CHAPTER 3: DON’T TRUST HIM

Waking up was surprisingly easy, considering the night I’d spent. I was haunted by inexplicable dreams ; dreams you can’t remember, but the feeling haunts you until you close your eyes to another morning. The days were starting to blur. Two weeks had passed without any good substance for the memoir. I was desperate. Every day was the same story.

“Mister Vale isn’t feeling well today, but we’ll take care of you. What breakfast would make it up to you?” Or me, staring at him for hours watching him smoke his cigarette. I could now paint his face in my mind, every inch of his body. I knew the color of his eyes in every kind of light, his different facial expressions, and what each one truly meant. His freckles. His scar on his chin. How his hair fell across his face. His tattoos each one confusing me. Even those gave me headaches as I tried to make sense of them: the burning cross, the dragon sliding down his left arm. They must have a meaning. I had to understand him. It was the first time in my life I’d ever felt so intrigued by someone. Because yes I couldn’t read him. It was an embarrassing thought, but truth is always embarrassing. I started dressing up more, trying to look presentable even putting mascara, which in my world was a miracle. My thoughts were cut short when my phone started ringing and buzzing.

Of course, it was Claire.

Her voice came through the line somehow I knew nothing good could came out of it.

“Please, tell me you’ve started writing something.”

“In two weeks, I was blessed to see him physically, if that’s what you’re asking,” I said, my sarcasm leaking through.

“And?” I could feel her panic.

“And he communicates mostly with… utmost silence.”

She sighed—the kind of sigh that makes you sit straighter even when she can’t see you.

“Ava, I have bad news. You have eight weeks. But since you started two weeks ago, that means you have five weeks. I can’t hold the publisher off forever.”

I felt my face freeze, my ears buzz, my cheeks flush. Another call, another shattering. Five weeks.

“Well, maybe if you told him that he—”

“You’re the writer. Charm him, provoke him, something. But get him talking.”

“I’ll try, but—”

“Don’t try. Do. We both have something to prove here.”

The line clicked dead before I could promise anything. She always hung up like that this time it tasted sour.

The silence that followed wasn’t quiet. It hummed. This house never truly rested; it breathed through the seams and sighed through the vents. Even my heartbeat felt like an intrusion. I had a mission now: find him, and make him talk. Almost breathless, I walked quickly through the house until I found him. He was there, in the library, half-leaning against the old grand piano. The morning light came through the high window gray and thin turning the dust in the air to glittering ghosts.

He didn’t look up. “You start early.”

“Deadlines make excellent alarm clocks.” I couldn’t believe those words came out of my mouth. I could feel myself leaving my body but I had a job, so I smiled, hoping he wouldn’t send me back to my tiny apartment where rent was due.

He rewarded me with a barely perceptible lift of one eyebrow.

“Coffee?” he asked.

“Already medicated, thanks.” I lifted my notebook. “I just need a few minutes of your life story. Preferably the printable version.”

He smirked. “You make it sound painless.”

“Oh, I promise nothing of the sort.”

Nothing’s painless in this world, sir…

He lit a cigarette, exhaling slow ribbons of smoke that moved like thought.

“You always hide behind jokes?”

“Only when sincerity looks dangerous.”

That earned a real laugh short, low, unexpected.

“You think I’m dangerous?”

“I think you’re bored. Bored people are unpredictable. Same result, different motive.”

He turned toward the window. “You came all this way to play psychiatrist?”

“I came to write. Psychiatry’s complimentary, and I’m not paid enough for it.”

Silence. The kind that stretches thin enough to hear your own pulse in it. I studied him from behind my notebook, pretending to write. Up close, he didn’t look like a fallen icon. He looked like someone who had run out of places to burry his pain. There was still beauty there angular, exhausted but the kind that warned you not to touch.

“You ever notice,” he said , “how writers talk like they’re immune to the stories they tell?”

“That’s because we usually are until someone interesting ruins it.”

He looked back and there it was: that flicker of curiosity I’d been trying to earn. The smallest crack in the stone.

“And you think that someone’s me?” he asked.

“I think you’d like to believe that.”

He smiled without showing teeth. “Careful, Ava. You’re trespassing.”

“On what? Your solitude?”

“On what’s left of it.”

His voice had changed lower, almost gentle. It filled the room the way fog fills valleys: slowly, without asking permission. On the other hand, I couldn’t believe he was actually speaking to me my first real conversation with him. We watched each other for a heartbeat too long. There’s a moment when two people stop speaking, and the air between them starts saying everything instead.

This was that moment.

I felt it the pull of it like gravity bending around something hot and dangerous. I wrote it off as hunger and kept talking.

“You could make this easier” I said.

“Easier rarely sells.”

“That’s cynical.”

“It’s experience.”

“You sound rehearsed.”

He smiled again, softer this time. “That’s because I’ve done this dance before.”

“Ghostwriters?”

“People who think they can translate me.”

“And they couldn’t?”

“They tried too hard to make me likable.”

Likable you? Never.

“I won’t make that mistake.”

He tilted his head. “So what direction are we heading, ghostwriter?”

“I’m still deciding if you’re the hero or the cautionary tale.”

“And if I’m neither?”

“Then I’ll have to invent a new category.”

He laughed quietly and looked away. For a second, I thought he might actually say something real but instead he said, “You should probably get out of here before I remember why I hate interviews.”

“Too late,” I said.

He looked at me again, amused. “Persistent.”

“Desperate,” I corrected. “Claire says five weeks.”

“That explains the ambition.”

“Ambition’s a nice word for panic. That’s the first conversation you’ve given me the honor of, Mr. Vale. But you’ve been sick or afflicted by mutism for 2 weeks now”

He smiled the kind that hides a laugh.

“ I don’t feel rested right now and I feel my mutism coming back” he said with a smirk. “But tonight, I may be feeling better. What do you think, Ava?”

“That sounds perfect,” I said, feeling my whole face contract.

I left him there, storming out of the library. On the way back to my room, I passed one of the housekeepers polishing the banister. She smiled politely sure but it looked hollow. The corridor was lined with portraits; unblinking faces. I wondered what they thought of me, the newest intruder.

In my room I sat on the edge of my bed, opened my notebook, and wrote:

He speaks like he’s trying to keep his words from escaping. Every sentence feels like a crime scene: traces of emotion, but no body left behind.

It wasn’t much, but it was a start. I had no choice but to work with the crumbs he was throwing my way. My fingers and I ran to my laptop. The screen glowed blue—bone-white, humming softly.

Then it blinked. One new email. No sender. No subject.

Just three words:

DON’T TRUST HIM.

I stared at it, my pulse hitching. No address. No timestamp. Just that phrase, waiting. Someone inside this house had sent it or maybe I’d sent it to myself without remembering. Mrs. Alder? Noah, the silent assistant? Julian, playing another game? I shut the laptop somewhere below, the piano gave a single, mournful note then silence. I told myself it was coincidence. But the truth whispered back, low and certain:

It never is.