Emiliana’s POV
The curtains in Emiliana’s room cost more than most people’s cars, which was a fact she knew and resented in roughly equal measure, mostly because nobody ever let her forget it. Deep burgundy velvet, gold thread worked through the hem, heavy enough that when she yanked them shut at dusk the whole room went a shade darker than the rest of the house. Somebody dusted them once a week. She’d caught the housekeeper doing it with a specific little brush meant for exactly that job, and had genuinely wanted to ask if the brush had its own drawer.
She didn’t ask. She had a highlighter in her mouth and a printed reading list balanced on her knee, cross-legged on the window seat, and the brush could wait.
Below her window, past the courtyard, the family crest sat carved into a slab of cedar above the front doors. An actual tree, felled and shaped for the sole purpose of announcing to visitors whose house they were walking into, in case the doors themselves, the fountain, or the two members of staff standing either side hadn’t already made that clear.
Emiliana had grown up under that crest.
She still thought it was faintly ridiculous.
She’d never once said so where her father could hear.
"Miss Vane." A soft knock, the housekeeper’s voice through the door. "Dinner, whenever you’re ready."
"Ten minutes."
"Of course."
Ten minutes turned into forty, because the paragraph she was reading didn’t agree with her the first three times through it, and nobody in this house had ever once complained about her being late to a meal she was eating alone in her room off a tray someone had quietly left outside her door, still hot.
The summons for the study came after dinner, delivered the way it always was. Not a knock, just her father’s voice from down the hall, pitched to carry exactly as far as it needed to and no further.
"Emiliana."
She found him behind the desk that was too big for the room it was in, the way every piece of furniture in this house seemed engineered to remind you whose house it was. He didn’t look up straight away, which meant this was going to be one of the ones he’d already rehearsed.
"The Garrick dinner is at seven," he said.
"I know."
"You need to be here by six. Changed, ready, not still explaining yourself to a taxi driver at quarter to."
"I have a project deadline Thursday. I’m not going to be finished by six."
He looked up at that. "You’ve had the deadline for a fortnight."
"I’ve had a lot of things for a fortnight, Dad. That doesn’t mean they finish themselves." She crossed her arms, more out of habit than actual defensiveness. "I’ll come. I’ll just be late. Half seven, maybe eight."
"This isn’t a coffee with friends, Emiliana. The Garricks are—"
"I know exactly who the Garricks are." She let that sit a beat, sharper than she meant it, then softened it slightly because she did actually love him, even when he was being like this. "I’m not skipping it. I’m asking for two hours."
Her father studied her the way he did when he was deciding whether to fight a battle he suspected he’d already lost. He usually decided this quickly. He was, whatever else he was, not stupid.
"Half seven," he said. "Not eight. And you greet Mrs. Garrick personally, not through me."
"Alright Dad." She was already halfway to the door. "Tell Owen not to leave without me. He did that last time and I had to get a normal taxi like an actual person."
"Owen wouldn’t dare."
"Owen absolutely would. He thinks it’s funny."
Her father, despite himself, almost smiled. She caught it and considered that a win worth more than the two hours.
She’d fought this exact family plenty of times before, over plenty of things.
The university argument had been the big one.
Months of asking. Then begging. Then asking again when begging had achieved absolutely nothing.
Her father had wanted her at Kingsford, the sort of prestigious university where her surname would fit neatly into the environment instead of standing out from it. The fees alone had been enough to make most people blink. The people there came from families whose names appeared on buildings.
Emiliana had hated the idea.
She’d wanted the smaller university instead. The same one Garrett attended, though she’d never known anything about him, or even known his name at the time. It was less prestigious, less expensive, and ordinary enough that she’d convinced herself she could finally live like a normal student.
Her father had refused.
So she’d begged.
Eventually, after weeks of arguments and more than one conversation that had ended with her storming upstairs, he’d finally agreed.
She’d thought she’d won.
She hadn’t expected her surname to follow her through the gates.
She’d wanted lectures where nobody adjusted their tone the second they placed her surname. Classmates who complained about the same deadlines she complained about. The specific, boring freedom of walking somewhere without someone timing it half a step behind her.
She’d assumed a smaller university would simply hand her that for free.
It hadn’t.
Apparently Emiliana Vane didn’t need a prestigious name over the gate to draw a crowd.
She’d have drawn one in a village hall.
The photograph sat on her nightstand in a frame she’d chosen herself, plain silver, no crest, no flourish. The one object in the entire room that hadn’t been selected to match anything else.
Her mother, mid-laugh, caught off-guard by whoever was holding the camera, hair down instead of the careful arrangement she wore in every other photo of her that existed in this house.
Emiliana picked it up most nights before bed, out of habit more than ritual, though she’d have argued it was habit if anyone asked, which nobody did.
"You’d have hated the Garrick dinner," she told the photo, not quite joking. "You’d have found a reason to leave by eight."
The photo, obviously, said nothing back.
She put it down anyway, gently, the way you’d put down something that might still be listening.
Morning arrived the way it always did in this house. Already several steps ahead of her, whether she’d asked for that or not.
