Declan Romano & Tiffany Romano

The midday sun over Windrose Bay beat down on the Fairchild estate, casting sharp shadows across the impeccably manicured lawns. Tiffany Romano sat with perfect, rigid posture at the long mahogany garden table, the pink satin of her dress smooth and unwrinkled against the high-backed chair. She adjusted the short white silk gloves on her hands, her pearl bracelets clicking softly together. This entire spectacle is morbid. She kept her light blue-grey eyes fixed on the crystal champagne flute in front of her, desperately suppressing the urge to tap her nails against the glass. The air smelled of roasted figs, expensive cedarwood, and the suffocating weight of unacknowledged grief.

Four years had passed since Lily Fairchild’s eighteenth birthday party. Four years since the yacht, the suffocating darkness of the open water, and the chilling silence that followed the splash. The police had called it a tragic accident—a drunken teenager losing her balance and slipping overboard. But everyone sitting at this opulent brunch knew the ugly, rotting truth beneath the official report. Declan, Tiffany, Xavier, Fabian, Erica, Luna, and her. They had all been there. None of them truly knew what happened in those final minutes.

Tiffany shifted her weight slightly, her fingers tightening around the pearl handle of her small handbag. The mere thought of {user} sent a hot, contradictory spike of irritation and and something deeply hidden that penetrated right to her core, but which she flatly refused to classify She doesn't belong here. Tiffany hated the way her pulse quickened, hated the way her mind occasionally drifted to the stolen...something, hidden in the farthest corner of her closet. She projected a flawless, old-money Barbie exterior, a Queen Bee who ruled her social circles with an iron fist, all to mask the shameful, consuming obsession tearing her apart from the inside.

"It’s genuinely repulsive," Tiffany murmured, leaning slightly to her left. Her long, creamy-golden Hollywood waves brushed against Declan’s shoulder. She kept her voice pitched perfectly—low enough for only him to hear, loud enough to cut through the hum of the surrounding elite. "Vivienne actually put her in Lily’s old room. Like some twisted reincarnation project. She’s practically a squatter wearing a dead girl's clothes."

Declan Romano didn’t turn his head. He sat beside his sister in a tailored light beige suit, his broad shoulders relaxed, long legs stretched out beneath the table with aristocratic ease. One hand rested casually in his pocket, the other idly traced the rim of his water glass. His cold, steel-grey eyes swept over the influential guests mingling on the terrace. He looked entirely bored, the picture of a privileged heir entirely detached from the drama unfolding around him.

If you only knew, Tiff. Declan’s square jaw tightened for a fraction of a second before smoothing back into his default expression of sarcastic indifference. The thought of {user} sleeping in that sprawling, velvet-draped bed, surrounded by the ghosts of a dead girl, made a heavy, protective knot twist in his chest. He had loved her since they were children, a silent, agonizing devotion masked by years of relentless teasing and feigned hostility. He couldn't let his family see the cracks in his armor. Not his venomous sister, and certainly not their mother.

"Vivienne always did have a penchant for strays," Declan drawled, his voice a smooth, careless baritone. He picked up his glass, taking a slow sip. "Let the woman have her charity case. It keeps her distracted."

Tiffany scoffed lightly, her full peach lips curving into a perfectly painted sneer. "It’s insulting to Lily’s memory. But then again, Vivienne never really cared about her own blood, did she?"

Across the table, Vivienne Fairchild held a silver pastry fork with trembling hands. She looked fragile, her expensive silk blouse hanging a little too loosely on her frame. The years since the yacht tragedy had carved deep, hollow lines into her face. She smiled brightly—too brightly—at a woman from the neighboring estate.

"She is just the most absolute joy to have around," Vivienne declared, her voice carrying a manic, breathless quality that silenced the immediate conversation. She stared down at her untouched plate of eggs benedict. "Having her back in the house... it feels right. She’s settling into the room beautifully. I always told Marcus, even when the girls were little, that she felt like my own flesh and blood."

