Chapter Text
Alex Claremont-Diaz has seen enough death to recognize when something doesn’t belong.
It isn’t the body. Bodies are easy. Bodies make sense. Gravity, physics, bad decisions—there’s always a chain you can follow if you’re willing to look hard enough. He learned that early, long before the bylines and televised panels and the polite, strained smiles from press secretaries who knew exactly how much trouble he could cause.
Back then, it had been smaller things. City council corruption. A wrongful arrest buried under paperwork and indifference. The kind of stories that didn’t make national headlines but still kept people up at night.
Now, the stakes are higher. The lies are cleaner. And he’s not doing it alone anymore.
No, what doesn’t belong is the detail. The detail is what breaks the pattern. The thing that doesn’t fit, no matter how neatly everything else is arranged around it. And Alex has built a career on noticing those things—on pulling at threads everyone else is content to leave alone.
His sister June had been the one to teach him how to find them in the first place. Not intentionally, not at first. It started as arguments—over headlines, over sources, over whether a story was worth chasing if it didn’t immediately pay off. June had always been sharper about structure, about narrative, about what people would believe. Alex had always been better at pushing, at asking the question no one wanted to answer and refusing to let it go.
They’d nearly gotten each other fired more than once before anyone realized they were more effective together than apart.
Now, it’s deliberate. Alex digs. June builds. He breaks things open; she makes sure the world listens when they do. Between them, stories don’t stay buried for long.
June got into journalism first. It wasn’t a dramatic decision or some grand act of rebellion—it was instinct. She was the first to realize that politics, even from inside their family orbit, was mostly storytelling. Whoever controlled the narrative controlled everything else.
She started in investigative reporting right out of college, driven less by idealism and more by precision. She didn’t want opinions—she wanted receipts. Paper trails. Patterns. Proof.
Her reputation built fast: sharp editorials, brutal fact-checking, and a talent for making powerful people accidentally incriminate themselves in interviews.
Alex came later.
At first, he was supposed to go into politics like their mother. Strategy, communications, campaign work—the “clean” side of influence. And for a while, he did. He was good at it, too. He understood people the way some people understood music: instinctively, almost too easily.
But what frustrated him was the gap between truth and messaging. He could see it constantly—how facts were reshaped until they were just palatable enough to survive public consumption.
June would call it “the system.”
Alex would call it “bullshit.”
The turning point wasn’t a single event—it was a pattern breaking.
Nobody screamed. There wasn’t some cinematic collapse where Alex Claremont-Diaz finally snapped under the pressure of American power and hypocrisy.
It happened slowly instead. Quietly. The way disillusionment usually happens.
At first, he told himself compromise was necessary. That real change took time. That politics was messy because people were messy, and helping people at scale meant accepting imperfection. And maybe some part of that was true.
But after a while, Alex started noticing how often “compromise” really meant sacrificing the same people repeatedly because they were easier to sacrifice. Poor people. Queer kids. Immigrants. People without money. Without influence. Without anyone powerful enough to protect them.
Every closed-door meeting seemed to end with someone deciding who was acceptable collateral damage. And Alex hated how quickly everyone else learned to live with that. Including him. Especially him. Because Alex was good at politics. That was the problem. He could charm donors. Negotiate language. Smooth over scandals. Make ugly things sound reasonable.
He could stand behind podiums and talk passionately about justice while knowing some staffer three floors down had already buried the part of the bill that would have actually helped people because it wasn’t politically viable.
It started eating him alive in pieces. “I thought politics was where you changed things,” he admitted to June one evening. “But every time someone actually needs help, there’s always another calculation.”
Money. Optics. Polling. Timing. Always a reason to wait. Always a reason not to act yet.
And Alex—
Alex had never been good at standing still when people were hurting.
That was the fundamental thing about him. The thing that drove nearly every decision he made whether it was smart or not:
He moved toward people. Toward pain. Toward conflict. Toward the possibility of helping.
Even when it wrecked him. Especially when it wrecked him.
So, Alex started feeding June things. Small at first. Internal memos. Offhand comments from aides. Inconsistencies he noticed while doing comms work on campaigns. Things that didn’t make headlines but didn’t sit right either. Alex knew how politicians talked when they were hiding things. He knew where money disappeared. Who buried reports. Which aides drank too much when nervous. Which staffers felt guilty enough to talk if someone listened long enough.
