Chapter 5
*But I never put Saint Jude’s on the hiring sheet.*
I had specifically written down: *I work as an independent archivist. Tell people I am booked through next autumn with private estates.* That was it. One line on a sheet of loose-leaf paper I had shoved into his hand in the back of the town car. I had never mentioned the phytate treatment. I had never mentioned the micro-chamber. I hadn't told him the name of the herbarium, because Saint Jude's was an obscure, private cliffside trust fifty miles north of the city that didn't even have a functioning website.
Beatrice’s face was turning a fascinating shade of mottled plum. “Well... yes, but that was an anomaly. Everyone knows Clara struggles with high-pressure environments. When she was cataloging the estate papers for the judge, she had to take multiple leaves of absence. She has a... delicate nervous system.”
“She took a leave of absence because the basement had an active black mold infestation that exceeded federal safety limits by four hundred percent,” Julian said, his eyes narrowing into cold, lethal slits. “And rather than suing the estate or abandoning the collection, she bought her own respirator and finished the cataloging in an open-air tent in November. That isn’t a delicate nervous system, Dr. Miller. That is an extraordinary, stubborn resilience that you and your committee couldn't replicate if you tried.”
Arthur Miller let out an involuntary, nervous grunt of agreement, which earned him a venomous glare from his wife.
“And as for her schedule,” Julian continued, his thumb gently, rhythmically tracing the inner tendon of my wrist, sending shivers of confusing warmth straight to my core, “Clara is currently declining seventy percent of the institutional contracts offered to her because she is preparing a retrospective monograph on seventeenth-century cartographic preservation. So if you’re looking to commission her for your foundation, Beatrice, I’d suggest you submit a formal inquiry to her office. Her rates have doubled since last spring, and her waiting list is eight months long.”
Beatrice stood frozen, her mouth opening and closing like a landed trout. For the first time in the four years I had known her, the grand matriarch of the heritage trust had absolutely nothing to say.
The two associates behind her exchanged uneasy glances, murmuring polite excuses before quickly retreating toward the dessert bar. Arthur offered a tight, apologetic bow of his head.
“A pleasure meeting you, Julian,” Arthur muttered. “Clara, congratulations on the charts. Truly.”
He took Beatrice by the elbow and steered her away before she could detonate.
The silence that followed their retreat was heavy, charged with an electric tension that felt almost violent.
I stood beside Julian, my ribs heaving as if I had just run five miles uphill in the dark. The crowd surged around us—women in velvet and silk, men sipping twenty-year-old scotch, waiters weaving through with trays of lemon tarts—but the world seemed to have drained of all color, leaving only the sharp, terrifying reality of the man standing beside me.
He had defended me. He had dismantled my worst tormentor with the cold, effortless precision of an executioner. It was everything I had dreamed of, everything I had paid two thousand dollars for.
And it was terrifying.
“Julian,” I whispered, the word catching in the back of my dry throat.
He turned to look down at me. The icy fury that had hardened his features while addressing Beatrice vanished instantly, replaced by that bottomless, agonizing tenderness that made my chest ache so fiercely I could barely stand.
“Are you all right?” he asked softly. “Did she hurt you?”
“How did you know about the calcium phytate?”
Julian’s shoulders shifted slightly, an almost imperceptible tightening under his dark tuxedo jacket. “You told me.”
“I didn't.” My voice was barely a breath, but it shook with a frantic, rising panic. “I didn't tell you, Julian. I didn't write it down. I didn't say it in the car. Saint Jude’s Herbarium is an obscure private estate on the cliffs above Blackwood Bay. I spent three months there two years ago. I didn't tell a single soul except...”
My voice trailed off. My mind hit a sudden, jagged blank wall.
*Except who?*
I grabbed my temple with my free hand, the throbbing behind my eye flaring up with sickening heat. The memory was right there, behind a door made of fog. A cliffside cottage with cedar shingles. The smell of salt spray and crushed rosemary. A wood-burning stove crackling in the corner while rain lashed against the small paned window. Someone sitting across from me at a battered pine table, pouring chamomile tea into a chipped ceramic mug, listening to me ramble for hours about the iron-gall ink eating away at the parchment...
*Derek?*
No. Derek hated the coast. Derek refused to stay anywhere that didn't have room service and a valet. Derek had called that assignment a waste of gas money.
“Clara,” Julian said, his hand sliding up from my wrist to cup my elbow, his touch grounding and warm against my freezing skin. “Look at me. Don't chase the fog. Look at my eyes.”
I looked up. His slate-gray eyes were wide, brimming with a grief so immense, so quiet and solitary, that it knocked the breath out of me.
“You hum,” Julian said softly, the words coming out slow, like a confession dragged out of him against his will.
“What?”
“When Beatrice mentioned your nervous system,” Julian murmured, his thumb stroking the curve of my forearm in slow, measured intervals. “You were about to apologize. You were about to drop your head, clench your fingers together, and start humming that old melody under your breath. The minor-key Gaelic one. *The Skye Boat Song*.”
A cold, icy dread flooded my veins, freezing me from the neck down.
“Your grandmother sang it to you,” Julian continued, his voice barely audible over the roar of the marquee. “In the kitchen in Inverness, when you were nine, before the storm blew the roof off the shed. You only hum it when your nervous system is pushed to its absolute limit, Clara. When you feel like the walls are falling down and there’s nowhere safe to stand.”
I stared at him, my heart hammering against my ribs until it felt like bone would splinter.
My grandmother had died in Scotland when I was twelve. I had never told Derek about Inverness. I had never told *anyone* about the shed or the roof or the way my grandmother’s hands smelled of lavender soap and dough while she sang to me through the thunder. I had buried that memory in a locked cedar chest in the deepest corner of my heart, a private sanctuary I had never shared with a single human being on this earth.
“Who are you?” I gasped, stumbling backward.
My heel caught on the edge of the marquee flooring. I swayed, nearly tumbling into a tiered tower of champagne glasses, but Julian’s hand shot forward, catching me by the waist and pulling me flush against his chest before I could fall.
His body was solid, warm, and smelled of cedar, rain, and clean linen. For a terrifying, intoxicating half-second, my cheek pressed against the lapel of his jacket, and my body responded with a visceral, instinctive relaxation—a total, complete surrender that defied all logic, all reason, all sanity. My hands knew the exact texture of his lapel. My cheek knew the exact dip of his collarbone.
