Ellie's POV
Several days have passed since the library, and I've become a ghost in my own borrowed life. I've also mapped their routines like a spy behind enemy lines.
This is what you wanted, I tell myself as I eat dinner alone in my room for the fourth night in a row. Distance, safety, invisibility.
But by the fifth day, the walls have started to feel like a coffin. I need air. I need to remember what it feels like to exist in a space that doesn't belong to the McKinneys.
Evening settles over the mansion. Zack is in his office, door closed. Veronica left this morning for a shoot in Miami. And Tyler—I tracked his footsteps after dinner, listened for his door, exhaled only when silence confirmed his absence.
The coast is clear.
I slip downstairs, my bare feet silent on the marble, aiming for the patio, the beach, anywhere with enough sky to make me feel less like I'm suffocating.
I round the corner and walk directly into Derek.
My body collides with his chest, and apologies tumble from my mouth before I can stop them. "Oh God, I'm so sorry, I didn't see you, I wasn't paying attention—"
Derek laughs—that warm, easy sound I've been avoiding along with everything else—and steadies me with a hand on my elbow. "Whoa. You okay there, ghost girl?"
The nickname lands strangely. "Ghost girl?"
"That's what I've been calling you in my head." He grins, but there's an edge underneath it, an observation. "You've been haunting the hallways for days. Appearing and disappearing. I was starting to think you'd figured out how to walk through walls."
I don't know what to say. The truth—I've been hiding from your brother because I slapped him and then almost let him do things to me against a bookshelf—is not an option.
Derek's grin fades. He studies my face, and I watch him catalog what he sees: the shadows under my eyes, the tension in my shoulders, the way I'm holding myself like I'm braced for impact.
"When's the last time you left this house?" he asks.
The question throws me. "I—what?"
"Left the house. Went somewhere. Did anything." He tilts his head, those honey-brown curls falling across his forehead. "You've been here almost a week and you haven't gone anywhere, have you?"
The accuracy makes my chest tight. I should laugh it off, make an excuse, retreat to my room and lock the door.
Instead, I hear myself say: "There's nowhere for me to go."
His expression shifts—concern replacing curiosity, determination replacing concern.
"Okay," he says. "Get your shoes."
"What?"
"Shoes. The things you put on your feet. Get them." He's already moving toward the garage, talking over his shoulder. "I'm taking you downtown. You need to see these walls from the outside for once, and I need an excuse to avoid the budget reports Dad wants me to review."
I should say no. I should retreat, regroup, and maintain the careful distance I've constructed.
"Okay," I say, surprising myself. "Okay."
Twenty minutes later, I'm in the passenger seat of Derek's car, watching Los Angeles unspool through the window. The city glitters and sprawls, pulses with a life that feels almost aggressive after the hermetic stillness of the mansion.
"That's the Griffith Observatory," Derek says, pointing toward a white building perched on the hills. "Best view in the city, if you don't count my rooftop. That's the Hollywood sign—smaller than you'd think, right? And that building there, the one with the green awning?" He grins. "That's the restaurant where Dad got his start, before he had money."
"Before the billion-dollar empire?" I ask, and the lightness in my own voice surprises me.
"Before the billion-dollar headache is more like it." He changes lanes smoothly. "Don't get me wrong, I love my life. But Dad's expectations come with the territory, and those expectations have expectations of their own."
"Must be nice to have someone expect anything from you at all." The words slip out before I can catch them.
Derek glances at me, his expression unreadable, but he doesn't push. Instead, he turns up the music and lets the city lights fill the silence between us.
We end up at a rooftop bar downtown—velvet ropes, a bouncer who nods at Derek like an old friend, a view that stops my breath. Los Angeles spreads below us, a carpet of light stretching to the dark edge of the Pacific.
Derek orders drinks I don't ask about and waves off my concern. "Relax, they know me here. Besides, you look like you could use something stronger than orange juice."
"I look that bad?"
"You look like someone who's been living with my brother." He slides a glass toward me. "Which means you look like you need a drink and probably also a lawyer."
I laugh—actually laugh—and the sound startles me. "He's not that bad."
"Ellie." Derek's eyebrows rise. "Tyler once made our nanny cry so hard she quit on the spot. We were seven. He told her she'd peaked in life and it was all downhill from there."
"That's... incredibly specific cruelty for a seven-year-old."
"Welcome to the McKinney family." He lifts his glass. "To surviving the first week. May the odds be ever in your favor."
We talk about nothing important after that. His work at the restaurants—the chaos of a kitchen during dinner rush, the satisfaction of a perfect service. My vague plans for college.
He doesn't ask about my parents. Doesn't poke at any of the bruises I've been hiding, and the relief of that is dizzying.
When we leave, the night air wraps around us thick with heat. Derek suggests walking, and I agree. The streets pulse with energy—couples holding hands, groups spilling out of bars, laughter rising into the warm darkness.
We pass an ice cream shop, its window glowing soft and inviting.
"Absolutely not," Derek says, already steering me toward the door. "Non-negotiable. You cannot experience LA without experiencing LA ice cream."
I get vanilla because I can't think of anything else. Derek gets something ridiculous with three flavors and too many toppings, and we walk and eat and I realize that this is the first time since the funeral that anything has felt almost normal.
But the heat is relentless. My ice cream melts faster than I can eat it, dripping down my fingers, and I laugh at the absurdity of trying to outpace it.
"Come on," Derek says, grabbing my free hand. "I know a place."
"What kind of place?"
"Trust me."
I should ask more questions. Should hesitate, should remember I don't really know this person. Yet, I let him pull me down the street, my fingers wrapped in his, the melting ice cream abandoned in the nearest trash can.
We turn a corner, then another, and suddenly we're standing in front of an industrial building. Derek pulls out his phone, taps the screen, and a side door clicks open.
"Derek, what is this?"
"Something you need to see."
The hallway is dim, the air shifting from summer-thick to cooler as we walk. Then Derek pushes through a final door, and the world opens up into cold and light and impossible, gleaming white.
A rink.
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