June didn’t dismiss him. She tested him. She made him prove every detail. Twice. And when he did, she started using him. Not officially. Not at first.
Alex would pass along leads. June would decide whether they were real stories or noise. If they were real, she’d build the investigation. If they weren’t, she’d tell him exactly why—and he’d learn from it.
They developed a rhythm without ever naming it. Then it escalated.
Alex left formal political communications after a story he flagged—one June pursued—blew open a corruption chain tied to a senior political donor network. It caused a quiet scandal that never fully made it to public understanding, but it cost people jobs, reputations, and leverage. It wasn't the one that launched their careers. That would come later. But it started a brother-sister partnership that has held strong to this day.
After that, there was no pretending Alex was “just observing” anymore.
He and June started working as a unit. Alex is the field lens. He talks to people, pushes into spaces he’s not supposed to be in, reads behavior in real time. He’s instinct, pressure, momentum. June is the architecture. She builds the story: structure, sourcing, verification, publication timing. She decides what becomes truth in the public record.
Alex is faster, more impulsive, more willing to risk access for answers. June is slower, more deliberate, more willing to sit on a truth until it can survive exposure. But Alex would never use that impulse to harm innocent people. He could slow down if it meant he could help someone and June appreciated that.
And unlike most reporters, Alex genuinely liked people. Even when he probably shouldn’t. He saw humanity in everyone constantly, almost compulsively. It made him too forgiving sometimes. Too reckless. Too emotionally invested.
But it also made people trust him.
Because Alex listened like someone who believed your life mattered. And that changed things for him. Sources opened doors for him they wouldn’t open for anyone else. Whistleblowers called him back. Victims trusted him. Even people caught inside ugly systems found themselves telling Alex the truth because he looked at them like they could still become better than the worst thing they’d done.
June once told him that was either his greatest strength or a catastrophic character flaw. Probably both.
He and June became a strange kind of investigative partnership after that. June was methodical, skeptical, precise. She saw structures clearly—systems, motives, institutional rot.
Alex saw people. Patterns in behavior. Fear. Shame. Desperation. Goodness trying to survive inside terrible systems.
Over time, Alex developed a reputation for impossible stories. Not because he was reckless. Because he refused to let things go.
If someone was being hurt, Alex dug until he found out why. If someone disappeared into bureaucracy, he followed. If powerful people thought money could bury consequences, Alex took it personally.
It exhausted him. He was a man who man who consistently chose empathy over self-preservation. But maybe that’s what made him exceptional.
Though privately, June sometimes worried about the way Alex threw himself into strangers’ pain like he believed he could save everyone if he just worked hard enough. Like he needed to save everyone. For what it’s worth, Alex himself never fully understood where that instinct came from.
Still, together they were an incredible team. And even though they argue constantly, it would rarely be about whether something is true. More often about whether the world is ready for it.
Underneath it all, there’s something personal that neither of them says out loud: June trusts Alex’s instincts more than any trained reporter she’s worked with. Alex trusts June not to let him burn everything down chasing something that isn’t real.
And both of them know the truth: If either of them worked alone, they’d go too far in opposite directions. Together, they stay effective, almost dangerous—but contained.
Tonight, it’s a suspicious death they’ll be investigating. A United States Senator. That always complicates things.
Alex stands just outside the perimeter tape, press badge clipped to his jacket, ignoring the way the uniformed officer at the edge of the scene keeps glancing at him like he’s trying to decide whether to kick him out or ask for his autograph. Alex doesn’t acknowledge it. He’s already filed the face away, already mapped the exits, already decided how far he can push before someone pushes back.
June, for her part, is already inside.
The morning air is sharp with the tail end of winter, the kind that bites at your lungs if you breathe too deeply. The street itself is a study in contradiction—quiet, manicured wealth interrupted by the low thrum of emergency vehicles and the murmur of gathered onlookers pretending they’re not watching.
A woman across the street clutches a coffee cup she hasn’t touched, eyes fixed on the house like she’s trying to reconcile what she knows of it with what’s happening now. A man beside her scrolls through his phone, likely already reading the first sanitized reports.
Accidental fall. Tragic. Unfortunate. Clean.
The townhouse looms in front of him—brick, polished, expensive in that quiet, old-money D.C. way. The kind of place where things are supposed to happen behind closed doors, discreetly, cleanly. The kind of place where consequences are managed before they ever become public.
