Chapter 1: The Museum and the Mouse

Clara'POV

Half past five in the evening. I sat cross-legged on a blanket I'd pulled off the sofa, laptop perched on the edge of the coffee table, a variety show playing on speaker — volume cranked high enough to bounce echoes off the walls of this forty-foot Gothic living room. Spread across the island counter were three open bags of chips, a cup of hot cocoa that had long gone cold (extra sugar, obviously), two paintbrushes smeared with pigment, and a stack of colorful sticky notes I'd idly piled into a lopsided tower.

I'd planned today down to the minute. Wednesday afternoons he had his graduate seminar, which meant he never came home before eight — sometimes later. So after I'd shown my face for attendance at school and come back around noon, I'd reverted to my natural state with a clear conscience.

This house normally ran like a museum of surgical precision. Every object sat at its designated angle. The air carried some bespoke fragrance in a cold, clean register. The climate control held steady at his preferred low temperature. I'd been living here for two weeks and still didn't dare shift a single thing in the living room by so much as an inch. The only evidence that another living person resided here was the parade of candy wrappers I smuggled into the fridge each night and cleared away before he got home.

On-screen, the guests were debating "hard boundaries when living with a roommate." I shoved chips into my mouth and wondered: what were we, exactly? Roommates? Landlord and tenant? Or — husband and wife? The word made me shudder so hard I nearly dropped a chip into my cocoa.

I crushed the thought immediately. This was nothing more than a contract. He needed a human spouse who satisfied the conditions of his family trust. I needed an exit from the expectations my family had mapped out for my life. A fair exchange, conducted with mutual courtesy. I hadn't even chosen him. All I had to do was stay out of his way, avoid tripping his cleanliness triggers, and make sure he never felt he'd gotten the worse end of the deal.

"The soundproofing in shared apartments is terrible," I echoed one of the show's guests, glancing around. Floor-to-ceiling shelves of antique books. That impossibly high vaulted ceiling overhead. A hand-knotted Persian rug beneath my feet. Well, soundproofing wasn't exactly a concern here — I could scream in the third-floor studio and it probably wouldn't reach the ground-floor study.

I thought nothing of it and grabbed another fistful of chips, scattering crumbs all over the black marble island.

A sound came from the entrance hall. Barely audible — a key turning, a lock clicking open. I was doubled over laughing at the screen and heard none of it.

Not until the show cut to a commercial break and the volume dipped did I catch it: the faintest tap of a leather sole on stone, somewhere behind me.

I froze like someone had hit pause. The chip bag hung in midair. My head rotated slowly toward the front door.

Julian Mason stood there, briefcase in one hand, the other still resting on the door handle. His gaze traveled from the blanket on the floor, to the laptop blaring on the coffee table, to the crumbs across the island, and finally up to my face.

I'm dead.

What followed was a sequence of emergency responses that could only be described as catastrophic. I flung the chip bag behind the sofa — crumbs exploding everywhere. I scrambled to my feet, caught my foot in the blanket, and stumbled. I clawed the snack wrappers against my chest, trying to stuff them into my hoodie pocket, which was laughably too small. Then I lunged for the laptop to kill the audio, hit the wrong key, and a guest's shrieking cackle detonated through the cavernous space at full volume.

If this house was a museum, I was the unsupervised child who'd just knocked over a bucket of paint in the main gallery.

He said nothing. He simply looked down and began changing his shoes. But just before he did, I caught it — his brow furrowed, barely perceptibly, then smoothed out again.

He'd frowned. He was definitely angry. I knew that expression. Last semester I'd sat in on one of his public lectures, and a student had asked a question so devoid of logic that he'd given exactly this micro-frown. That student had wanted to sink through the floor on the spot. And right now, I was a thousand times worse.

I threw myself into cleaning the island — stacking the sticky notes, failing three times to get them straight. I carried the cocoa cup to the sink, sloshed a little, wiped it up with my sleeve. Then I planted myself in front of the sofa, hands clasped, head bowed, looking for all the world like a schoolchild awaiting a lecture.

He finished changing his shoes and walked over. He didn't glance at the island. He came straight to me and stopped about five feet away. I stared at the tips of my own socks. I could feel his gaze land on me — not a passing look but a sustained one. The back of my neck prickled.

The silence lasted roughly ten seconds. I counted each one in my head, and every second felt like a century.

"Ease up on the snacks." He finally spoke, his eyes settling on the chip bag poking out from behind the sofa. His tone was flat, tinged with something almost like a sigh.

It didn't sound like a husband talking to a wife, or a professor addressing a student. More like a weary father. In fairness, I had eaten three bags of chips and half a bag of chocolate drops today. The truth was I'd had four bags yesterday, but I wasn't about to volunteer that. I kept my eyes down and gave a single reply.

"Mm."

He didn't leave, didn't say anything more — just stood there looking at me. I opened my mouth, wanting to apologize, but had no idea where to start. Sorry I turned your house into a college dorm sounded too idiotic to say aloud.

"You didn't go to campus today?" he asked.