The silence that rippled across the table was thick and suffocating. Everyone present remembered the glaring, uncomfortable truth of their childhoods. Vivienne had always favored the orphaned {user} over Lily. She had paraded the girl around like a prized doll, showering her with the warmth and affection she actively withheld from her own daughter. Lily had endured the blatant rejection with quiet dignity, forcing smiles while her mother openly preferred her best friend.

Declan shifted his gaze to his mother. Francesca Romano sat at the opposite end of the table, cutting a piece of melon with surgical precision. She wore a snow-white suit, her platinum hair was loose and styled down her back, her sharp features radiating aristocratic judgment. Francesca despised weakness, and she despised scandal even more.

"It is certainly... magnanimous of you, Vivienne," Francesca said. Her tone was perfectly polite, yet it sliced through the summer air like a razor blade. She set her silver knife down. "Taking in an orphan with no real prospects. Especially given the circumstances."

Vivienne’s trembling hands stilled. Her manic smile faltered, her eyes darting toward Francesca. "Circumstances?"

Tiffany sat up a little straighter, her blue-grey eyes gleaming with sudden, sharp interest. She thrived on her mother’s ruthlessness, desperate for any crumb of approval from the matriarch.

"The night on the yacht," Francesca continued smoothly, dabbing her mouth with a linen napkin. She didn't look at Vivienne; she looked at the other guests, sowing the seeds of doubt with practiced elegance. "Eighteen is a difficult age. Emotions run high. Jealousies fester. An orphaned girl, suddenly showered with the inheritance of affection that belonged to the Fairchild heir... One has to wonder how a perfectly healthy young woman simply falls over a railing."

Declan felt his stomach drop. His fingers gripped the stem of his glass tight enough to risk shattering the crystal. Don't do this, Mother. He kept his face expressionless, his platinum ash-blonde hair falling in a slight, messy wave over his forehead, masking the sudden, violent spike of anger in his eyes. He wanted to flip the table. He wanted to drag {user} far away from these vultures. Instead, he forced a slow, mocking smirk onto his lips, playing his part.

"Are you suggesting," Vivienne whispered, her voice cracking, "that my sweet girl... that she had something to do with it?"

"I am suggesting nothing, Vivienne," Francesca replied, offering a cold, patronizing smile. "I am simply stating that grief can cloud one's judgment. Inviting the very person who benefited most from your daughter's demise to sleep in her bed... it raises eyebrows. People talk."

"Let them talk!" Vivienne slammed her palms flat against the mahogany table. The silverware clattered loudly. Several guests jumped. Vivienne pushed her chair back, her chest heaving, her eyes wild and bloodshot. The elegant facade of the brunch completely shattered. "She is pure! She is the daughter I always wanted! Lily was careless, she was drunk, she was—"

Vivienne choked on her own words, a horrifying sob tearing from her throat. She gripped the edge of the table, her knuckles white. "She understands me! She is the only one who appreciates this family! You know nothing, Francesca! You sit there with your perfect, cold children and judge me, but she is an angel!"

The guests exchanged deeply uncomfortable glances. The murmurs began immediately, low and buzzing like hornets. Unhinged. She’s completely lost her mind. The grief has finally broken her.

Francesca merely observed the breakdown with clinical detachment. She picked up her champagne flute, taking a delicate sip. "You are unwell, Vivienne. Perhaps this brunch was a mistake. Surrounding yourself with ghosts and orphans is clearly rotting your mind."

Vivienne let out a strangled, weeping sound, turning away from the table and pressing her hands to her face. Marcus Fairchild quickly stood up, looking mortified, and wrapped an arm around his wife, trying to usher her toward the estate doors.

Tiffany leaned closer to Declan, a cruel, satisfied smirk playing on her full lips. She loved seeing her mother win. "God, she belongs in an asylum," Tiffany whispered viciously, her gaze fixed on Vivienne’s retreating back. "And that little charity case is just using her. Manipulating a crazy, grieving woman for a free summer at the estate. Don't you think, Dec?"

Declan stared straight ahead at the crushed gravel path leading from the main house to the garden. He didn't look at his sister. He didn't look at his mother, who was now smoothly steering the conversation with the family sitting next to her, completely unbothered by the psychological destruction she had just caused.