Not like this.
“Lil’ Bit.”
Alex turns at the sound of his nickname. June is slipping under the tape before anyone can stop her, phone in hand, expression sharp. Of course she is. Rules, to June, are more like suggestions—useful only until they get in the way of something better.
“You’re late,” she says.
“I’m two minutes early,” Alex replies automatically.
“You’re underdressed for a murder.”
“It’s not a murder,” Alex says, though his eyes drift back to the open front door, where a pair of paramedics are wheeling out a covered stretcher. The black zipper of the body bag catches briefly on the edge of the gurney before one of them smooths it down with practiced efficiency. “Officially.”
June huffs. “Right. ‘Tragic accident.’” She does air quotes as she says it. “That’s what they’re calling it.”
“Isn’t it?”
She just looks at him. That’s answer enough.
Alex exhales slowly, dragging his gaze back to the house. From this angle, he can just make out the base of the staircase through the entryway—polished wood, a narrow runner, the faint scuff marks that could be anything or nothing at all.
“Security?” he asks.
“Locked down,” June says. “Private detail. They’re already talking to the police, but from what I can tell, nothing’s out of place. No forced entry. No missing items. No alarms tripped.” She pauses, then adds, “I talked my way past one of the officers at the back. They’re rattled—but they don’t know why yet.”
Alex huffs quietly. “You’re going to get arrested one of these days, Bug.”
“Please. You’d just write me out of it.”
He doesn’t deny it. Because he would. Because he has. More than once.
“Which means either nothing happened,” Alex murmurs, “or whoever did it didn’t need to break in.”
June’s mouth twitches like she agrees but isn’t ready to say it out loud.
“What do we know?” he asks.
“Senator Arthur Reeves. Fifty-eight. Found at the bottom of his own staircase around six this morning by his security detail.” June ticks it off like she’s reading from a script. “No signs of forced entry. No obvious struggle. Neck broken on impact.”
“Clean,” Alex murmurs.
“Too clean,” June corrects. Then, after a beat: “You’re going to want to see this.”
She holds out her phone.
There’s a shift in her tone now—subtle, but unmistakable. Not just urgency. Weight.
June doesn’t bring him something like this unless she’s already checked it six different ways and still can’t explain it.
Alex takes it, already bracing himself for photos from the scene—blood, angles, something concrete. Something he can prove.
Instead, it’s a document. Black text on a stark white page. Clean formatting. Wide margins.
A manuscript.
Alex frowns. “What am I looking at?”
“Scroll.”
He does.
At first, it reads like any other piece of literary fiction—measured, controlled, unsettling in a way that creeps up on you instead of announcing itself. The prose is deliberate. Precise. Not a word wasted.
It’s good.
That registers automatically, annoyingly, even as the rest of his brain is trying to figure out why June looks like she’s about to drop something nuclear in his lap.
Then he hits the paragraph.
—
He doesn’t hear the first step give beneath him.
It’s the second that does it—the subtle shift, the almost imperceptible slide of polished leather against worn wood. Enough to break balance. Not enough to save him.
There’s a moment, suspended and strange, where he understands exactly what’s happening.
The fall is inevitable.
The body will land at the base of the stairs, neck angled wrong, eyes still open.
It will look like an accident.
—
Alex stops scrolling.
For a second, the noise of the street—the murmured conversations, the distant sirens, the low hum of the city waking up—drops away completely.
He looks up slowly at the townhouse. At the staircase just visible through the open door. At the paramedics loading the stretcher into the ambulance.
And for a brief, unwelcome moment, his mind does something he hates—it overlays the words onto the scene, matching detail to detail, step to step, until the line between fiction and reality feels thinner than it should.
“Where did you get this?” he asks, his voice quieter now.
June watches him carefully. “It’s from an unreleased manuscript.”
Alex’s grip tightens slightly on the phone. “Whose?”
She hesitates. And that—more than anything else—sets something cold and sharp settling into Alex’s chest.
Because June doesn’t hesitate. Not unless the answer matters.
“June.”
“It’s not public,” she says. “It hasn’t even been announced yet. I shouldn’t have it.”
“June.”
She exhales. “It’s Henry Fox’s.”
The name lands heavier than it should.
