Chapter 5: The family

The lake house smells like fresh pine and old money.

Nadia's heels click too loudly on the hardwood as James guides her inside, his hand low on her back—a gesture he's been perfecting all weekend. She wonders if he practices it when she's not around. The thought makes her throat tight in a way she's not examining.

The living room erupts into motion the moment they appear.

A woman with James's exact jawline launches off the sofa, followed immediately by two men arguing about golf handicaps and a teenage girl filming their arrival on her phone. A golden retriever the size of a bear skids across the floor, nails clattering, and James's mother emerges from the chaos with a wine glass in one hand and the kind of smile that sees directly into your chest.

"You're Nadia," she says, not asks. She extends her free hand. "I'm Catherine. James never mentioned you were stunning."

Nadia catches James's shoulders stiffen beside her, a microexpression of panic before he schools it. She squeezes his hand gently—the kind of gesture a woman who knows her fiancé would make.

"He's never mentioned your family was loud," Nadia says, shaking Catherine's hand, which is warm and firm. "Which I appreciate. Surprises are better."

The lie tastes like copper and wine.

Catherine laughs, the real kind, from her stomach. She waves her hand at the chaos. "Sit. We've got appetizers. David, stop recruiting James to your golf conspiracy. He's on his honeymoon timeline now." She winks at Nadia, who feels something pitch sideways in her chest. This is the hard part—not the lying to his family, but the way his mother is already treating her like she matters.

The older brother—David, apparently—grins and refills his drink instead. "Don't listen to Mother. There's no timeline. James just suddenly shows up with this woman and announces an engagement. Very romantic. Very not-like-him."

"Because I can decide things without a six-month committee discussion," James says quietly, and there's an edge there, something protective. His arm stays around Nadia's waist even as they move into the room.

She registers that. Files it away.

They settle into the oversized furniture, the kind of seating arrangement designed for people who are comfortable together. Nadia perches on the arm of a sofa, and James's hand finds her knee—not casual, not practiced. Necessary. Like he's holding onto something that might drift away. The teenage girl—who introduces herself as Sophie but doesn't put her phone down—records at least three minutes of them settling in before their father, a gray-haired man who looks like James in twenty years, calls her to dinner.

But Catherine doesn't move. She sits across from them, wine glass tilted thoughtfully, studying Nadia like she's a business proposition worth understanding.

"So Nadia," she says, crossing her legs, her gaze surgical and warm at once. "James has been remarkably quiet about how you met. I'm dying to know. Did he actually use words, or did he just stare at you intensely for six months like he does with spreadsheets?"

The room isn't quiet exactly, but everyone's listening. The older brother raises an eyebrow. Even Sophie glances up from her phone screen.

Nadia doesn't miss the tension that coils through James's forearm. She also doesn't miss that Catherine's question isn't casual. It's precise. A woman testing the strength of a foundation.

"He cornered me at a client event," Nadia says, and it's true enough. She turns to James, letting her expression settle into something warm and private. "He'd watched me handle a crisis—a caterer fell through, family situation, the whole thing was imploding—and he waited until I'd fixed it before he even said hello."

She's not making it up entirely. James did watch her for six months. He did approach her at a client event. But the story she's painting has softer edges than the truth. It's the version of themselves that could exist, if things were different. If she weren't performing and he weren't desperate.

"Very James," Catherine says thoughtfully. "He observes before he acts. Never jumps." She takes a deliberate sip of wine. "But when he does act, he commits fully, doesn't he? No half measures."

It lands like a bell, hollow and true. Nadia feels James's hand tighten on her knee.

"Completely," Nadia says. She doesn't break eye contact with Catherine. "When James decides something matters, he moves with purpose."

The words hang there. They're still true. Just not in the way his mother thinks.

Catherine smiles, and there's something in it that suggests she knows the difference between polish and honesty, and she's wondering which one Nadia's offering. The kind of mother-look that mothers give when they've raised three sons and seen every version of a lie a man can tell.

