My Stepfather, My Ruin

10

Roxy

I spent the rest of the day rehearsing a version of myself that could survive tonight.

Calm. Polite. A stranger meeting another stranger. Nothing more.

I practiced it in the mirror while Mary curled my hair for dinner. I practiced it as I walked down the hallway and back. I practiced it so many times that the words stopped meaning anything. Calm. Polite. A stranger. They were just sounds coming out of my mouth.

None of it lasted past the sound of the front gates opening.

I heard the car before I saw it. The tires moved slowly over the gravel, making the same sound that had carried up the driveway weeks ago, back when everything was different. I was standing by the window when the headlights swept across the grounds. Before I knew it, my hand had reached for the curtain.

A car door slammed below. I heard Dorian’s voice, followed by another voice answering him.

I would have known that voice anywhere. Two years hadn’t changed it at all.

“Roxy.” I heard Mother’s voice. “He’s here. Come down.”

I looked at myself in the mirror one more time. My hair was curled, my dress was pressed, and my face was arranged into something that could pass for pleasant. Still, I knew none of it was going to be enough.

I went down anyway.

The foyer was brighter than I remembered, every light turned on, as if the house itself had dressed up for this. Dorian stood near the door with his arm around a man’s shoulders. They were talking easily, looking comfortable together, and something in my chest tightened before I even saw the man’s face.

Then he turned.

Two years should have changed him more than this. He was taller than I remembered, or maybe I had just forgotten how he could fill a doorway. He was broader through the shoulders, his jaw sharper, and there was something harder in his face that hadn’t been there the last time I saw him.

But his eyes were exactly the same. The same eyes that used to find mine across a lecture hall as if there was no one else worth looking at.

They found mine now.

Whatever he’d expected when he walked through that door, it wasn’t this. I watched the realization hit him. The recognition. The disbelief. And something underneath both that I couldn’t name and didn’t want to.

“Roxy?”

My name in his mouth again, after two years of silence, hit somewhere I hadn’t expected.

“Evander.” I made myself say it evenly, making myself hold still under the weight of him looking at me like I was the last thing in the world he’d expected to find in his father’s living room.

Neither of us moved.

Dorian’s hand landed on Evander’s shoulder. He looked completely unaware, or maybe he was pretending so well that I couldn’t tell anymore.

“You two know each other?”

The question hung there. My mother’s eyes moved between us, confused and waiting.

Evander’s jaw tightened once, then again, like he was deciding how much of the truth he could tell in that room.

“We went to the same school,” he said finally.

I let out a breath I hadn’t realized I was holding.

“A while back.”

A while back. Two years compressed into three words, like it hadn’t been the thing that changed everything after it.

“Small world,” Dorian said, smiling the way he smiled at everything. Pleased, unbothered, already moving on. “Well, I’m glad you two won’t be complete strangers, at least.”

Strangers. I almost laughed. I didn’t.

“Dinner’s ready whenever you are,” my mother said brightly, already turning toward the dining room, already acting like tonight was exactly how she’d planned it.

Evander didn’t move right away. He was still looking at me, and I made myself look back instead of down, because looking down would have meant something. It would have given him something, and I wasn’t ready to hand him anything yet.

“You look good,” he said quietly, his voice low enough that no one else could hear.

“Don’t.”

“I’m not doing anything.”

“You’re doing something.” My voice came out steadier than I felt. “You always did something.”

Something almost like a smile crossed his face, gone before it could fully form.

“Same Roxy.”

“Not even close.”

He studied me for another second, like he was deciding whether to believe me. Then Dorian’s voice called us both back to the dining room, and the moment was gone before either of us could do anything about it.

I sat through dinner without tasting a single thing on my plate. Evander sat across from me, charming with his father and warm with my mother, answering questions about his studies abroad with an ease that made it clear he’d had two years to learn how to be someone new.

I wondered, watching him, whether any of it was real. I wondered whether he was wondering the same thing about me.

Twice during the meal, I caught him looking at me when he thought I wasn’t paying attention. Both times, he looked away like he hadn’t been.

By the time dinner ended, my face ached from smiling at nothing.

I excused myself early, claiming exhaustion no one questioned, and made it halfway up the stairs before I heard footsteps behind me.

“Roxy.”

I stopped on the landing but didn’t turn around.

“What?”

“We should talk. Actually talk. Not...” A pause. “Not whatever that was down there.”

“There’s nothing to talk about.”

“There’s two years of nothing to talk about.” His voice was closer now. I could feel him a few steps below me, close enough that turning around would have put us face to face in a stairwell neither of us could easily escape. “You really thought you’d never see me again.”

“I hoped.”

A short, humorless laugh. “Yeah. Me too, for a while.”

That stopped me. I turned around despite myself, and he was closer than I’d realized, close enough that I had to tip my head back slightly to hold his eyes.

“What is that supposed to mean?”

Evander’s expression changed into something unreadable, something that looked almost like regret if I didn’t know better than to believe anything that crossed his face.

“It means I’m not the same either,” he said. “Whether you believe that or not.”

He didn’t wait for an answer. He turned and walked back down the stairs, leaving me standing there with my pulse racing and no idea, for the first time in two years, what he actually wanted from me.