Alex knows it, of course. Everyone does. You don’t become that kind of literary phenomenon without being impossible to ignore. Henry Fox: critically adored, famously private, equal parts myth and man. The kind of writer people either worship or dissect.
There are profiles—dozens of them—trying to pin him down. None of them agree. Reclusive genius. Calculated enigma. Fragile. Arrogant. Brilliant. Unstable.
June reads them all. Alex reads between them. He doesn’t have time for myths. People are simpler than that, in the end. They lie. They protect themselves. They make choices they think they can live with.
Until they can’t. Until now.
“That’s a coincidence,” he says, though it doesn’t sound convincing even to his own ears.
June gives him a look. “Is it?”
Alex looks back down at the screen.
Reads the paragraph again.
This time, he notices the details he missed before—the precision of it, the way it doesn’t just describe a fall but anticipates it. The timing. The inevitability. The quiet certainty threaded through every line.
It doesn’t read like imagination. It reads like observation.
“When was this written?” he asks.
“Draft timestamp puts the last edit at three days ago.”
Three days.
Alex glances back at the house. At the place where a man died this morning in a way that shouldn’t raise questions—but suddenly, very much does.
Three days is enough time for a coincidence.
It’s also enough time for something else.
“Who else has seen this?” he asks.
“Just me. And now you.”
“Good.” He hands the phone back, already thinking three steps ahead, five, ten. Names. Access. Motive. Opportunity. “Keep it that way.”
June raises an eyebrow. “You’re not going to run it?”
“Not yet.”
That surprises her. It should. Alex doesn’t sit on stories like this—not when they’re this explosive, this easy to spin into headlines that would dominate every news cycle for the next week. There are no people to protect here. A conservative senator and a weatlthy privileged author are exactly the type of people that Alex doesn’t mind taking down to help others.
But this—this isn’t a story yet. It’s a question. And questions, if you ask them too loudly, have a way of disappearing before you ever get answers.
He takes one last look at the townhouse. At the clean lines. At the quiet, careful order of it. At the detail that doesn’t belong.
Then he says, “I want everything we have on Henry Fox.”
June studies him for a moment. “You think he did it?”
Alex shakes his head slowly.
“No,” he says.
And then, after a beat, quieter—more certain, and somehow more unsettled because of it:
“But I think he knew.”
The building doesn’t look like it belongs to someone who writes about death.
Alex notices that first. Not the security—though there is security. Subtle, expensive, the kind that doesn’t advertise itself but doesn’t miss anything either. A man at the front desk who clocks Alex the second he walks in. Cameras positioned just a little too deliberately to be decorative.
No, it’s the quiet.
The building is all glass and pale stone, softened by warm lighting and curated art that looks effortless in the way only very expensive things can. It feels… controlled. Balanced.
Nothing like the sharp, invasive precision of the manuscript sitting in Alex’s bag.
“Name?”
The man at the desk doesn’t look up as he asks it.
“Claremont-Diaz.”
That gets a glance. Not recognition—Alex’s ego notes that immediately—but something adjacent to it. Awareness, maybe. The kind that comes from being told to expect someone.
“Mr. Fox is expecting you,” the man says after a beat. “Top floor.”
Alex didn’t call ahead. Didn’t email. Didn’t even confirm that Henry Fox was in the city.
And yet—
He steps into the elevator, the doors sliding shut with a soft, final sound that feels heavier than it should. The ride up is too smooth. Too quiet. Alex leans back against the wall, arms crossed loosely, mind already working angles.
There are only a few possibilities.
One: coincidence. Unlikely.
Two: Henry is being fed information from the same source as the manuscript leak.
Three—
Alex exhales slowly.
Three is the one he doesn’t like.
Three is that Henry knew he was coming.
The elevator doors open before he can chase that thought any further.
The hallway beyond is just as curated as the lobby—minimalist, deliberate, every detail placed with intention. There’s only one door at the end. Alex doesn’t knock. He doesn’t give himself time to think about why. He just turns the handle and walks in.
The apartment is… not what he expected.
It’s darker than the rest of the building, for one thing. Not dim, exactly, but muted. Heavy curtains pulled halfway across floor-to-ceiling windows, letting in just enough gray daylight to outline the space without fully illuminating it.
Books everywhere. Not in messy stacks, not chaotic—organized, intentional, but abundant. Shelves lining the walls, tables, even the floor in places. Open notebooks. Marked pages. A life built out of words.
