Chapter 255: [4.73] Staring Directly Into the Sun

I stood there in the kitchen for a while after Mrs. Tanaka left.

The coffee maker did its thing. Eight minutes, exactly like she said. I poured a cup into a mug that probably cost more than my monthly phone bill, because everything in this house existed on a different economic plane than the one I inhabited, and I drank it black while leaning against the marble island and thinking about the fact that the Valentine family housekeeper had just gone to bat for me against a woman who could buy my entire neighborhood and turn it into a parking garage.

The coffee was excellent. Of course it was.

My phone sat heavy in my pocket, buzzing every few minutes with whatever chaos the group chat had generated since I excused myself from the breakfast table approximately twelve minutes ago. Twelve minutes. That was all it had taken for the conversation to devolve from Sabrina winning Christmas through sheer cinematic weaponry to whatever fresh insanity they were cooking up now.

I took another sip.

Here’s the thing about being propositioned by four identical billionaire sisters to enter a polyamorous relationship while your mother is simultaneously trying to lure you to California and your fourteen-year-old sister is treating the entire situation like a season finale of a drama she’d personally scripted: there is no correct way to process it. There is no playbook. The self-help section at Barnes and Noble does not contain a title called So Four Identical Heiresses Want to Date You and Your Absent Mother Picked Today to Care.

I drank more coffee.

The Colombian roast had a thing going on. Rich, smooth, slightly chocolatey without being sweet. Like someone had taken the concept of comfort and dissolved it into liquid form. I could hear Iris’s voice in my head saying coffee is not a feeling, which was categorically wrong, because this coffee was giving me more emotional stability than the previous seventy-two hours combined.

My phone buzzed again.

I pulled it out. The group chat, named "Isaiah’s Owners" by Cassidy at some ungodly hour last night, had accumulated thirty-seven new messages since I’d left the table. I scrolled through them with the detachment of a man watching footage of a natural disaster he’d already survived.

Harlow had sent seven consecutive photos of her rock-paper-scissors hand positions, apparently practicing for the Christmas tournament against Vivienne. Cassidy had responded to each photo with increasingly creative insults about Harlow’s grip technique. Vivienne had posted a link to a Wikipedia article about optimal rock-paper-scissors strategy, which Cassidy screenshotted and captioned "certified psychopath behavior." Sabrina sent a single message at the bottom of the thread: "I already won. Focus on your own problems."

Below that, a private message from Iris.

"u look less dead than yesterday. progress"

I typed back: "Your emotional support skills need work."

"i learned from the best :)" Then, a beat later: "also harlow asked if u want waffles. she says chef laurent can make the ones with the strawberry cream if u want"

I stared at the message. Harlow was offering me custom waffles through my sister, who was apparently now functioning as some kind of Valentine-to-Angelo communication relay. This was my life. A fourteen-year-old girl who should be worrying about algebra was instead serving as a diplomatic liaison between me and four girls who wanted to share custody of my romantic attention on a rotating biweekly schedule.

I typed: "Tell her I’m good with the coffee."

"she says coffee isnt food"

"Tell her she sounds like you."

"rude"

I pocketed the phone and finished my cup. The kitchen remained empty. Sunlight had started to shift through the tall windows that overlooked the herb garden, which I knew existed because Mrs. Tanaka had once pointed it out during a tour of the grounds and because I had accidentally walked through it at two in the morning while searching for Sabrina’s room and ended up smelling like rosemary for three hours.

I rinsed the mug. Dried it. Put it back in the cabinet because Isaiah Angelo was not the kind of person who left dirty dishes for household staff, regardless of what said household staff were being paid, which was probably more than I made in a month. Then I walked out of the kitchen, through the service corridor, past the small sitting room where nobody ever sat, and into the main hallway of the east wing.

The manor at morning was different from the manor at night. At night, the place felt like a museum after hours, all shadows and judgment from dead relatives on the walls. But in the morning, light poured through the windows in thick golden sheets and the whole building became something else. Something closer to alive. I could hear distant sounds, a door closing somewhere on the second floor, the low murmur of the television in the informal sitting room, the distant mechanical hum of whatever kept the aquarium running.

