Jace's POV
There were nights she asked about the work itself, and nights she asked about something closer to me, and I understood, somewhere in the third or fourth week of it, that the line between those two kinds of questions had started to blur in a way neither of us seemed inclined to correct.
"Did you enjoy any of it," she asked once, out of nowhere, in the middle of a conversation that had started as an ordinary question about a man's face in a photograph. "The modeling. Any part of it."
I considered lying, the way I'd learned to lie about that particular question, dressing the truth up into something easier for whoever was asking to hear. I didn't, that night. I am still not entirely certain why.
"The work itself, sometimes," I told her. "There's a version of it that's almost like a puzzle, figuring out exactly what a camera wants from your face and giving it that, precisely, without wasting a single unnecessary movement. I was good at that part. I liked being good at something, even if I didn't always like what the something was for."
"And the rest of it?"
"The rest of it I've spent considerably more time trying not to think about than actually thinking about," I said, which was as close to the whole truth as I had given anyone since Alec, and she didn't push further, which I understood, even then, as its own kind of mercy.
She told me things too, in fragments, though I noticed she gave them to me the way she gave everyone everything, precisely, deliberately, never more than she'd already decided was safe to hand over. She mentioned, once, that she hadn't always run this house, that there had been a version of her life before it that she rarely spoke of to anyone, and then she changed the subject before I could ask what that version had looked like, and I understood, watching her do it, that I had just been shown the exact shape of a door she wasn't ready to open, and that pressing on it would cost me more of her trust than I was willing to spend testing.
I built an entire understanding of Celeste out of the careful, guarded fragments she was willing to hand me, and did not yet know the single fact that would have explained nearly all of them, had I possessed it. I only knew that something in her carried weight the way a scar carries weight, healed over but never quite forgotten, and that whatever it was, she was not yet ready to let me see the shape of it directly.
I found the first real edge of it by accident, dusting a shelf in a room I hadn't been assigned to clean, on a morning she wasn't expecting anyone to be in it. There was a photograph, turned face-down in a drawer I hadn't meant to open, of a young man with an easy, unguarded smile I had never once seen on Celeste's face in all the weeks I'd known her, and beneath it, folded small, a single dried flower gone the particular brittle brown of something kept considerably longer than flowers are meant to last.
I put it back exactly as I'd found it, face-down, undisturbed, and said nothing to anyone about it, because I understood, even without knowing his name yet, that I had just found the edge of something that wasn't mine to hold.
CELESTE'S POV
I noticed the flinch before I understood it. He did it so quickly, and recovered so smoothly, that I would have missed it entirely in anyone I was watching less closely. A fraction of a second's stillness whenever a phone came out unexpectedly in a room he was in, a guard checking a message, Claire taking a call, the particular reflexive bracing of a man whose whole prior life had trained his body to expect a lens before his mind had time to catch up and explain there wasn't one.
I kept note of it without asking about it directly. Jace gave things up in his own time, in his own careful order, and pressing him for more than that produced considerably less than simply waiting did.
I learned, over those weeks, in fragments rather than any single conversation that he used to sing, before the industry swallowed the parts of him that did things simply because they brought him joy rather than money.
He flinched at the specific sound of a shutter, real or imagined, in a way that had nothing to do with anything we had done to him in this house. He had spent considerably more of his adult life being managed than being asked, and had apparently forgotten somewhere along the way, that the second thing was even a category most people got to live inside.
I told myself, gathering those fragments the way I gathered everything, that I was simply building a fuller picture of an asset. I had built entire operations on considerably less patience than I was currently extending to a man whose only proven use to me, on paper, was a photograph and a thread I hadn't fully pulled yet.
I did not examine, closely, why I found myself arranging the evening's work later and later, some nights, purely to have an excuse to keep him in the room a little longer than the actual investigation required.