I didn't reach for the page. I closed my eyes instead, and the snow outside turned into another winter.

---

"Come back here, you stupid kite!"

I was eight. The wind in the Hamptons had teeth that December, and it snapped my butterfly kite clean out of my hands. It sailed over the stone wall and tangled in the Sterling family's maple tree.

"Violet, leave it!" our housekeeper called from the porch. "Those people don't like visitors!"

I didn't leave it. The wall was too tall to climb, so I crawled along the hedge until I found a gap. It was just big enough for a skinny girl in a puffy coat.

I squeezed through and stopped.

A boy knelt on the frozen lawn. His feet were bare and red, and his back was straight as a spear. My kite lay a few inches from his knees.

"Is that yours?" he asked. He didn't turn his head.

"Yeah." I grabbed it. "Why are you kneeling in the snow?"

"Go home."

"Your toes are purple."

"I said go home."

I went. I got as far as the hedge before I looked back. He hadn't moved. Not even to shiver.

That night I asked the gardener's wife about him.

"That's Alex," she whispered, like his name was a swear word. "Mr. Sterling's boy from another woman. He talked back to the new Mrs. Sterling. No supper, no house, until he says sorry."

"What if he never says sorry?"

She sighed. "Then he'll be out there a long time, sweetheart."

---

The next evening I crouched in the hedge gap with a slice of marble cake I'd stolen from the kitchen.

He was still there.

I didn't hold it out. I took a big bite right in front of him. Then another. My cheeks puffed up like a chipmunk's.

His eyes slid toward me. "Are you serious?"

"Mm-hmm." I chewed loudly. "It's really good."

"You're cruel."

"Mm-hmm."

He lunged. He snatched the cake right out of my fingers and shoved the whole thing into his mouth, glaring at me the entire time.

I grinned at him with the gap where my front tooth used to be.

He stopped chewing. For one second, the corner of his mouth twitched.

"You're weird," he said with his mouth full.

"I'm Violet."

"Still weird."

---

After that, I went through the hedge every day.

I brought him warm cookies in my coat pockets. Hot cocoa in a thermos that burned my hands. Gossip I'd heard from the gardeners.

"Mrs. Sterling's sister got a nose job," I told him once. "A bad one."

He actually laughed. It sounded rusty, like he didn't use it much.

I learned how things worked over there. Small punishments every three days. Big ones every five. Locked closets. Missed meals. A belt, once, that he wouldn't talk about.

"Why don't you tell somebody?" I asked.

"Who?" He picked at a scab on his knuckle. "Nobody in that house wants me, Violet."

"I want you."

He looked at me for a long time. Then he flicked my forehead.

"Weird," he said again. But softer.

---

The summer I turned eleven, I climbed the wall for the first time.

"Alex!" I hissed, hanging over the top. "Fireflies! Down by the pond, come on—"

The words died.

Two men in black writhed on the grass below. One was clutching his stomach. One was screaming.

Alex stood between them with a knife in his hand.

He looked up. Something warm and wet hit my cheek.

My fingers slipped off the stone, and I fell.

I never hit the ground. He caught me against his chest, his shirt soaked dark and sticky.

"Careful," he said, frowning down at me like I'd done something stupid.

"You—they—"

"They came for me. Not you." He carried me to the hedge and pushed me through the gap, gentle but firm. "Go home. Wash your face. Don't tell anyone."

"Alex, are you okay?"

"Go, Violet."

I didn't sleep that night.

The next morning, a little plate sat in the hedge gap. Chestnut cakes, still warm, lined up in a neat row.

No note. He didn't need one.

---

Then my father fell.

Richard Hayes, the man who carried me on his shoulders at every Fourth of July party, was arrested for financial fraud. The newspapers called him a thief. I heard the whispers later. Alex's uncle had set the trap and shorted everything my family owned.

Dad died in prison before his trial ended. Mom followed him three months later. Her heart just quit.