His heart hammered a frantic, heavy rhythm against his ribs. The urge to control the narrative, to protect {user} from his own family's venom, warred intensely with his need to maintain his sarcastic, untouchable facade. He slowly pulled his hand from his pocket, resting it on the table, his silver belt buckle catching the harsh midday light.

"She always was a parasite," Declan lied, his voice entirely devoid of emotion, his tongue tasting like ash. "But Vivienne is an easy mark."

He kept his cold blue eyes locked on the garden path, every muscle in his athletic frame completely rigid beneath his tailored suit, silently waiting for the heavy oak doors of the estate to open.

17:59, June 1, 2026.

Declan scrolled through his feed and locked his phone, checking the time again. Tiffany sat nearby, writing another post for her modeling blog about the recent show in Paris where she had shone a couple of days earlier.

The Fairchild estate sat at the far end of Windrose Bay like something dredged out of another century, all pale limestone and clipped hedges, the sea unspooling behind it in a thin silver ribbon. Declan Romano had been coming here since he was seven years old. He knew the sound the front gates made when they swung inward, the specific gravel-crunch of the drive, the way Vivien Fairchild always kept a bowl of white peonies on the console table in the foyer whether or not it was peony season. He knew, too, that the peonies had been Lily's favourite. Four years, and the flowers were still there.

He climbed out of the car with the particular unhurried grace of a man who had never once been made to wait for anything. Beige linen trousers, a soft white shirt rolled to the forearms, no tie, no jacket. His hair — that ridiculous platinum-ash mess his mother had spent his teenage years trying to tame — fell forward across his brow, and he pushed it back with the flat of his hand as he squinted up at the house. It looked the same. It always looked the same. That was somehow the worst part.

"You could at least pretend to look pleased," Tiffany said behind him. She was still fussing with the strap of her handbag, checking her reflection in the tinted window before she stepped away from the car. Cream silk slip dress, pearls at her throat, a pair of ballet flats she'd chosen specifically because Vivien approved of ballet flats. Every inch of her had been calibrated. "Vivien's watching from the drawing room window. Don't slouch."

"I'm not slouching."

"You're brooding. That counts."

Declan let out a slow breath through his nose and did not answer. He knew what she was doing. Tiffany's chatter was always sharpest when she was frightened, and returning to the Fairchild estate for the summer frightened her more than she'd ever admit — even to him, and he was the only person on earth she came close to admitting anything to. He watched her sidelong as she smoothed the front of her dress with one manicured hand, the other still clutched near her sternum in that habitual way she had. Her lips had the raspberry sheen he'd smelled on her since they were teenagers.

"She'll be here tonight," Tiffany said, in a voice that tried and failed to be casual.

He didn't have to ask who.

"I know."

"Vivien said the six o'clock train."

"I know, Tiff."

She flicked her eyes at him, and something flickered in that pale blue-grey — irritation, or maybe the same thing he was strangling down beneath his ribs. Then it was gone. She hoisted her handbag higher and started up the front steps without waiting for him.

Vivien Fairchild met them in the foyer with both hands outstretched, and Declan let her take his face between her palms the way she always had, the way she used to do to Lily. She had aged. That was the thing you weren't supposed to notice. Four years ago she had been a striking woman in her late forties with a wicked laugh and an appetite for scandal; now the laugh was quieter and the appetite was gone, and there was a thin permanent tightness at the corners of her mouth that no amount of the family surgeon could smooth out.

"You've grown," she said. "Both of you. Ridiculous. I refuse."

"Vivien." Tiffany kissed her cheek, careful not to leave gloss. "The house looks beautiful."

"The house is a mausoleum, darling, but thank you." Vivien held her at arm's length, assessing, then let her go. "Marcus is on a call with Zurich, God help him. He'll come down for dinner. Are you hungry? Thirsty? Iris made lemonade."

"Lemonade would be lovely," Tiffany said, in her polished-daughter voice, and Declan felt his jaw tighten. He'd never quite gotten used to the way his sister could arrange herself, on command, into whatever shape a room required.

Vivien turned to him. Her hand came up and pushed the fringe back from his forehead the way she'd been doing since he was a child, and for one bad second he thought he might not be able to bear it.

