He let it slide. The words repeat in my head like a mantra, equal parts relief and suspicion.
Almost a week has passed since the bathroom encounter—several days of waiting for the other shoe to drop, for Kai to deploy whatever weapon he'd sharpened against me—and nothing.
He hasn't mentioned it once. Not a single reference to Petra finding her literature tutor flushed and evasive in a steam-filled bathroom. No renewed blackmail about Dylan Colley, no mocking asides, no sly observations about how relaxed I looked afterward.
He's simply... stopped. The antagonism that defined our early interactions has evaporated, replaced by something far more disarming: polite distance.
At breakfast, he looks through me like he's waiting for a bus. He answers Heinrich's questions with monosyllables, collects his things, leaves without the charged pauses that used to make my skin prickle.
He's become the stepbrother I could almost stomach—if I didn't distrust the transformation so completely.
I don't trust anyone. Not since Travis Walker, the ex who taught me the danger of sudden changes, of sweetness that calcifies into control, of loving someone who collects your insecurities to use them against you.
Travis shattered my self-esteem so thoroughly I'd needed two years to rebuild it, and even now I catch myself measuring my waist in mirrors, hearing his voice in moments of weakness.
Kai's silence feels like Travis's early days—the calculated withdrawal before the strike, the silence that makes you desperate enough to provoke a response.
But my feelings toward Kai refuse simple categorization. I catch myself almost missing our banter, the electric snap of trading barbs with someone who could actually keep pace.
The house feels larger when he's absent, the air thinner, my own thoughts echoing too loudly in all that space.
I tell myself it's relief, not boredom. I tell myself the twist in my stomach when I imagine him with Petra again is disgust, not jealousy. I tell myself these things repeatedly, with decreasing conviction.
Our tutoring sessions have become the strangest part. One-on-one, he's almost professional—prepared, attentive, open to genuine dialogue about the texts.
He asks questions that surprise me with their insight, challenges interpretations without malice, treats me like an actual teacher rather than an enemy to be conquered.
I find myself leaning forward during these sessions, engaged in ways I haven't been with other students, and then hate myself for the engagement.
I wonder what went wrong with his plan. If he's simply waiting. If I'm walking into a trap so elaborate I can't see the edges yet.
By Thursday, the uncertainty has curdled into irritation. I carry it into the group tutoring session like a live coal, sharp and burning.
Petra sits with the other graduate students, no longer making faces when I speak—instead watching with careful neutrality, as if cataloging secrets.
When Petra's analysis of Wuthering Heights veers into shallow romanticism, I unleash words I should keep contained.
"Heathcliff is not passionate," I say, and my voice carries the edge of every sleepless night, every unanswered question. "He is abusive. Conflating the two is exactly why women die in relationships they mistake for epic love stories."
The room goes quiet. Petra's cheeks flush red, her mouth opening and closing without sound. I do not apologize.
Saturday comes fast, the week collapsing under its own tension. I wake with the certainty that I'm going to explode. I need space.
I find my mother in the east wing.
Diane is already tipsy at ten in the morning, a glass of white wine sweating on the windowsill, laughing too loudly at something a construction worker has said.
The worker is young, muscular, clearly uncomfortable with the attention. Diane touches his arm, leans close, performs flirtation.
"It's ten in the morning, Mom."
Diane's smile doesn't waver, but her eyes harden. "And your point?"
"My point is that you're drinking wine before noon with a man half your age while his crew works around you."
"If your daughter missed your wedding, Skye, you'd be drinking too." Diane's voice carries that particular sharpness that emerges only when she's cornered, the blade she keeps for family. "You'd be drinking, and you'd be wondering what kind of child punishes her mother for finding happiness again."
"Five months." My voice rises despite my intention to stay controlled. "Five months after Dad's funeral. That's not happiness, Mom. That's insanity. That's—"
"That's none of your business." Diane drains her glass, reaches for the bottle. "Your father is dead. I'm alive. Some of us choose to keep living."
I remember the invitation that arrived three weeks after I stopped being able to afford my apartment, the calligraphy on heavy cream paper announcing Diane's joy.
I'd flown to Edinburgh that same night, telling myself I needed Grandma Fiona's sharp wit, Grandpa Malcolm's dry humor, the dark hair that matched mine exactly.
The truth was simpler: I couldn't watch my mother promise forever to a stranger when my father's grave was still settling. So I stayed in Scotland until the ceremony was done. I never apologized for it.
"You didn't come to the wedding," Diane says. "Your own mother's wedding."
"I was protecting myself from watching a farce."
"Your father—" Diane stops abruptly, her hand tightening on the wine glass until her knuckles whiten.
"Was a good man." I say, sudden and sharp. "He loved us. He—"
Diane's laugh is short and bitter. "He loved his work. He loved his reputation. He loved the version of himself that looked noble in photographs."
"That is not true."
"Is it not?" Her voice has dropped to a conspiratorial whisper, the alcohol loosening constraints I did not know existed. "Thirty years, Skye. Thirty years of being the wife who understood, who supported, who looked the other way."
"Looked the other way at what?" I feel the ground shift beneath my feet. "What are you saying?"
"I'm saying saints don't exist, darling." Diane reaches for her wine bottle again, but her hand is shaking now, wine spilling over the rim to stain her fingers. "I'm saying your father had secrets, and I kept them, and I paid for them, and you paid for them too—you just don't remember."
"What are you talking about? Dad never—"
"Never what?" Diane's eyes are bright with tears, and she laughs again, the sound catching in her throat like a sob. "Never hurt anyone? Never lied?"
"Stop it." I hear my voice rising, hear the desperation in it that I cannot control. "Just stop it."
"You know what? Some things are better left buried, Skye." Diane sets down her glass on the windowsill. "That is what I have always told myself."
I stand in the doorway of the east wing, surrounded by sawdust and my mother's broken defenses, and feel the first crack appear in the marble statue of my father.
The construction worker has vanished. The house is silent except for Diane's breathing and the distant drip of a faucet somewhere upstairs.
I want to demand specifics, names, the exact shape of the secrets Diane is hinting at.
But I see the fear in my mother's face—the fear of having said too much already—and understand that I'm surrounded by nothing but locked doors.
I leave Diane to her wine and walk back through the house that isn't mine, past Kai's closed door, past the bathroom where I touched myself thinking of him, and understand that the ground I'm standing on has never been as solid as I believed.
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