EARNING MY PLACE TODAY.

Underneath were tasks.

Carry bread.

Collect napkins.

Refill water.

Thank every guest.

At the bottom was a number.

Twenty.

Beside Teddy’s efforts, someone had marked eleven small ticks.

Sebastian read the page once.

Then again.

His son watched his face.

“Can I still get there before the candles?”

Sebastian Arden was forty-two years old and knew how to make a room obey him.

In public, he owned hotels, restaurants, and a shipping company with offices in three cities.

In private, people used other words for the authority he held.

They were careful words.

Usually spoken when he wasn’t present.

Teddy knew his father owned buildings. He knew adults sometimes stood when Sebastian entered a room. He also knew Sebastian could make excellent scrambled eggs and became strangely competitive about miniature golf.

Those were the parts that mattered to him.

His parents had divorced when he was five.

The separation had been painful without becoming a war. His mother, Mara, lived twenty minutes away. Teddy spent time in both homes, carried the same battered stuffed rabbit between them, and remained firmly convinced that neither parent bought the right cereal.

Sebastian and Mara disagreed about plenty.

They agreed their son should never have to audition for either household.

When Sebastian married Lavinia eleven months earlier, he thought that understanding would carry forward automatically.

Lavinia was organized, confident, and good at making a complicated evening appear effortless.

She remembered birthdays.

She sent flowers.

She persuaded Sebastian to stop canceling every social invitation that did not involve work.

With Teddy, she could be funny. She invented elaborate names for the squirrels outside the breakfast room and once made him laugh so hard that milk came out of his nose.

Sebastian trusted those moments.

He wanted the marriage to work.

He wanted Teddy to feel at home.

And, too often, he treated wanting those things as though it meant they were already happening.

That morning, Teddy had called while Sebastian was leaving for a business meeting.

“Before the cake?”

“Before dinner,” Sebastian promised.

“Actually dinner?”

“Actually dinner.”

His son had sounded relieved.

Sebastian thought the relief belonged to his birthday.

Now, holding the folded score sheet beneath the chandelier, he understood that Teddy had been waiting for someone who might change the rules.

“Rose,” Sebastian said, “would you bring Teddy’s dinner to the breakfast room?”

His son’s shoulders dropped.

Sebastian noticed immediately.

“What is it?”

Teddy looked at the floor.

“That’s where she said I could eat after.”