"And your family?" she continues, like she's already made a note about the first answer. "Egyptian?"

"Half," Nadia confirms. "My father. My mother's from Maine. I grew up in Chicago—my parents met at Northwestern. Very Midwest love story. Practical, warm, no drama."

"Unlike us," Catherine gestures at the chaos, where Sophie has now migrated back to the living room and is narrating everyone's behavior for her followers. David is arguing with their father about something that happened at the office. The dog demands cheese from whoever's standing nearest the charcuterie board. "You must find us exhausting."

"No," Nadia says, and means it. The certainty in her own voice surprises her. "I find you real. It's refreshing, actually. Most families I know are performing for each other. You're just... being."

She watches Catherine process that. Watches something shift behind her eyes—recognition, maybe, or the small satisfaction of someone who's just learned something true about a stranger. Catherine sits back slightly, resettling into the sofa cushions like she's made a decision.

"I like her," Catherine says to James, not taking her eyes off Nadia. "She's honest. Are you good to her?"

It's an absurd question, loaded and dangerous. It's also a test.

James's hand moves from her knee to her hand, his fingers threading between hers—the first time he's held her hand when no one was watching (except they're all watching). His jaw tightens. His eyes find hers, and for one impossible second, she sees straight through his careful, quiet exterior into something raw and uncertain and entirely unguarded.

It's the look of a man who isn't sure if his kindness is enough. Who wonders, every day, if whatever he's offering could ever match what someone like Nadia deserves.

"I'm trying," he says, to his mother, but the answer is really for Nadia. "Every day."

Something shifts in Nadia's chest—not a small thing, not manageable. It's the kind of shift that means she's no longer sure which parts of this are performance and which parts are real. It's the kind of shift that makes her want to pull her hand away and hold it tighter at the exact same time.

Catherine watches the moment travel between them with an expression that's part amusement, part calculation, part something deeper that Nadia recognizes from her own mother. The look of a woman who understands what it means to love something quietly and completely.

She sets her wine glass down on the side table with deliberate care.

"You look at her," she says to James—not accusingly, just stating fact, "like you're cataloguing the exact moment you fell."

James's eyes snap to his mother's face, and his cheeks flush—actually blush, like he's twenty-two again, not a thirty-one-year-old CFO with the kind of authority that makes people in conference rooms sit up straighter. He opens his mouth. Closes it. Looks away too slowly, and in that half-second of delay, Nadia sees all of it.

The wanting. The uncertainty. The way this whole fake engagement has become very, very real in ways that have nothing to do with his family and everything to do with the fact that his mother is right.

He has been cataloguing her.

Catherine picks her wine glass back up, pleasure written across her face. "Interesting," she murmurs, more to herself than to anyone.

Nadia's heart is moving too fast. Around them, the chaos continues—David is telling a story about a golf tournament that went wrong, Sophie is still narrating for her followers, the dog is making another appeal for cheese. Normal family sounds. Safe sounds.

But Nadia can only hear the quiet in her own chest, where something is being rearranged and won't ever fit back the way it was. Where the line between performance and reality has become so thin she can't remember which side she's standing on anymore.

She doesn't pull her hand away from James's. She also doesn't look at him, because she's not sure what her face would say if she did.

Later, when the dishes are being cleared and the younger cousins have migrated to the porch, Catherine finds her in the kitchen refilling the water pitcher.

"You're very good at this," Catherine says, soft enough that it doesn't carry.

Nadia thinks about deflecting. She's been deflecting professionally for six years. "We've had some practice."

"No," Catherine says. "You're good at watching him. The way you know where he is in a room without looking." She sets her empty glass in the sink. "Most people take years to learn that, if they ever do."

She leaves before Nadia can answer, which is probably exactly the point.

Nadia stands at the kitchen sink and fills the pitcher twice, because the first time she fills it she forgets to check when it's full. Outside, James is laughing at something his brother said. She can hear it through the window screen, low and real, nothing like his work voice.

She knows his work voice by heart. She realizes, standing at the sink, that she knows this one too.