He stood in the center of my master suite as if he had always belonged there, broad shoulders wrapped in pale silk, one side of the robe hanging open across his chest. In one hand, he held my crystal scotch glass. With the other, he dragged his fingertips over my duvet like he was inspecting property he intended to keep.
My mother was sitting on the velvet bench at the foot of my bed, using two fingers to scoop my eight-hundred-dollar face cream out of its jar. She rubbed it into her skin without a flicker of guilt, as casually as if it had been bought on clearance at a drugstore.
Neither of them looked embarrassed.
Neither of them looked surprised to see me.
“Don’t just stand there, Vanessa,” my mother said. “Your brother is exhausted. You can sleep with the crew.”
For a second, I truly thought I had misheard her.
I stood in the doorway staring at my own room — my pale curtains, my marble bathroom, my private suite, the low hum of the yacht’s generators under the floor — and none of it felt real. It was as if two people from a life I had spent years escaping had stepped into my present and decided it belonged to them.
My throat tightened so completely I couldn’t answer.