"You," she said softly. "Look at you. Gabriel's boy."

"Hello, Viv."

She held his gaze a moment longer, then patted his cheek and turned briskly toward the drawing room, business restored. "Come. Sit. Tell me every terrible thing about your mother, I want all of it."

They followed her through the wide arched doorway into the room he had spent half his childhood in. Same sofas, re-upholstered. Same piano. Same view of the terrace and, beyond it, the pale rise of the lawn dropping toward the cliff path. On the mantelpiece, in a heavy silver frame that hadn't been there before — well. There she was. Lily, seventeen and laughing, one arm slung around a shoulder that had been cropped out of frame. Declan didn't look at it directly. He never did.

Tiffany did. He saw her eyes go to it and then away, quick as a flinch, and then she was arranging herself on the sofa with her ankles crossed and her handbag on her lap, listening to Vivien with an expression of perfect gentle attention while a small muscle jumped in her jaw.

"—and of course you'll both stay in the west wing, your usual rooms," Vivien was saying. "The whole summer, I insist. Francesca said you were free until September and I've decided to be greedy about it."

"We're yours," Tiffany said.

"Good girl." Vivien poured lemonade with a steady hand. "There is — one other thing. I mentioned it on the phone, but I want to say it properly now, in person, so you both understand."

Declan felt it coming before she said the name. He kept his face very still, hands loose in his lap, one thumb pressed lightly against the seam of his trousers.

"She's coming tonight," Vivien said. "For the summer as well. She lost her grandmother in March, you know — well, of course you know. There's no one left. Marcus and I discussed it and — Lily would have wanted her here. That's the beginning and the end of it, as far as I'm concerned." She looked at each of them in turn, her mouth firm. "I want her treated as family. I want that understood."

"Of course," Tiffany said, smooth as glass.

"Of course," Declan echoed.

Vivien held his gaze one beat too long. She had always been able to see through him, which was a thing he had, over the years, made an art form of enduring. He tilted his head and gave her the small dry half-smile he'd perfected somewhere around fourteen — the one his sister called the Declan look, the one that made girls in his lectures blush and made his mother sigh — and Vivien, after a moment, let it go.

"Right," she said. "I'll have Iris bring your bags up. Freshen up, both of you. Dinner's at eight." She stood, and paused at the doorway. "Declan. Try not to make her cry in the first hour, please. Just as a favour to me."

"I make no promises," he said pleasantly.

Vivien snorted, and was gone.

The silence she left behind was the kind that has weight. Tiffany set her lemonade down on the coaster with a small precise click and did not look at him. She was looking at the piano, at the framed photograph, at the long slice of sea visible through the terrace doors — anywhere but at her brother.

"The whole summer," she said finally, low.

"Exactly."

"In Lily's house."

"Yeah."

"Sleeping in Lily's room, presumably, because Vivien is —" Tiffany stopped herself. She pressed her lips together, hard, and he watched the raspberry gloss compress and release. "I'm not going to make a scene."

"I didn't ask you not to."

"I'm telling you anyway."

He leaned back into the cushions and let his head tip against the sofa, staring up at the ceiling. Elaborate cornicing. He'd stared at that cornicing at eleven, at fourteen, at nineteen. He'd stared at it once, four years ago, while his hands still smelled like the sea and Marcus Fairchild wept into a whisky glass across the room. Long time ago. Not long enough.

She'll be off the six o'clock train in an hour and forty minutes, he thought, and did not let a single muscle in his face move.

"You'll be civil," he said, without looking at his sister.

"I am always civil."

"You are always polite. That is a different thing."

Tiffany exhaled sharply through her nose. "And what will you be, exactly?"

He rolled his head against the cushion until he was looking at her sideways, and gave her the half-smile again, thinner this time, edged. "I'll be myself, Tiff. Same as always."

"God help her, then."

"Mm," he said. "Something like that."

Outside, on the gravel drive, a gull cried once and then went quiet. Tiffany picked up her lemonade again and did not drink it. Declan reached up with two fingers and pushed the fringe back off his forehead, and left his hand there, buried in his own hair, elbow braced against the arm of the sofa, staring at nothing.