After that, I took her name. Monroe. I didn't want to be a Hayes anymore.

At the funeral, Alex was seventeen. He pushed through the crowd in a black suit too big in the shoulders and pulled me straight into his chest.

"Violet." His voice scraped like sandpaper. "Every single person who killed your father, I'll make them pay."

"Alex, you can't fight your own family—"

"Watch me." His hand cupped the back of my head. "You just stay with me. That's all you have to do."

He kept his word.

One by one, they went down. Prison. Bankruptcy. A one-way ticket out of New York. He hunted them like a calm, patient animal, and he never once looked sorry.

Not even when the last one was his uncle.

---

I opened my eyes.

The IV needle sat taped to the back of my hand. A little plastic tube, a little bruise around it. I laughed under my breath.

Then the other night came back. The one that mattered most.

Alex was nineteen. A man stepped out of a parking garage with a blade, and I moved before I could think. It slid along my shoulder, an inch from my heart.

Alex didn't sleep for three days.

On the last night, the moon came through the window, and his eyes were red. He kissed the tips of my fingers, one at a time.

"Don't leave me," he whispered. "Please. You're all I have."

That was the most he ever loved me. I knew it even then.

And I'd made the doctor lie to him.

*Tell him it's cleared,* I'd begged. *Tell him I'm fine.*

Now the poison lived in my bones. There was no point in saying anything.

He'd gotten justice for my father. I'd bled for him. We were even.

The snow kept falling past the glass.

The boy who left chestnut cakes in the hedge gap was gone. He'd died somewhere I couldn't see, a long time ago.

My eyes drifted to the nightstand. To Dr. Lindsey's letterhead. To the creases where someone had opened it and folded it again, neatly. Too neatly.

The nurses didn't fold things like that.

Only one person I knew did.

It started with diamonds.

Two years ago, the Ashford jewelry gala at the Plaza. Alex had his hand on the small of my back, and I was still the only woman he looked at.

Then Isabella Ashford walked down the staircase.

Champagne silk. Bare shoulders. Light poured over her like it had been waiting all night for her. She looked like a white camellia grown in a glass house, something no one had ever been allowed to touch.

Every man in the ballroom turned.

So did Alex.

"Who is that?" I asked.

He didn't answer right away. His fingers slid off my back.

"Isabella Ashford," he said. "Gerald's daughter. She just came back from London."

"You know her?"

"I know of her."

His voice was normal. But his eyes darkened, inch by inch, like a room when someone turns the lights down slowly. I'd watched that face for eleven years. I knew every look it had.

I'd just never seen that one pointed at someone else.

"Alex."

"Hm?"

"Nothing."

I already knew. He liked her.

---

After that, it happened in small pieces.

Isabella coughed at a charity lunch, and Alex left the table. He came back twenty minutes later with a pharmacy bag.

"You went yourself?" I asked. "You have three assistants."

"They'd buy the wrong thing."

Paparazzi trapped her outside a SoHo boutique. Alex was there before her own security.

Then a text came at two in the morning. I watched him read it in the blue glow of his phone, in our bed.

"Who is it?"

"Bella can't sleep." He was already pulling on a sweater.

"You have the Kessler merger at eight."

"I'll handle it."

"Alex. It's two a.m."

"She's alone, Violet."

The door shut. I lay there and listened to the elevator go down.

And the strangest part was that he never told her. Not once. Not one word.

"Why don't you just say it?" I asked him one night. "You obviously want her."

He set down his whiskey very carefully. "She's engaged to Jason Rhodes."

"So?"

"So I won't put her in that position." He looked at me like I was the unreasonable one. "She doesn't deserve to be gossiped about."

He wouldn't let her suffer one ounce of embarrassment.

But he'd let me suffer all of it.

---

"Alex, let me leave."

I said it in his study, standing in front of his desk with my coat already on.

He didn't look up from his laptop. "Leave where?"

