“Being thoroughly invisible to Alaric doesn’t mean you’d be invisible to me. I’ll be here to hang out with you or talk or go shopping. If you want to, I mean.” Jaya shrugged, feeling a little awkward.

Smiling faintly, Daphne Elizabeth stood and squeezed Jaya’s shoulder. “Thanks. That really means a lot.”

Jaya watched Daphne Elizabeth disappear around the corner after Alaric, her mind drifting to Grey.

She sat back, lost in thought. Grey wouldn’t—couldn’t?—date anyone. He wasn’t planning on managing the Westborough estate and he didn’t speak with his family. But why? What linked all of those things together?

Grey

His feet carried him to the far west corner of the West Wing as if they had a will of their own. He needed the tower, his tower. Grey unlocked the heavy door in the dark corner, and shutting it behind him, he stood in the near complete darkness and closed his eyes. The blood rushed in his ears, roaring like an indignant ocean. Unfair. He tried not to let himself go down the self-pity path too often, but sometimes the sheer unjustness of the entire situation hit him between the eyes.

He was seventeen (almost eighteen, but that was a problem for another day—maybe a day too soon). He’d danced with a girl who wanted to dance with him. Why was that such a crime? Why did it have to be so… so fraught? Why couldn’t he, like all the other guys there, just decide to dance without being weighed down by all the other shit?

The room was lightless and silent, as familiar to Grey as his own name. Chest heaving, he put one foot on the step he knew was right in front of him and wound his way up, into the tower in the sky.

Grey stood suspended above the world, looking out through the big, curving windows. The tower was dank and always cold, no matter the time of year. He was sure more than a few bats and other undesirables made their home up there in the soaring ceiling rafters and musty corners, which should instinctively make him want to stay away. But Grey knew he belonged.

He slid his phone out of his pocket and dialed. The reception through the heavy stone walls of the tower was unreliable, but it would have to do.

“Grey?” His father’s voice crackled down the line, sounding like he was in another dimension, rather than on another continent.

“Hello, Father.” They were both silent, their awkwardness with each other a dance they did every time they spoke, which, thankfully, wasn’t often at all.

“Well, what is it?” The words were terse, as if Grey were an underling who’d called to break bad news of a financial investment. “What’s happened?”

“Nothing’s happened. But I—I need to know something.”