Her uniform hung exactly where she had told them to put it. Breakfast steamed on the table downstairs, timed to a schedule nobody had confirmed with her directly, and yet somehow correct.
"Morning, Miss Vane." Owen, by the front doors, phone in hand, three-quarters through what looked like a crossword.
"Don’t call me that before nine, Owen. We’ve talked about this."
"Morning, Emiliana." He didn’t even look up. "Car’s ready when you are."
"It’s always ready. That’s the whole point of it."
"Hmm..." he turned to look at her "...Someone’s chatty this early."
"Someone slept four hours because of an essay you wouldn’t understand if I explained it."
Owen grinned and said nothing else, which was the correct response, and one of the reasons she actually liked him.
None of the rest of it, the pressed uniform, the steaming plate, the car idling exactly where it always idled, registered as remarkable anymore.
What registered was the seminar at eleven and the paragraph of her essay she still wanted to rewrite before she handed it in.
The house ran on money.
She ran on whether she’d actually understood the material.
Her phone, by contrast, never ran on anything sensible.
Fifty-something notifications by the time she checked it in the car, Owen pulling smoothly out through gates that opened themselves before he’d fully braked for them.
A photo someone had taken of her outside the library, tagged with three exclamation marks she hadn’t earned. An invitation to something calling itself a "networking mixer", which as far as she could tell meant forty people hoping to be photographed standing near her. Someone she’d met once, for three minutes, asking if she was free Friday, like three minutes constituted a foundation for anything.
She scrolled through most of it the way you’d scroll through spam. Not offended, mostly just tired, the enthusiasm behind it landing as noise rather than flattery.
Two names stopped her longer than the rest.
Raymond Carter.
She read the first line of his message, didn’t finish it, and left it unread on purpose.
Brian Gilbert.
She opened his message.
She typed three words back before she’d even properly opened her eyes all the way, sent it, and didn’t examine why one got an answer and the other didn’t.
She rarely let herself examine that particular habit too closely.
It was easier not to.
By the time the car reached campus, her calendar had accumulated four separate requests for "just a coffee, nothing serious," two of which had already suggested times without asking whether she was free at them.
"People are exhausting," she said, mostly to the window.
"People are exhausting," Owen agreed, like it was the most obvious thing anyone had said all week.
She wanted the eleven o’clock seminar and the essay rewrite and, if she was being honest with herself, the version of the day where nobody needed anything from her before she’d had breakfast.
It was, she knew, a genuinely stupid thing to resent, when most people would’ve killed for the attention she spent half her week trying to shrug off.
She resented it anyway.
Wanting to actually be a student, properly, without the rest of it attached, hadn’t turned out to be a small ask. It had turned out to be the one thing nobody seemed able to give her, precisely because everybody wanted something from the person they saw before they bothered looking for the girl underneath.
The thought came for her most mornings now, uninvited, usually somewhere around this point in the drive.
Everybody wanted something.
Brian, who she actually, quietly, didn’t mind, still approached her the way everyone approached her. One careful step at a time, clearly aware of exactly who she was before he’d worked out anything about who she wasn’t.
Raymond wanted whatever came with being seen next to her.
The girl who’d sent the library photo wanted proximity to something that photographed well.
Even the ones who meant well mostly meant well at her, the surname doing the introducing before she’d got the chance.
Nobody had ever sat next to her and simply asked what she actually liked.
Not the version people assumed she liked.
The real one.
She caught herself doing the thing she always did with that thought, filing it somewhere she didn’t have to look at it directly, and pulled her phone back out instead. Moping in the back of a car achieved absolutely nothing, and she had never once been the type to sit still with a feeling for longer than it took to name it.
"We’re here," Owen said.
"Thrilling," she said, already unclipping her seatbelt. "Same time as always?"
"Same time as always."
"You’re a saint, Owen."
"I’m paid very well, Miss Vane."
"There it is."
Campus recognised her within about thirty seconds of her crossing it, same as every day.
A group near the fountain went quiet, then loudly not-quiet, in the specific way of people trying to look like they hadn’t noticed.
Someone asked, from a distance too far to actually be addressed to her, whether she’d seen the library photo.
"Yes," she said, to nobody in particular, not slowing down. "I have eyes."
She’d learned to move through it on something close to autopilot. Polite enough not to be talked about for the wrong reasons, distant enough not to be encouraged.
Most people saw the crowd she generated and imagined the opposite of what it actually felt like from inside it.
Brian found her before she reached the building, easy about it the way he was easy about most things, already talking before he’d fully caught her stride.
She let him walk with her, answered enough to keep it moving, teased him once about something he’d said wrong in a group chat two days ago that he clearly hadn’t expected her to remember.
There was something easier about talking to Brian.
She couldn’t have explained why.
Maybe it was simply that he didn’t make every conversation feel like an audition.
Raymond appeared a minute later and said something meant to be funny.
She gave him a shorter answer than she’d given Brian and kept walking.
Neither of them noticed the difference.
She made sure of that. Carefully, automatically, a skill with so much practice behind it that it no longer felt like effort.