone.

"For you to stop lying to everyone in this house," Tyler said. "Including me. But since you won't, I'll settle for this — there's a thing on Saturday. A dinner, no name on the invitation, everyone who matters in this city in one room. You're coming. And you're wearing a dress."

"Absolutely not."

"You're coming," he repeated, "because if you don't, the next person who asks you a question won't be me. And I'd rather you were standing next to someone who'd notice if you stopped breathing."

"Is that a threat or a rescue, Tyler? Because I genuinely can't tell."

His face did something complicated. "Neither. Both. I don't know anymore."

I thought of William, who had said *on my turf I decide when guests leave*, and of the messages from a stranger called Luna that still sat unanswered in a folder I couldn't bring myself to delete, and of my own thumb pressing *it's over* like a coward. Two men. One of them wanted the girl I'd invented, and one of them wanted the girl I'd been. Neither of them had ever been offered the girl in this room.

"Jessica will be there," I said.

"Yes."

"Then no."

"Nikki—"

"I said no." I walked past him to the door and held it open, and the wet air came in off the garden and smelled like the sea, absurdly, impossibly, like the house William once promised to build for a woman who didn't exist. "You've said your piece. Now go home to your girlfriend and leave me to work out which of you I'm actually frightened of."

Tyler stopped in the doorway. Rain had started again, thin and silver in the lamplight.

"For what it's worth," he said, not turning round, "I never stopped thinking about that letter. Not once. That's the explanation you owe me."

Then he was gone down the drive, and I stood alone in the empty room with the door still open, and I understood, with a coldness that had nothing to do with the weather, that I had just been given a choice between a man who wanted to protect me and a man who wanted to possess me — and I could no longer tell which was which.