And threaded through it—
Something else. A faint, metallic scent. Not strong enough to place immediately, but wrong enough that Alex notices it. Ink, maybe. Or something sharper, buried beneath it.
And in the center of it—
Henry Fox.
He’s standing by the window, back half-turned, like he knew exactly when Alex would walk in and didn’t feel the need to check.
Which is—
Annoying.
“Most people knock,” Henry says, voice calm, precise. British, obviously—but softer than Alex expected. Less performative. More… contained.
Alex closes the door behind him. “Most people don’t write about murders before they happen.”
Henry turns then.
And—That’s unexpected. Not because Alex didn’t know what he looked like. Of course he did. There are photos. Interviews. Carefully curated appearances that reveal just enough to maintain intrigue.
But they don’t get it right. They don’t capture the stillness of him.
Henry Fox doesn’t just stand in a room—he holds it. Quietly. Completely. Like everything else moves around him, not the other way around. And he has these incredible blue eyes that look as if they can see into Alex’s soul.
His expression doesn’t change much as he takes Alex in, gaze steady, assessing in a way that feels uncomfortably mutual.
Up close, there are details the photos miss—faint shadows beneath his eyes, like sleep is something optional at best. Ink smudged along the side of his hand, not fresh but not fully scrubbed away either.
A man who works too much. Or doesn’t stop.
“You’ve read it,” Henry says.
It’s not a question.
Alex doesn’t bother pretending otherwise. “Enough.”
A beat passes between them. Measured.
Then Henry nods slightly, like that confirms something he already suspected. “And you came anyway.”
“Should I not have?”
“That depends,” Henry says, and there’s something almost curious in it now, something sharper beneath the calm. “Do you think I killed him?”
There it is.
No denial. No outrage.
Just—
Directness.
Alex studies him. Really studies him.
Looking for cracks. For tells. For anything that lines up with the version of Henry Fox that exists in headlines and speculation and whispered conversations about genius and instability.
He doesn’t find what he expects. He finds… control. Careful, deliberate control. And something underneath it—
Strain.
“I think,” Alex says slowly, “that you wrote about a man dying in a very specific way.”
Henry doesn’t move.
“I think that man died in that exact way three days later.”
Still nothing.
“And I think,” Alex continues, stepping further into the room, closing the distance just slightly, “you didn’t seem surprised when I walked in here.”
That, at least, gets a reaction. Small. Almost imperceptible. But it’s there.
Henry’s gaze sharpens, just a fraction.
“Surprise is overrated,” he says.
“Convenient,” Alex counters.
Another beat.
Then Henry exhales softly, something in his posture shifting—not relaxing, exactly, but… adjusting. Like he’s recalibrating.
“You’re very certain of your narrative,” Henry says.
“That’s my sister’s job,” Alex replies automatically. “I just find the holes in it.”
Something flickers in Henry’s expression at that. Interest, maybe.
“Do you?” he asks.
Alex doesn’t answer that. Instead, he reaches into his bag, pulls out a printed copy of the manuscript June sent him, and sets it down on the nearest table between them.
The pages splay slightly on impact.
A quiet, deliberate move.
“Walk me through it,” Alex says.
Henry looks at the pages. For a long moment, he doesn’t touch them. Doesn’t even look surprised to see them there.
If anything—
He looks… wrong.
Not physically. Not in a way Alex could point to and explain.
But like something in him has slipped half a step out of place.
“I can’t,” Henry says finally.
Alex’s jaw tightens. “Can’t or won’t?”
Henry’s gaze lifts back to his, steady again—but something underneath it has shifted now. Something less controlled.
“I don’t remember writing that part,” he says.
And just like that—
The ground shifts.
Because it would be easier if he were lying. It would be easier if there were tells, cracks, something Alex could point to and say there, that’s it, that’s the angle, that’s the truth breaking through.
But this—
This doesn’t feel like a lie. It feels like something worse.
Alex had interviewed liars before. Politicians. Grifters. Men who weaponized charm like second nature. Henry didn’t feel like that. Henry seemed frightened.
Henry takes a step closer to the table, like he’s drawn to it despite himself. His fingers hover over the pages—but he doesn’t touch them.
“I know the structure,” he says quietly, almost to himself now. “The pacing. The voice.”
His brow furrows.
“But not this.”
