My alarm goes off at six but my brain's been running since four — faculty meeting at nine, a stack of midterm essays that won't grade themselves, and a department review I've been dodging for a week. I swing my legs out of the too-narrow childhood bed and pad down the hallway toward the bathroom.
The door is locked. Steam curls from underneath, licking at the hardwood like a warning.
I knock. Nothing.
Knock harder. "Hello?"
"Occupied." Dominic's voice, muffled and utterly unhurried. Like a man with nowhere to be and no one's schedule to respect.
I check my watch. Elliot needs breakfast in twenty minutes, dressed in thirty, buckled into his booster seat in forty-five. There is no margin in this morning for a man who treats a shared bathroom like his personal spa.
"I need in there. My son has to get ready."
Nothing. Just the steady, arrogant rush of water.
"Dominic."
"I'm conditioning. Thirty seconds." A pause. The water doesn't change. "Maybe sixty."
The audacity of this man — scheduling his hair routine around my son's morning.
Twelve minutes. I pace the hallway. Check my watch. Pace again. My jaw locks tighter with every lap. Somewhere downstairs Harold is probably already in the garden, blissfully unaware that I'm contemplating homicide on the second floor.
I raise my fist to pound again and the door swings open.
He fills the frame. Nothing but a towel slung low across his hips — dangerously low, the kind of low that suggests gravity is one deep breath away from winning. Steam rolls off his shoulders like he's been manufactured in a factory specifically designed to ruin women's mornings.
Seven years and a CEO title have done obscene things to this man's body. The boy I remember was lean, almost lanky. This version is built — shoulders carved wide, chest that tapers to a stomach ridged with definition I refuse to count. Water slides down the groove between his pectorals, catches in the dip of his navel, disappears beneath terrycloth that's clinging to things I absolutely will not look at.
I look at them. Briefly. Involuntarily. My neck goes hot.
"Patience," he says, and his voice is pitched low enough to vibrate in places it has no business reaching. "is a virtue."
"So is not being an insufferable asshole at six in the morning."
His mouth twitches. One drop of water traces his temple, slides along the hard edge of his jaw, rolls down the tendon in his neck. I track it the way you track a car wreck — unable to stop, furious at yourself for watching.
He catches me. Of course he catches me. That mismatched gaze sharpens with something lazy and knowing.
"See something interesting, Professor?"
"I see a man blocking a doorway in a towel that's one sneeze away from a lawsuit."
He laughs — low, genuine, and it does something devastating to the lines around his eyes. He still doesn't move. The bathroom exhales humid air between us, mixing with the hallway cold, and the space in this doorway shrinks to something that feels like a dare.
"Ask nicely," he says. "And I might let you through."
"I'm not asking you for anything."
"No?" He leans against the frame. The towel shifts. I keep my eyes on his face with an effort that should qualify as cardiovascular exercise. "You used to ask me for things. Very sweetly, if I remember right." His voice drops to something private, something that belongs to dark rooms and bad decisions. "You used to say please like it was the only word you knew."
The memory detonates behind my ribs. His hands. My voice. A summer night when I didn't know yet that everything he whispered was temporary.
"Mama?" Elliot's voice from down the hall. "I'm hungry."
I step through the doorway sideways, my arm brushing his bare chest. The contact sends a current straight through my shirt, across my skin, into places I will aggressively not think about for the rest of this day.
I don't look back. I can feel him watching me walk away. Can feel that smirk burning between my shoulder blades.
By the time Elliot is fed, dressed, and delivered to school with his lunch box and his dinosaur, I'm running on caffeine and fury. The university doesn't improve things — a plagiarism dispute that eats my morning, a faculty meeting where the dean uses the word "synergy" eleven times, and then my phone lights up with a name that makes my molars grind.
Richard Weston.
I let it ring. He calls back immediately. I answer on the fourth ring because Richard Weston is the kind of man who will call the provost if you don't pick up.
"Professor Holloway. I understand you've filed a formal complaint against my son."
"Your son was caught in a compromising position in a university restroom with a freshman student during class hours. The complaint was the minimum response."
"Tyler tells me you've had it out for him all semester."
"Tyler tells a lot of things. His essays suggest creative fiction might be his real calling."
By the time I hang up, my hands are shaking and I want nothing more than to go home, pour wine into the largest glass I own, and sit in Vivian's study marking papers while Hartwell House settles its old bones around me.
Elliot chatters through the drive home — something about a boy who brought a lizard to show-and-tell and how it escaped under the teacher's desk. I make the right noises. My knuckles are white again.
The house appears at the end of the drive. Solid. Patient. Mine.
I walk through the front door, down the hall toward the study, and stop dead.
Boxes line the corridor. My boxes. My research files, my books, three years of lecture notes and syllabi. The mug Elliot painted for me when he was four — lopsided sunflowers, purple "Best Mom" — sits on top of the pile like a headstone.
The study door is open. I step inside and the room I knew is gone.
Vivian's reading chair has been replaced by a sleek glass desk with two monitors. Her oak bookshelves — the ones that held first editions she spent decades collecting — now display framed magazine covers. Dominic's face on Forbes. Dominic's face on Bloomberg Businessweek. Dominic shaking hands with people who own small countries.
A shrine to Dominic Langley, CEO, erected on the grave of everything Vivian loved about this room.
He's at the desk, jacket off, sleeves rolled to the elbow, typing something that's apparently more important than acknowledging my existence.
"What the hell is this?"
"Home office." He doesn't look up. "I have calls with three time zones this week. Needed a proper setup."
"This was Vivian's study. I've worked in this room for three years."
"And now I work here." He finally glances at me, that same cold amusement from the bedroom. "Your things are in the hall."
First the bedroom. Now this. He's erasing me from my own house with the systematic efficiency of a man who dismantles companies for a living.
"You can't just—"
"If you don't like the arrangement," he says, leaning back, fingers steepled beneath his chin, forearms flexing in a way I refuse to register, "you can always take my offer. Fair market value. Walk away comfortable." That smile — sharp, corporate, empty. "Save yourself the trouble of living with me."
I want to throw one of his monitors through the window. Want to ask how the boy who caught fireflies with me in this garden became this hollow thing in an expensive suit.
Instead I walk to the hallway. Stack the boxes in my arms — one, two, three — and carry them to my childhood bedroom without a word. Set them down next to the books from the nightstand, next to the clothes from the closet.
My entire life, boxed and exiled to a room with wallpaper I've hated since seventh grade.
My hands won't stop shaking. The mug with Elliot's sunflowers stares up at me from the top of the pile.
Second thing he's taken. I swear to myself it will be the last.