Miss Vane—Is It Because Of A Boyfriend? (Alistair's POV)

I said yes.

Not because he'd said anything particularly persuasive, and not because I'd suddenly developed any deep feeling for this father and son. It was simply that Cassian had fallen asleep against my shoulder—like a small animal that had finally found somewhere safe—and I couldn't bring myself to say no.

I asked the front desk for a cot and settled Cassian in the inner room, drawing the blackout curtains closed. When I set him down he stirred, brow furrowing slightly, and I didn't leave right away. I crouched beside the bed and waited until his breathing evened out again, slow and deep, before I stood and slipped quietly back into the other room.

Alistair was sitting in the armchair by the floor-to-ceiling window. On the low table in front of him sat an open bottle of whiskey; his glass held about two fingers of amber liquid. One hand rested on the armrest, his body angled sideways, gaze settled on the city skyline beyond the glass. His expression was calm—but beneath that calm was something difficult to ignore, something that looked like exhaustion, or the particular weight of a worry that had gone unresolved for a very long time. With no one watching him, he'd stopped hiding it.

I stood in the doorway for a moment, just looking.

This wasn't the Alistair Voss I'd seen earlier today—the one in the perfectly pressed suit, every word measured, every pause feeling deliberate. The man by the window had his top button undone. He reached for his glass occasionally, and every so often his gaze drifted toward the inner room, and in those brief unguarded moments his expression went entirely soft—a tenderness with nothing else mixed into it. Then he'd look away, and the composed, unreadable mask would settle back into place.

He hadn't noticed me watching.

Standing there, I thought: this man is considerably more complicated than I'd given him credit for.

He turned his head, saw me, and said nothing. He simply lifted his glass a few inches in my direction—a quiet, unhurried invitation.

I crossed the room, sat down in the chair across from him, and poured myself a finger of whiskey from the bottle on the table. He watched me. The corner of his mouth moved—not quite a smile, but not the absence of one either.

We touched glasses.

The whiskey went down warm, carrying that faint trace of smoke that only comes with the good stuff, spreading through my chest and loosening something that had been pulled tight all day.

"How did it go at Croft Group today," he said first. His tone was easy, almost offhand.

"Well enough," I said. "I didn't flip the table, at least."

He looked at me. "That's a low bar."

I didn't answer. I took another sip.

I'm not sure exactly how the conversation shifted. Somewhere along the way I mentioned the installation piece I'd seen in the Croft building lobby—offhand, critical, saying the structural logic was a mess, that whoever designed it had spent a fortune on materials and still managed to kill the sense of space entirely.

Alistair set down his glass and said he knew the piece. He named the designer, mentioned that the man had done decent public space work in another city a few years back, but that too many commercial commissions had done something to him—he'd started substituting accumulation for thought.

I hadn't expected that.

"You know architecture?" I asked.

"Not really," he said. "But I can tell when a space makes me comfortable and when it doesn't."

I considered that for a moment. "That's actually the hardest kind of judgment to fake."

He didn't respond. He just raised his glass and drank, but the corner of his mouth moved again.

We kept talking.

From the installation to urban renewal, from urban renewal to the cities I'd drifted through during those years of wandering—the neighborhoods and buildings that had stayed with me, the ones that felt like time and the texture of ordinary life had been pressed directly into the stone. I said that whenever I walked into a place like that, I stopped thinking of architecture as a container. It felt more like a physical form that memory takes.

Alistair listened without interrupting. Then he said, "So you went into architectural design because you wanted to learn how to read those memories."

I paused.

It wasn't a question. It was a statement—and an accurate one, accurate enough to make me slightly uncomfortable in the way that happens when someone names something you don't usually say out loud, and you feel the reflex to pull back.

"More or less," I said, shifting my gaze toward the window. "Or maybe because I have too many things I can't read in myself. So I read other things instead."

The moment it was out I regretted it. Too honest. Too unguarded. The whiskey, probably.

I glanced down at my glass. Third pour. I hadn't noticed when that had happened.

Alistair didn't follow up. He just nudged the bottle a few inches toward me, then turned to look out the window, giving me room. In that moment I felt something close to gratitude—the specific, quiet kind that comes from someone knowing when not to speak. It relaxed me more than anything he'd said.

I set my glass down and leaned back, and felt the edges of my thoughts start to go soft and indistinct, like cotton filling in around them. I'd been awake all night, and now there was whiskey on top of that. My body was being entirely honest about its condition.

At some point I became aware that my weight had shifted—slightly, without my noticing—toward his side of the room. I didn't correct it. There was a strange, brief moment where I registered what was happening and simply didn't want to move.

He glanced over at me. He didn't say anything. He didn't shift away either.

Then he spoke.

"Miss Vane." His voice was lower than before, carrying the same warmth as the whiskey. "Would you be willing to be Cassian's mother?"

The same question. A second time.

But it landed completely differently.

The first time he'd asked, my immediate response had been disbelief—then defensiveness—the instinct to dismiss it as a stranger making an arrogant proposition dressed up as an offer. But this time, in this dim room, with the faint sound of Cassian's breathing just audible from the other side of the wall, after three glasses of whiskey and nearly an hour of conversation that had gone far more smoothly than it had any right to—

I didn't know the answer.

I stared at the half-empty bottle on the table and felt a genuine, unsettling shift in my certainty.

There was something in me when it came to Cassian—something that had been there from the first time I saw him. I couldn't name it cleanly. It wasn't pity, and it wasn't quite affection in any ordinary sense. It was stranger and deeper than either of those, like being pulled by something whose source I couldn't locate.

And Alistair—this man I'd only really started to know today—he could hold a conversation that went somewhere. He knew when to let a topic go. And the way he looked at Cassian was the kind of thing that couldn't be performed.

Did I want this?

I didn't know. I genuinely didn't know, and the fact that I didn't know was already making me uneasy.

My phone vibrated.

I looked down. Gideon.

I picked up. His voice came through with its usual lightness, asking how my day had gone, whether things had been all right.

As I listened, the cottony blur at the edges of my thinking began to contract. Clarity returned, slow and deliberate.

Gideon's voice was a reminder. I still had things to deal with—a past I hadn't fully accounted for, a future I hadn't yet mapped. Cassian's situation was fragile in ways that demanded more than I could currently offer. What he needed was stability, constancy—and those were precisely the things I was least able to give anyone right now.

I knew what my answer to Alistair had to be.

I'd known all along.

"I'm fine," I told Gideon, my voice steadier than I felt. "Go ahead with what you're doing—I'll talk to you later."

I ended the call and set the phone face-down on my knee. When I looked up, Alistair's expression was still composed, his eyes steady on mine.

I drew a slow breath. I was about to speak—

"So," he said, his tone quiet and precisely placed, "the reason you turned me down before, Miss Vane—is it because of a boyfriend?"