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A spell seemed to be winding around the room, almost as though she’d brought the Christmas magic she was famed for curating in people’s homes and spread it through him. Already. Without so much as touching a pine needle.

“Why do I feel like you’re speaking from experience?” His voice emerged hoarse, but it did the same thing as a blade, piercing the spell she’d created. Her hand dropped away, her face suddenly expressionless. But her eyes were still soft, laced with pity. Pity he would usually reject in spades.

It was the worry.

The way Ellie was changing, pulling away from him, losing herself to a sadness that was impossible to help her with.

How the hell was he supposed to parent? What did he know about kids, much less teenage girls? Even as a teenager himself, he’d been interested more in women than his contemporaries… he was completely adrift.

“Everyone’s known loss,” she said with a small lift of a shoulder. “But not like this. I have no experience that compares to yours—only, I do know a fair bit about blame and guilt, and I can see you’re carrying more than your fair share of it. I suspect it makes you feel better to feel worse, if that makes sense.”

His gut rolled; he felt…seen, and not in a good way. He felt like a bug under a microscope, that she’d effortlessly captured and was examining. None of his usual defences seemed to be working.

“You didn’t ask for my advice, but here it is. Give yourself time. This all happened so recently—you, and Ellie, just need to sit with it a while.”

He grimaced, looking around her room. “She goes out of her way not to leave anything personal here. Like it’s temporary. How can I make her see this is her home now?”

Why was he asking the opinion of a virtual stranger? Perhaps because she was a stranger. He didn’t have to pretend with her, didn’t have to be ‘Dimitrios Konstantino’. Or maybe just because she was there, and she seemed to understand the weight of what he was dealing with, his burden of desperation.

“I think that will take time, too,” she said, but she moved away from him, deeper into the spacious room. With each step she took, he felt as though a cord was pulling him, trying to make him move after her. He stood his ground, crossed his arms over his chest for good measure. “But perhaps a makeover would be in order,” she said, softly, almost apologetically. When she turned to face him, her nose was wrinkled.

The first time they’d seen each other, he’d been too focused on the job at hand to pay much attention to her beauty, though looking back, his body had reacted, trying to jolt him into the moment. But now, having secured her decoration services, alone in Ellie’s room, he found it hard not to catalogue every detail of her appearance. From her ,e bun that he ached to loosen so her hair cascaded over her shoulders to her slim yet curvy figure, her wide-set blue eyes, high cheekbones, pouting pink lips, she was both stunning and graceful. Even more reason not to move.

When she’d touched his arm in a simple gesture of sympathy, desire had exploded through him, a bright wave of electric light.

“I mean, it’s a lovely room,” she continued, clearly unaware of the feelings lurching through him. “But maybe we could make it a bit more appropriate for a teenage girl.”

He let out a long whoosh of breath. “I have no idea how to do that, obviously.”

“Well, you’re not a teenage girl,” she said with a smile. “And nor am I. But I was one, once, and I have nieces around this age, so I have a pretty good idea of what they’re into.”

Dimitrios was not a man who cried. Not since he’d been about seven years old and his older brother had taken something he cherished and destroyed it for fun. Only, his father had smacked him for the weakness of showing emotion, and Dimitrios had learned the lesson. But in that moment, he experienced such a welling of relief, he honestly felt as though he could have buckled to his knees, at her feet, weeping with gratitude.

He did not.

“The wearing black thing,” she said, tapping a finger to the side of her mouth. “Is that since the accident? Or is she emo or whatever?”

“Since Ben,” he said, frowning. “More or less. Laura adopted the habit of always wearing black, and Ellie followed suit.”

Chloe’s face softened in sympathy. “The poor love. She’s been wallowing in sadness for so long.” Her eyes alighted now with a new sense of purpose. “Okay, you’ve got me,” she said, lifting one shoulder, and he frowned, not understanding what she meant. “My empathy is sufficiently engaged. I’ll do whatever it takes to help you help her. But it’s a big job.”

He nodded, immediately understanding. In his world, money talked, and he suspected that was the same with all her clients. “You need a bigger fee. I understand. Whatever you want⁠—”

“No, no,” she said, quickly. “The fee isn’t the problem. It’s time and manpower.”

He waited for her to explain.

“I’m going to need to start sooner than anticipated, and a week’s not going to cut it. More like two weeks, three if you want me to do her room as well. And while I’ll try to source some local labour to help with the physical stuff, if I can’t, you’ll have to help too, okay?”

At that point, he would have promised her anything if it meant the possibility of getting Ellie through this and so he nodded once, with no concept of how much both of their lives were about to change.

CHAPTER 2

THINGS WITH ELLIE lurched from bad to worse over the next few weeks, so by the time the start of December rolled around, he was on tenterhooks waiting for Chloe to return. In his mind, he’d come to conflate her arrival with the beginning of everything being fixed. Or at least to him being less alone.

True, there was Jane, but she seemed as clueless as him when it came to Ellie. That was part of what he liked about Jane, he supposed—she was efficient, helpful, pleasant but despite her having worked for Dimitrios for the better part of a decade, he didn’t know so much as her parents’ names. She wasn’t interested in forming deep personal bonds with her employer—or his adopted daughter.

It wasn’t that Ellie was ever rude or spoke out, more that she was just a shell. Always quiet and withdrawn, not telling him anything. He had memories of the happy, laughing little curly-haired thing she’d been as a toddler, then a young girl. Losing Ben had been devastating and she’d grown up fast, yet traces of that little girl had remained, for a while. But now? She was unrecognizable. He was living with a stranger.