“So,” Lena said, stretching the word. “Have you told him yet?”
Clara’s stomach tightened. “Told who what?”
“Don’t you dare play innocent with me. Oliver. Have you told him you don’t actually want to marry him?”
Clara stared at the sandwich in her hand, her appetite gone. “It’s not that simple.”
“Itisthat simple. You say no, you walk away, and the world keeps spinning. You don’t have to chain yourself to a man you don’t love just because your parents guilted you with tales of ancestral wallpaper.”
Clara bit her lip. “It’s not just wallpaper, Lena. It’s the library, the gardens, everything my father worked for his whole life. He can’t manage it anymore, and my mother, she couldn’t bear to leave. They’d lose everything.”
“Not your problem,” Lena said firmly. “You’re their daughter, not their personal saviour. They should want you to be happy, not sacrificed.”
The words made something ache in Clara’s chest. “They’re not asking me to sacrifice. Oliver and I… we’ve known each other since childhood. It makes sense.”
“You’re cataloguing your own life like one of your parchments again.” Lena’s tone softened. “Clara, making sense isn’t the same as being right. You deserve more than ‘makes sense.’ You deserve to feel alive when you look at someone.”
Clara closed her eyes, and to her horror, the first thing that surfaced wasn’t Oliver’s face at all. It was the feeling she’d had outside the museum, the prickling awareness, as thoughsomeone had been watching her from the shadows. Someone unseen, but impossibly close.
Her throat tightened. She pushed the image down, hard. “Lena, you know how my parents are. They need this.”
“They need to learn that your life is yours.”
Clara gave a small laugh that was almost a sigh. “You’d say that even if Oliver was perfect.”
“Of course I would. Because you’re mine to look after, not theirs.”
Clara smiled despite herself. Fierce loyalty wrapped in irreverence, that was Lena. The friend her parents didn’t approve of, the one who lived openly with her girlfriend in a cramped flat full of plants and unfinished art projects, who never once apologised for being exactly who she was.
“I don’t know what I’d do without you,” Clara murmured.
“Probably marry Oliver and become a very polished corpse in ten years’ time. I’ll save you if I have to.”
Clara laughed again, for real this time, even as guilt lingered under her ribs. “Good night, Lena.”
“Good night, darling. And remember, you’re allowed to want more.”
When the call ended, Clara sat in the quiet for a long moment, staring at her darkened phone. She pulled the yellow throw tighter around her shoulders, but the warmth didn’t quite reach the unease still coiled deep inside her.
She had chosen this path. For her parents. For duty.
But Lena was right about one thing.
Wanting more wasn’t something she could deny forever.
Chapter 4
Jonas hadn’t plannedto follow her inside. He told himself he was only mapping patterns, time she left her flat, route she took, security coverage along the way. That was the mission. Stay outside. Keep control.
But when Clara Sutton walked up the broad stone steps of the museum and pushed through the oak doors, his feet moved before he gave them permission.
The air inside smelled of polished stone and old paper, faint traces of beeswax polish clinging to the bannisters. High arched ceilings caught every footstep, throwing them back with cathedral weight.
Jonas moved like another tourist, calm, unhurried, but his eyes worked at a pace no one else could match. Guards: two, by the main hall, distracted. Cameras: seven visible, two blind spots. School group veering right toward the dinosaur wing. Clara, already halfway down the corridor toward the medieval manuscripts, a slim figure with her bag hugged close.
Photographs hadn’t done her justice. He’d studied enough of them in Oliver’s file to know the curve of her face, the line of her jaw. But up close, she wasn’t static ink on paper, her skinwarmed under the light, her eyes were alive with thought, even when her expression stayed composed. A faint strand of hair had slipped loose from her twist, brushing her cheek when she bent her head.
Jonas shouldn’t notice. But he did.
