Miss Vane—Is It Because Of A Boyfriend? (Alistair's POV)

I said yes.

Not because he'd said anything particularly persuasive, and not because I'd suddenly developed any deep feeling for this father and son. It was simply that Cassian had fallen asleep against my shoulder—like a small animal that had finally found somewhere safe—and I couldn't bring myself to say no.

I asked the front desk for a cot and settled Cassian in the inner room, drawing the blackout curtains closed. When I set him down he stirred, brow furrowing slightly, and I didn't leave right away. I crouched beside the bed and waited until his breathing evened out again, slow and deep, before I stood and slipped quietly back into the other room.

Alistair was sitting in the armchair by the floor-to-ceiling window. On the low table in front of him sat an open bottle of whiskey; his glass held about two fingers of amber liquid. One hand rested on the armrest, his body angled sideways, gaze settled on the city skyline beyond the glass. His expression was calm—but beneath that calm was something difficult to ignore, something that looked like exhaustion, or the particular weight of a worry that had gone unresolved for a very long time. With no one watching him, he'd stopped hiding it.

I stood in the doorway for a moment, just looking.

This wasn't the Alistair Voss I'd seen earlier today—the one in the perfectly pressed suit, every word measured, every pause feeling deliberate. The man by the window had his top button undone. He reached for his glass occasionally, and every so often his gaze drifted toward the inner room, and in those brief unguarded moments his expression went entirely soft—a tenderness with nothing else mixed into it. Then he'd look away, and the composed, unreadable mask would settle back into place.

He hadn't noticed me watching.

Standing there, I thought: this man is considerably more complicated than I'd given him credit for.

He turned his head, saw me, and said nothing. He simply lifted his glass a few inches in my direction—a quiet, unhurried invitation.

I crossed the room, sat down in the chair across from him, and poured myself a finger of whiskey from the bottle on the table. He watched me. The corner of his mouth moved—not quite a smile, but not the absence of one either.

We touched glasses.

The whiskey went down warm, carrying that faint trace of smoke that only comes with the good stuff, spreading through my chest and loosening something that had been pulled tight all day.

"How did it go at Croft Group today," he said first. His tone was easy, almost offhand.

"Well enough," I said. "I didn't flip the table, at least."

He looked at me. "That's a low bar."

I didn't answer. I took another sip.

I'm not sure exactly how the conversation shifted. Somewhere along the way I mentioned the installation piece I'd seen in the Croft building lobby—offhand, critical, saying the structural logic was a mess, that whoever designed it had spent a fortune on materials and still managed to kill the sense of space entirely. Alistair set down his glass and said he knew the piece. He named the designer, mentioned that the man had done decent public space work in another city a few years back, but that too many commercial commissions had done something to him—he'd started substituting accumulation for thought. I hadn't expected that kind of answer, and I said so, and he said he couldn't claim to know architecture, only that he could tell when a space made him comfortable and when it didn't. I told him that was actually the hardest kind of judgment to fake, and he raised his glass without responding, and the corner of his mouth moved again.

We kept talking. From the installation to urban renewal, from urban renewal to the cities I'd drifted through during those years of wandering—the neighborhoods and buildings that had stayed with me, the ones that felt like time and the texture of ordinary life had been pressed directly into the stone. Alistair listened without interrupting, and when I finished he said, quietly, that it sounded like I'd gone into design because I wanted to learn how to read those memories. The observation was accurate enough to make me uncomfortable in the specific way that happens when someone names something you don't usually say out loud. I looked toward the window and said, more or less, and then admitted—because the whiskey had done something to my better judgment—that maybe it was also because I had too many things I couldn't read in myself, and so I read other things instead. The moment it was out I regretted the honesty of it. He didn't follow up. He just nudged the bottle a few inches toward me and turned to look at the skyline, giving me room, and I felt a particular quiet gratitude for that—the kind that comes from someone knowing exactly when not to speak.

The second pour became a third without my noticing.

At some point the conversation wandered further from the professional, the way conversations do late at night with whiskey involved, sliding into territory that had no clear business justification. I'd been watching him for a while—the way he held his glass, the way his gaze moved between the window and the inner room, the careful steadiness of everything he did—and something about it nagged at me until I finally said it out loud.

"You never smile," I said.

He turned to look at me. "I smile."

"I haven't seen it."

There was a brief pause, and something shifted almost imperceptibly in his expression—not irritation, exactly, but the particular stillness of a man deciding whether to be amused. "You've known me for three days, Miss Vane."

I considered that for a moment, turning my glass slowly in my hand. "So I still have time," I said.

The silence that followed lasted perhaps four seconds. Then something happened to his face that I hadn't seen before—not the controlled near-smile he'd offered earlier, not the composed blankness he wore by default, but something genuine and unguarded, a real smile, quiet and unhurried, the kind that reaches a person's eyes before their mouth has quite finished deciding on it.

It changed him entirely.

I hadn't been prepared for that, and I found I had nothing to say. I looked back at my glass, and the warmth spreading through my chest had very little to do with the whiskey.

I set my glass down and leaned back, and felt the edges of my thoughts start to go soft and indistinct. I'd been awake all night, and now there was whiskey on top of that, and the room had grown dim and close and oddly comfortable in a way I hadn't anticipated and wasn't entirely sure how to account for. At some point I became aware that my weight had shifted—slightly, without my noticing—toward his side of the room. I didn't correct it. There was a strange, brief moment where I registered what was happening and simply didn't want to move.

He glanced over at me. He didn't say anything. He didn't shift away either.

Then he spoke. "Miss Vane." His voice was lower than before, carrying the same warmth as the whiskey, the same unhurried quality. "Would you be willing to be Cassian's mother?"

The same question. A second time. But it landed completely differently.

The first time he'd asked, my immediate response had been disbelief, then defensiveness—the instinct to dismiss it as a stranger making an arrogant proposition dressed up as an offer. But this time, in this dim room, with the faint sound of Cassian's breathing just audible from the other side of the wall, after three glasses of whiskey and an hour of conversation that had gone further than it had any right to, with the memory of that unguarded smile still sitting somewhere behind my sternum—

I didn't know the answer. I stared at the half-empty bottle on the table and felt a genuine, unsettling shift in my certainty.

My phone vibrated.

I looked down. Gideon. I picked up, and his voice came through with its usual lightness, asking how my day had gone. As I listened, the cottony blur at the edges of my thinking began to contract. Clarity returned, slow and deliberate. Gideon's voice was a reminder—I still had things to deal with, a past I hadn't fully accounted for, a future I hadn't yet mapped. What Cassian needed was stability, constancy, and those were precisely the things I was least able to give anyone right now. I knew what my answer to Alistair had to be. I'd known all along.

"I'm fine," I told Gideon, my voice steadier than I felt. "Go ahead—I'll talk to you later."

I ended the call and set the phone face-down on my knee. When I looked up, Alistair's expression was still composed, his eyes steady on mine. I drew a slow breath. I was about to speak—

"So," he said, his tone quiet and precisely placed, "the reason you turned me down before, Miss Vane—is it because of a boyfriend?"