Chapter 121: Victor

POV: Carly

She met Harrison properly on Wednesday afternoon.

Not the portrait version. Not the glimpse she had caught of him across the dinner table, all cheekbones and careful reticence. The actual person, in the library off the east passage, where she had gone after the garden to actually do the reading she had brought outside and failed to do. The garden had been too full of birdsong and Isabel's careful questions to concentrate on anything, and she had wanted, badly, an hour where nobody looked at her like a puzzle they hadn't solved yet.

She had been in there for almost an hour, settled into the window seat with her grimoire and a cooling cup of tea she kept forgetting to drink, when the door opened and a boy came in who was clearly looking for a book and clearly had not expected to find anyone in the room.

He stopped.

She looked up.

He was younger than the others. Not dramatically - he had the Monroeson height and the bone structure and the general quality of someone who had stopped growing into their face and arrived at something that worked - but there was something less settled about him. Less decided. The specific unfinished quality of someone who was still figuring out what they were going to become, still trying on expressions to see which ones fit.

He looked at her.

She looked at him.

"You're Carly." He said.

"I am." She said. "You're Harrison."

He blinked. "How did you know."

"Niko described all of you." She said. "You're the youngest, you're at university in Edinburgh, you're charming in the way that makes people assume you're not paying attention when you actually are."

Harrison stared at her, something flickering behind his eyes that looked almost like being caught out.

She went back to her grimoire, giving him the small mercy of not watching him decide what to do with that.

She heard him cross the room to the bookshelf. She heard him looking through it, fingers trailing over spines without much purpose. Then she heard him sit down in the armchair nearest the window rather than leave, which told her something.

She kept reading.

He kept not leaving.

"He talked about me." Harrison said eventually, quiet, like he was testing whether the sentence would hold weight.

"He talked about all of you." She said without looking up. "Reba. Freida. Deacon. You."

"What did he say." Harrison said. Not fishing for compliments. Genuinely wanting to know, his voice carrying the particular carefulness of someone who has learned not to expect much and is bracing anyway.

She looked up. "That you were the one he worried about most when he left."

Harrison was quiet.

His expression went through something she was not going to pretend she fully understood because she did not have the context to understand it. But she could see the shape of what it was doing to him, the way something that had been braced against a particular absence shifted when the absence was acknowledged - a held breath finally let go, and something underneath it that looked almost like grief for a version of himself that had waited a long time to hear that sentence.

"I was twelve." He said. "When he left. In human terms."

"I know." She said, gently.

"He didn't say goodbye." He said. Not accusatory. Just stating it, the way you might state a fact about weather from a long time ago, worn smooth from handling.

"I know that too." She said.

She closed her grimoire.

She looked at Harrison properly.

He had the blue eyes that seemed to run through the family in varying shades, his a lighter grey-blue than Niko's, and there was something in his face that reminded her of the portrait on the landing. Not the adult version. The boy in front of Victor, with his hand just barely touching his father's arm, like he was reaching for something he wasn't sure he was allowed to hold.

"He's been back three days." Harrison said. "We've talked twice. Both times he was watching me like he was trying to calculate how much I had changed and whether the change was." He stopped. "Whether the change was okay."

Carly looked at him.

"Is it." She said.

He considered that, turning it over with the seriousness of someone who did not often get asked directly. "I think so." He said. "I think I turned out mostly okay. It's hard to know from the inside." He shrugged one shoulder. "Edinburgh is good. I like it there. I'm studying architecture, which nobody in this family expected."

"Why not." She said.

"Because Monroesons don't study things." He said. "We acquire things. There's a distinction." He said it with the wry edge of someone who had been inside a dynamic long enough to be able to describe it from the outside, half amusement and half old, quiet exhaustion.

She recognized that edge.

"What does your father say about Edinburgh." She said.

Harrison looked at the bookshelf, like the answer lived somewhere in the spines. "Not much." He said. "Which with Victor means approval. He says things when he disapproves. Silence is the positive version."

"That's an exhausting system." She said.

He laughed. Short and genuine, surprised out of him. "It really is." He looked at her. "You handled him at dinner."

"I answered his question." She said.

"Nobody answers Victor's questions like that." He said. "Everyone in this family walks around them or under them or just accepts them as statements rather than things that actually require an answer." He tilted his head, studying her with fresh interest. "You just answered it."