I made it approximately forty feet before encountering the first obstacle.

Harlow stood in the middle of the hallway wearing an oversized lavender hoodie that dropped past her thighs, her hair loose and damp from a recent shower, feet bare against the carpet. She held a plate stacked with what appeared to be four waffles, each one decorated with strawberries arranged into heart shapes.

"I said I was fine with coffee."

"Coffee isn’t food. I already told Iris this and she agreed with me."

"Iris agrees with anyone who feeds her."

"That’s not true." Harlow pushed the plate toward me. "She also agrees with people who show her manga. And people who let her pet their hair. She petted Sabrina’s hair for like ten minutes last night and Sabrina just let her? Which was really cute actually? Sabrina never lets anyone touch her hair but she let Iris do it and I think that means they’re friends now."

Harlow talked the way she always talked. Like the words were already moving before her mouth caught up, each sentence crashing into the next with barely a comma between them. Her purple eyes were wide and earnest, her cheeks still pink from the steam of whatever shower she’d emerged from, and the hoodie had slipped enough off one shoulder to reveal the thin strap of something underneath. Not intentional. Not calculated. Just Harlow being Harlow, existing in the world with complete disregard for the effect she had on the people around her.

I took the plate.

"Thank you."

She beamed. Literal beaming. The girl’s face could power solar panels. "Okay so I need to tell you something and you have to promise not to freak out."

"I have never once in my life freaked out."

"You freak out constantly. You freaked out when I bit your neck. You freaked out when Sabrina sat on your lap. You freaked out when Vivienne did the collar thing."

"Those were appropriate survival responses, not freakouts."

"Same thing." She bounced on her toes, which made the hoodie shift in ways I was not going to acknowledge. "So the thing is. Vivienne and I agreed to settle the Christmas thing with rock paper scissors, right?"

"I was there. I remember."

"Right, so. We already did it."

I looked at her. "It’s been twelve minutes."

"We did it over text. Best of seven rounds. Vivienne went scissors four times in a row because she read some article about how people default to scissors when they’re anxious and she thought I’d try to counter with rock but I actually went paper three times and then rock twice and then scissors once and then paper again and I won four to three."

I processed this.

"You beat the girl who runs a billion-dollar fashion empire at a game of chance by going paper three times."

"Paper is underrated!" Harlow’s face glowed with pride. "Everyone thinks rock is the power move but paper is actually the smartest choice because people associate it with weakness which means they never expect it. I read that in a psychology article Sabrina sent me."

"Sabrina sent you a psychology article about rock paper scissors."

"She sends me articles about everything. Last week she sent me one about octopus intelligence and one about the emotional effects of color-coded scheduling on teenagers which I think was supposed to be a dig at Vivienne but I thought it was really interesting."

I ate a waffle. It was, predictably, incredible. Chef Laurent had done something with the batter that involved vanilla and what might have been cardamom, and the strawberry cream tasted like someone had bottled the concept of summer and spread it on carbohydrates.

Harlow watched me eat with the singular focus of a girl who had memorized the exact expression I made when I enjoyed food and was now cataloging it for future reference.

"So," she said, softer now. "I get Christmas."

"You get Christmas."

Her lower lip trembled. Not from sadness but from something bigger, something she was trying to hold inside and failing. "I get to spend Christmas morning with you."

The hallway felt warmer than it should have. Just the two of us, standing on carpet that cost more than my car, her in a lavender hoodie and bare feet and me holding a plate of heart-shaped waffles.

"Yeah," I said. "You do."

She smiled so hard her eyes nearly disappeared.

I had to look away, because something about Harlow’s happiness at full power felt like staring directly into the sun and I wasn’t sure my retinas could take it at nine in the morning on four hours of sleep.

"Vivienne is handling it well," Harlow added, though her tone suggested this was an extremely generous interpretation of events.

I finished the second waffle and considered the remaining two. The strawberry hearts stared up at me with aggressive cheerfulness.

"Harlow."

"Yeah?"

"What are we doing?"