Chapter 4

I should explain how I knew Damien Voss.

Two years ago, I was in the worst stretch of my life.

Ryan and Lexi hadn't started yet—or if they had, I didn't know it. What I knew was that my mutism had flared badly after a particularly difficult dinner with Margaret Calloway, during which she'd described my silence as embarrassing for everyone, and I had sat there unable to respond, burning from the inside.

My therapist had suggested an online peer support group for adults with situational mutism. I joined it quietly, under a screen name I'd chosen at random: SH.

The group had a buddy-pairing system. You were matched with someone at a similar stage and asked to check in once a week.

My match had a profile picture of a pink cartoon rabbit. Username: Angel.

First message I sent:

【Hi. I'm SH. I guess we're paired together. I'm not sure what to say, so—hi.】

No response for four days.

I sent another one anyway.

【Still here if you want to talk. No pressure.】

And another.

【I made lemon cookies today. First time they came out right. Small victory, I know, but it felt like something.】

On day nine, I sent a voice memo. Just me talking about nothing—a walk I'd taken, a bookshop I'd found, the way the light hit the river in the late afternoon.

On day ten, Angel responded.

【That bookshop sounds nice. What was it called?】

We talked for the next eight months.

Slowly at first. Then every day. Then multiple times a day. I assumed Angel was a woman—the pink rabbit, the handle, something in the sparseness of the writing that felt private and guarded in a way I associated with women who had learned to protect themselves.

I was wrong about almost everything.

The first time we spoke on the phone—six months in, during a night I couldn't sleep—I heard a voice I had not expected.

Low. Male. Unhurried.

"Angel?" I said.

A pause.

"Damien," he said. "My name is Damien."

I nearly dropped the phone.

There was a long silence.

"I should have said something earlier," he said. Not apologetic. Just factual. "I kept the profile from my sister's account. It seemed easier than explaining."

"Your sister's—"

"She's gone," he said simply.

Something in the way he said it stopped me from asking more.

That night, we talked for four hours.

About nothing important. About everything.

I told him about the accident. About the silence that had followed. About learning to speak again and never quite trusting my own voice after that.

He told me about a family empire with too many people who wanted pieces of it, and too few he trusted, and years of fighting a war that was necessary and exhausting and had cost him things he hadn't known were priceable until they were gone.

He didn't tell me his last name for another three months.

When I searched it, I sat with the results for a long time.

Damien Voss. Director, Voss International Holdings. Former head of the European Voss syndicate. A photograph from six years ago: a man at a conference table, sharp-jawed, looking at the camera with an expression that disclosed nothing.

The man who had sent me a voice memo of himself laughing at a bad joke I'd made about lemon cookies.

I sat with that dissonance for a while.

Then I sent him a message.

【You could have told me.】

【Would you have kept talking to me if I had?】

I thought about it honestly.

【Probably not.】

【Then I made the right call.】

I thought about it again.

【...Fair enough.】

……

Ryan had been in my life so long that I had never thought of it as a cage.

That was the thing about cages built from love—you didn't notice the bars until you started pressing against them.

You can't work, Sophia. What would you even do? You'd freeze up in any real situation.

Don't wear your hair like that to family dinners. Mom will think you're trying too hard.

You don't need to go to that. It'll be loud. You'll have an episode.

Just let me handle it. You're better at the background stuff anyway.

Each one of those sentences, on its own, was nothing.

Accumulated over three years, they were the blueprint of a woman who had slowly stopped taking up space.

Damien never did that.

He never once suggested there was something I shouldn't try.

The first time I told him about the work I'd done—the account management, the financial patterns, the way I'd quietly maintained a parallel record of the Calloway assets—he was quiet for a moment.

Then he said: "You're more dangerous than they know."

I laughed.

"I mean it," he said. "That's a skill, Sophia. A real one. Don't let anyone convince you it isn't."

I had replayed that sentence more times than I could count.

……

He arrived at my apartment at 1 a.m.

I heard the car first—the low sound of an engine, then silence. Then a knock at the door.

I was still on the floor, still unable to speak properly, my voice doing the locked-up thing it did when the mutism clamped down.

I opened the door.

Damien was taller than I'd pictured. Lean, dark-coated, water on his shoulders from the rain. He looked at me for a moment—taking in the floor-sitting, the reddened eyes, the absence of sound—and didn't comment on any of it.

He just said, "Pack a bag. Whatever you need for a week, maybe longer."

I stared at him.

He looked back, patient.

"You said okay," he said. "In the message. Two weeks ago. Remember?"

I did remember.

【You could just marry me instead.】

【Okay.】

"That's—" My voice was barely working. "That was—I didn't mean—"

"I know you meant it," he said. "You're careful with words. You always have been."

I looked at him.

At this man I'd talked to for two years, who knew things about me that Ryan never thought to ask, who had flown overnight from wherever he'd been because I'd gone quiet on the phone.

"I have a bag," I said finally. "Give me ten minutes."