"It seemed like the simplest approach." She said.

He looked at her for a moment with the specific quality of someone reassessing something they had decided in advance.

"Niko seems different." He said. "From how I remembered him."

"People change." She said.

"Not Monroesons." He said. "Not usually. Not like this." He held her gaze, searching it for something. "Whatever you did."

"I didn't do anything." She said. Same words she had said to Isabel in the garden. Still true.

"You were there." He said. "For a Monroeson that's usually enough of a thing to do."

She looked at him.

He looked back.

"He's going to be okay." He said. "Right? Here this week. Because I know this house is." He stopped, something tightening in his jaw. "I know what this house can do to him and I need him to be okay."

She felt the specific weight of what he was asking.

Not asking her to promise something. Asking her to confirm something she already knew, the way a person asks a question they have already answered for themselves but need to hear said aloud by someone else, someone outside the family's old, tangled loyalties.

"Yes." She said. "He's going to be okay."

Harrison nodded, slowly, like he was setting the words down somewhere safe.

He looked relieved in the specific way of someone who had been carrying a question for a long time and had not known who to ask. Something in his shoulders loosened that she suspected had been tight for three years.

He stood up. He had apparently found whatever he needed from the library without actually looking at a single book.

He paused at the door.

"The architecture thing." He said. "Don't tell Victor I actually like it. He thinks I'm studying it for investment assessment purposes."

She pressed her lips together to keep from smiling outright. "I won't say a word."

He nodded.

He left.

She sat in the window seat alone and looked at the east grounds through the glass and thought about a boy who had been twelve when his brother left and had been waiting three years to find out whether the change was okay. She thought about how young twelve was, and how long three years could stretch when you spent it wondering.

She thought about Niko on the floor of the corridor outside her room and in the courtyard in the cold morning and in the studio at four in the morning painting the view from her window.

She thought about okay being a relative term and a real one simultaneously, and how much it had apparently cost this family to stop believing the two could coexist.

She opened her grimoire.

She actually read this time.

POV: Niko

He found Harrison in the corridor outside the library at half past two.

Harrison was leaning against the wall with his hands in his pockets and the expression he had worn since he was twelve of someone who was processing something privately and had not yet decided to share it. The afternoon light through the tall windows caught the side of his face, and for a moment Niko saw both the boy he had left and the man he had apparently become, laid over each other like transparencies.

Niko stopped.

They looked at each other.

"I just met your girlfriend." Harrison said.

"I know." Niko said. "I could hear you from the stairs."

Harrison looked at him. "You didn't come in."

"You were talking." Niko said. "I didn't want to interrupt." He did not say the rest of it - that he had stood outside the door for a full minute, listening to his brother's voice through the wood, cataloguing how much lower it had gotten, how much steadier.

Harrison was quiet for a moment. He looked at his feet. Then back up.

"She said you worried about me." He said. "When you left."

Niko held his gaze. "Yes."

"You could have called." Harrison said. "Or written. Or any number of things that would have told me you were okay without requiring you to come back here." His voice did not rise, but something underneath it had gone taut.

"I know." Niko said. "I should have."

Harrison looked at him.

The specific look that was not forgiving exactly but was the precondition of forgiving. The look of someone deciding whether the acknowledgment was real, weighing it the way you weigh a coin you suspect might be counterfeit.

"Okay." He said.

Niko exhaled, something in his chest unclenching by a fraction.

Harrison pushed off the wall. He started down the corridor. He stopped.

"She's good." He said without turning around. "Your girlfriend. She's really good."

He kept walking, and Niko watched him go until he turned the corner and disappeared toward the stairs.

Niko stood in the corridor alone.

He thought about Carly in the library window seat, reading her grimoire in a house that had nothing to do with her, being exactly herself regardless. He thought about her talking to Freida. Talking to Victor. Talking to Isabel in the garden, which she had told him about in careful and complete detail over lunch, exactly as promised, not softening any of it for his sake.

He thought about her in the studio at seven in the morning on a stool, watching him paint without saying anything, just there - the quiet, steady fact of her, like something he had built his life around without noticing he was doing it.

He thought about Harrison saying she's really good and meaning it in the specific way of someone who had been paying attention, and felt something loosen in him that had been wound tight since the day he came back through the front gates.

He pressed his lips together.

He went to find her.