YARA Sleep won’t come after that dinner.
Yasmin’s voice keeps circling back through my head, warm and sisterly and utterly wrong: I’m just worried about you, Yara.
We all are.
I lie there replaying the exact pitch of it, the way she’d let her lower lip tremble at precisely the right moment, and underneath it all sits that taste – sugar gone to ash – coating the back of my throat even now, hours later, like something I swallowed and can’t quite bring back up.
Two days later, I’m crossing the back lawn toward the stables when I see him.
He’s near the back gate, the one that opens onto the service road behind the property, the one deliverymen and gardeners use so as not to track dirt past the front columns.
Tall.
Dark-haired.
A folded slip of paper catches the light in his hand for just a second before he tucks it into his jacket, pale against the dark fabric, small enough to be a note, not a delivery slip.
Moving the way a man moves when he’s decided, long before he ever walked through that gate, exactly how fast he needs to be and exactly how little attention he wants to draw doing it.
Nothing about him is hurried.
Nothing about him is loud.
He simply crosses the last stretch of lawn and passes through the gate like the property was never really his to be seen leaving.
My feet stop on their own.
There’s nothing about a man leaving through a back gate that should raise the hair on my arms, but it does anyway, the same wrongness I felt over the bird, over the letter, over the scarf still folded at the bottom of my drawer.
My pulse picks up before my mind even catches up to why, some older, quieter part of me recognizing danger faster than reason can name it.
By the time I reach the gate myself, he’s gone.
No car pulling away.
No sound of an engine at all.
Just the empty service road, dust settling where his feet must have been.
I stand there longer than I should, scanning the tree line, half expecting him to materialize again out of the heat shimmer, and when he doesn’t, I feel foolish for how hard my heart is still hammering.
I ask the groundskeeper first, an older man who’s worked this property longer than I’ve been alive, his hands permanently stained with the work of decades.
He shakes his head, brow furrowed in genuine puzzlement.
“Nobody’s come through today, Miss Yara,” he says, voice slow with certainty.
“Not that I’ve seen.” I watch his face carefully, searching for the smallest flicker of a lie, but there’s nothing there except honest confusion, and somehow that’s worse than if he’d been hiding something.
I ask the kitchen staff next.
Nobody saw a delivery.
Nobody was expecting one.
I ask the housekeeper, who tilts her head with the particular patience adults save for children insisting on something imaginary.
“Perhaps you saw a shadow,” she offers, gentle and placating, “or one of the neighbor’s men cutting through.” Her kindness stings more than dismissal would.
At least dismissal I could argue with.
I know what I saw.
I don’t say that out loud, because I’ve learned by now exactly what happens in this house when I insist on my own eyes over everyone else’s certainty.
I find Yasmin in the sitting room, curled into the window seat with a book she isn’t really reading, her finger resting on the same paragraph it was resting on twenty minutes ago when I passed by the first time.
I ask her plainly, because I’m tired of circling, tired of measuring every question before I ask it.
“Was someone here today?” My arms cross over my chest, bracing, as though I could physically hold myself together.
“A man, tall, dark hair.
I saw him leaving through the back gate.” For one instant, less than a second, her face goes carefully, completely blank.
Not confused.
Not curious.
Blank the way a door is blank when someone’s decided not to let you see what’s on the other side of it.
I catch it only because I’ve learned to watch for it now, that flicker of nothing before the performance begins.
Then she smiles, easy, unbothered, already turning a page she hasn’t read.
“Probably just a delivery person, sweetheart.
We’ve had half of Savannah in and out this week getting ready for the Garrison wedding shower.” “You looked like you were expecting him,” I say.
The book closes, soft but final, and when she looks up at me this time there’s nothing sisterly in it at all, just a flat, careful stillness, the kind that makes the room feel smaller.
“Careful, Yara.” Her voice hasn’t risen.
It doesn’t need to.
“You’ve been seeing an awful lot of things lately that nobody else seems to see.
People start to wonder about a girl like that.
Whether something’s wrong with her.” She lets that sit for a moment, then smiles again, warm as ever, as if she hasn’t just threatened me at all.
“I’d hate for anyone to worry.” I don’t ask anything else.
Not because I believe her.
Because I understand, standing there, that asking again has a price now, and she’s just shown me exactly what it is.
But that night, lying awake with the ceiling fan turning slow circles above me, I replay the way he moved.
Delivery men rush.
They carry boxes, check addresses, glance at house numbers like they’re not entirely sure they’ve got the right property.
This man carried nothing but that single folded note.
He didn’t check anything.
He crossed that lawn like he’d walked it before, like the gate was exactly where he expected it to be, like the whole property had already been mapped out behind his eyes long before his feet ever touched the grass.
He didn’t move like a stranger passing through.
He moved like a hunter who already knew where the den was.
Whoever he is, he’s been here before.
And somewhere behind that easy, unbothered smile, some part of my sister has been expecting him.