His hand finally presses flat against the paper—
And then—
He freezes.
Completely.
Alex notices it immediately.
The tension in his shoulders. The way his breathing stutters, just slightly.
“Henry?”
No response.
Henry’s gaze is fixed on a specific line in the manuscript, pupils blown wider than they should be.
For a split second, he looks—
Not confused. Not even afraid. He looks like he’s recognizing something he shouldn’t. Then he jerks his hand back like the page burned him.
“I didn’t write that,” he says again, sharper this time.
Too sharp.
Alex steps closer without thinking.
“Hey—”
“Don’t,” Henry snaps.
The word lands harder than it should. Silence follows it. Tight. Charged.
And suddenly—
They’re close.
Closer than either of them intended.
Alex is aware of it all at once—the shift in air, the narrow space between them, the way Henry’s breathing hasn’t quite evened out yet.
Up close, the control fractures more visibly.
The tension. The exhaustion.
And something else—
Something electric and unwanted and impossible to ignore.
Henry looks at him then. Really looks.
And for the first time, the composure cracks just enough to let something raw slip through.
“You should leave,” Henry says, but there’s no force behind it. No real conviction.
Alex doesn’t move.
“That’s not how this works,” he says, quieter now.
Henry lets out something that might almost be a laugh, except there’s nothing amused about it.
“You don’t even know what this is.”
“No,” Alex agrees. “But you don’t either.”
That lands.
Henry’s gaze flickers—just for a second—but it’s enough.
Alex presses, just slightly.
“You didn’t seem surprised I was coming,” he says. “You didn’t question how I got the manuscript. And you’re telling me you don’t remember writing part of it.”
Another step closer. Close enough now that it’s impossible to ignore the tension coiling between them.
“That’s not nothing,” Alex says.
Henry’s jaw tightens.
“I’ve had…” He stops. Resets. “I lose time,” he says finally, the words controlled but quieter now. “Not like forgetting where you put your keys. Hours. Sometimes longer.”
Alex doesn’t interrupt. Doesn’t soften. But he listens.
“I wake up and things are different,” Henry continues. “Work is done I don’t remember doing. Notes I don’t remember writing.”
His gaze drifts—just briefly—to a stack of open notebooks nearby.
“Sometimes it’s nothing. Sometimes it’s…” He gestures vaguely toward the manuscript.
Alex follows the motion. Then looks back at him.
“And you didn’t think that was worth telling anyone?” he asks.
Henry’s expression tightens. “Who, exactly, would you suggest?”
That’s fair. Alex lets that sit for a second. “Has it been getting worse?”
A pause. That’s answer enough.
Henry exhales slowly, running a hand through his hair—an unguarded gesture that breaks the careful composure more than anything else has so far.
“Yes,” he says.
The word lands between them. Heavy. Real.
And something about that honesty—reluctant, strained, unpolished—shifts the dynamic again.
Alex studies him for another long moment. Recalibrating. Adjusting.
“Okay,” he says finally, quieter now. “Then we start there.”
Henry’s brow furrows slightly. “You’re assuming I want your help.”
“I’m assuming,” Alex says, “that if someone is using your work to stage deaths, you’re either part of it—”
Henry goes very still.
“—or you’re next.”
Silence stretches between them. Heavy. Charged.
For the first time since Alex walked in, Henry looks genuinely caught off guard.
Not by the accusation. By the implication.
And when he speaks again, his voice is softer. Quieter. More honest than anything he’s said so far.
“I think,” Henry says slowly, “you’ve already decided which one you believe.”
Alex meets his gaze. Doesn’t look away. Close enough now that it would be easy to. Easier than holding it.
“I think,” he says, “I haven’t decided yet.”
Another pause. Longer this time. Neither of them moves.
There’s something unmistakable in it now—something neither of them acknowledges, but neither of them steps away from either.
Then—
Henry nods once. Sharp. Decisive.
“Good,” he says.
And for the first time, there’s something almost like a challenge in it.
“Because neither have I.”
Alex doesn’t expect it—the way Henry holds his gaze just a second too long.
Not confrontational. Not friendly. Just… assessing. Like he’s trying to solve something.
Alex tilts his head slightly. “You always stare at people like that, or am I getting special treatment?”
Henry blinks, blushing slightly, like he’s been caught somewhere he didn’t mean to be.
“Only when I don’t understand them,” he says.