The coffee-spilling, lip-crashing, chest-adjacent disaster from the farmers market was standing in my doorway.My new assistant. In my office. The one space on earth that was entirely, controllably mine, where every surface was wiped twice dailyand every object sat at a precise angle and nothing,nothing, happened that I hadn’t anticipated.
My brain did what it always did. Scanned without permission. A sale-rack blazer with fraying cuffs. Shoes that were clean but scuffed at the toes. The bag, structured but worn at the strap—purchased with intention, carried well past its prime. Her hair was pulled back, dark curls fighting the restraint, a few of them already winning. Olive skin, warm-toned, catching the office light along her jaw in a way that was entirely irrelevant to her job qualifications.
She was beautiful.
I noticed it the way I noticed structural details in buildings, involuntarily and with irritation that it registered at all. High cheekbones. Full mouth. Dark brown eyes that looked directly at me without flinching, without the usual nervous glance-away that most people performed within three seconds of meeting me.
None of that mattered. What mattered was that she was a disruption installed in my controlled environment, and my brother had put her there.
"Absolutely not," I said. "Not her."
Miles’s smile didn’t waver. He looked at me, then at Anna, then back at me with calm patience.
"Anna, would you mind stepping out for just a sec?" he said. Like this was all perfectly normal.
She looked between us, nodded once, and stepped out. The door clicked shut behind her.
"What’s wrong with her?" Miles asked.
"It can’t be her."
"Because?"
I didn’t answer. The honest answer involved vanilla and a forty-eight-hour loop of replaying a stranger’s mouth against mine, and I would rather dissolve into the floor than say anyof that out loud. So I said nothing, which Miles took as an invitation to keep talking.
He always did. It was his worst quality. One of many.
"She’s qualified. She’s sharp. She’s not going to quit after a week, which puts her ahead of the last four."
"I said no, Miles."
He went quiet. That was worse than the talking. Miles going quiet meant he was switching tactics, reaching for the thing he knew would work, the one card in his hand that I couldn’t argue against.
"Mom called this morning," he said.
I looked at him.
"They adjusted her medication again. Higher dose." He kept his voice casual, the way he always did when he was handling me.
Careful Miles. Diplomatic Miles. The version of my brother that made me want to throw something at his head.
"She asked about you. She asks about you every day, Jace. And every day I tell her you’re fine. That you’re eating, sleeping, functioning like a normal human being."
"I am functioning."
"You went through four assistants in six months. The last one quit crying." He said it like he was reading a weather report. "Mom doesn’t know that. She doesn’t know about the exposure therapy or the sessions with Dr. Adler or any of it. She thinks you’re managing. I’d like to keep it that way, wouldn’t you?"
The thing about Miles was that he never said the quiet part out loud. He never drew the line between my inability to keep an assistant and our mother’s stress cardiomyopathy, the condition she developed because of what happened to me when I was eight. He didn’t have to. The arithmetic was simple enough for anyone who knew our family, and Miles knew it better than most.
Our mother worried. Every day since I was a boy, without fail, and her body carried the cost—the medication, the tremor in her hands she tried to hide by keeping them in her lap. All of it tracing back to me, to something I still couldn't talk about without the walls closing in and my lungs forgetting how to work.
I hated being maneuvered. I hated that it worked. I hated that my brother could stand there with his purposeful smile and his warm voice and gut me with a sentence about our mother’s medication dosage.
"Fine," I said. "Bring her back."
Miles didn’t gloat. He was too smart for that, at least. He opened the door, gestured her in, and we signed the contract in silence. Standard terms.
"Try to be nice," Miles said on his way out, squeezing my shoulder. I didn’t flinch. I wanted to, but I didn’t. Miles was one of three people on the planet who could touch me without warning and not send my nervous system into full revolt. He knew it. He used it sparingly, which was the only reason I tolerated it.