"You. This house. I don't want to be next to you anymore."

He laughed. One quiet breath through his nose.

"If you leave me," he said, "where would you even go?"

"Anywhere."

Now he looked up.

He came around the desk slowly and took my wrist. Not hard. He didn't have to grip hard. His thumb settled right over my pulse, like he was checking that it still belonged to him.

The corner of his mouth curved. The smile was so cold it hurt.

"Violet. You stay with me. That's the only place you go."

---

So I fought him instead.

I fought him over dinner. Over a missed birthday. Over a bracelet that showed up on Isabella's wrist in a magazine photo, the same one he'd once said was "too flashy" for me.

"You bought her that."

"It was a thank-you for her father's introduction."

"Do you hear yourself?"

"Lower your voice."

"Why? Afraid someone will tell *Bella*?"

His glass hit the counter. "Don't say her name like that."

"Like what? Like she's the reason you come home at four in the morning smelling like her perfume?"

"Violet."

"Say it, Alex! Just say you want her!"

He crossed the kitchen in two strides and caught my chin between his fingers. He tipped my face up toward the light.

His eyes ran over me, slow and flat.

"Look at yourself," he said. "Look at what you've turned into. You're ugly like this."

I waited for the anger to come.

It didn't.

Something inside me simply clicked off, like a lamp. No crash. No scream. Just quiet.

"Okay," I said.

He frowned. "Okay?"

"Okay."

He let go of my chin. I walked out of the kitchen, and I didn't slam a single door.

That night I packed two suitcases and carried them across the estate to the little guest cottage by the east gardens. By morning I'd told the staff the same thing, one by one.

"If Mr. Reyes comes, I'm not seeing him."

The housekeeper twisted her apron. "Miss Monroe, he'll be angry."

"Then let him be angry somewhere else."

---

Some nights in that cottage, the memories came in without knocking.

Alex at twenty, in a hospital bed after a car tried to run him off the Long Island Expressway. Me at his side, crying so hard I hiccupped.

He'd lifted one weak hand and pinched my cheek.

"Hey. Quit crying. You always call me trouble, right?"

"You *are* trouble."

"And trouble lives forever." He grinned with cracked lips. "You're stuck with me, Vi."

Or the Thanksgiving parade when I was sixteen. The crowd surged near Herald Square. Someone shoved. A scaffold of giant paper turkeys tipped toward us, and Alex wrapped his whole body around mine like a shell.

I heard the metal hit his back.

He spent three days flat in bed. I sat beside him every hour of them, sniffling into his blanket.

When he finally opened his eyes, the first thing he said was, "It's fine, Vi. Doesn't hurt."

The sweeter those memories got, the more they burned going down.

---

Last spring, Alex got hurt again.

Some street thugs cornered Isabella outside a club in the Meatpacking District. Alex pulled one of them off her, and another one put a knife in his back.

I heard the cars come up the drive at midnight. I stood at the cottage window and watched him climb out of the back seat. His face was gray. His shirt was stuck to him in dark patches. Two of his men held his arms.

He glanced toward the east gardens once.

I didn't move from the window. I didn't open the door.

He'd saved me once. I'd saved him once. We were even.

In my arms, Cinnamon twitched her nose and burrowed into my sweater. She was the brown rabbit he'd given me three Christmases ago, the twin of the white one he'd kept for himself.

Snowball.

The housekeeper told me last week. Snowball died in a hutch in the main house, water bowl dry, because nobody remembered he was there. Alex had been at Isabella's for five days straight.

I stroked Cinnamon's ears and whispered into her fur.

"Do you miss him? Your brother?"

She didn't answer. Of course she didn't.

A man like that, I thought, doesn't even deserve a rabbit.

Across the lawn, the lights in the main house went on room by room. Then the door to the main house opened, and a figure stepped out onto the porch, holding his side.

He was looking straight at my window.

And he started walking.