The Ghost in the Guesthouse
The travel from Rowan Voss’s private office at Voss Media Tower to Rowan’s estate guesthouse and main kitchen consumed the next hour. Headlights cut cold through the gathering dusk.
The guesthouse sat at the eastern edge of the property, separated from the main house by a hedgerow of trimmed cypress and a flagstone path that caught the afternoon light like scattered coins. Rowan had bought the estate seven years ago for the privacy, not the grandeur—sixteen acres of landscaped seclusion that had once belonged to a studio head who understood the value of disappearing.
Nadia stood in the center of the guesthouse living room, her duffel bag still clutched in her hand, and tried to reconcile the space with the word “guesthouse.” The ceilings rose twenty feet. A marble fireplace dominated the far wall. The kitchen, visible through an archway, had appliances that probably cost more than her first car.
Max had already abandoned her side and was circling the room with the methodical intensity of a child cataloguing a new environment. He stopped in front of a framed photograph on the mantel—Rowan at some industry event, shaking hands with a man Nadia didn’t recognize.
“That’s him,” Max said. It wasn’t a question.
“Yes.”
“He looks different in real life.” The boy tilted his head, studying the image. “In the picture, he’s smiling. He didn’t smile when we met him.”
Nadia set the duffel down. “He was surprised to meet you. Sometimes people don’t smile when they’re surprised.”
“He smiled at the lawyer.”
She had no response to that. Max had always been too observant for his age—a trait she recognized as both a gift and a curse, depending on the day. He had inherited her eye for detail, her ability to read a room in seconds. But he had inherited other things too. Things she saw every time she looked at him and felt her chest tighten.
The doorbell chimed, a soft harmonic tone that seemed to come from everywhere at once. Nadia crossed to the door and found Rosa on the threshold, carrying a garment bag and a takeout container that smelled of garlic and herbs.
“I brought dinner,” Rosa said, pushing past her without ceremony. “And pajamas for Max. And a bottle of wine that costs more than it should, because I felt like we needed something that implies celebration even if we’re not ready for it.”
Nadia closed the door. “You didn’t have to—”
“Stop.” Rosa set the container on the kitchen island and turned to face her, arms crossed. “You moved into your ex-boyfriend’s guesthouse because your son’s other set of grandparents are trying to kidnap him. I’m bringing dinner. This is how friendship works.”
Max appeared in the archway, drawn by the smell of food. Rosa’s expression softened immediately—the way it always did around him, the way everyone’s did when they met him for the first time.
“Max, this is my friend Rosa,” Nadia said. “She’s going to help us get settled.”
Max extended his hand with formal politeness. “Hello, Rosa. Thank you for the food.”
Rosa shook it, her eyes flicking to Nadia with amused surprise. “You raised a gentleman.”
“He taught himself that part.”
Max accepted the compliment with a small nod and retreated to the living room, where he resumed his inspection of the space. Rosa watched her go, then turned back to Nadia with an expression that shifted from fondness to something more serious.
“He looks exactly like him,” Rosa said quietly. “It’s uncanny.”
“I know.”
“Does Rowan know? Has he looked at the boy’s face yet?”
Nadia thought about the moment in the conference room—Rowan’s eyes moving from the custody agreement to Max, the way his hand had stilled on the pen, the fractional hesitation before he’d signed. He had looked. She had seen the recognition hit him like a physical blow.
“He’s starting to,” she said.
The upstairs bedroom was smaller than the living room but still larger than the entire apartment Nadia had shared with Max in Echo Park. A queen bed dominated one wall, and a window looked out over the pool—turquoise water that caught the late afternoon light and scattered it across the ceiling in shifting patterns.
Rosa helped her unfold the spare bedding they’d found in the hall closet, laying a second mattress on the floor for Max. The boy had already claimed the window seat, his knees drawn up to his chest as he watched a drone pass overhead—silver, insectile, too high to be a toy.
“Is that one of the bad people’s?” Max asked.
Nadia’s heart stopped. “What do you mean?”
“The man who drove us here—Owen—he said to tell him if I saw any drones. He said they might be taking pictures.” Max didn’t turn from the window. “I’ve been counting. That’s the third one since we got here.”
Nadia crossed to the window and pulled the curtain closed. The fabric was heavy, lined, designed to block light and observation. She hadn’t thought about curtains when they’d arrived. She hadn’t thought about a lot of things.
“From now on, you tell me first,” she said, keeping her voice steady. “Okay? Before you tell anyone else.”
Max nodded, but his eyes lingered on the closed curtain as if he could see through it. “Are they going to take me?”
“No.” She knelt beside him, taking his hands in hers. “No one is going to take you. Your father is going to make sure of that.”
“He’s not my father yet.” Max’s voice was flat, clinical. “He’s just a man who signed a paper.”
Rosa made a sound in the doorway—a soft exhale of sympathy that she tried to mask by clearing her throat. Nadia held Max’s gaze until he looked away, and then she stood and walked to the door, gesturing for Rosa to follow her into the hall.
“He’s processing,” Rosa said, her voice low. “That’s normal.”
“None of this is normal.” Nadia pressed her palms against the wall, feeling the cool plaster against her skin. “I brought him here to keep him safe, and now there are drones circling the property like vultures.”
“Then talk to Rowan. That’s what he’s for.”
The kitchen of the main house was warm, lit by pendant lights that cast amber pools across the marble island. Rowan stood at the stove, his back to the doorway, a spatula in his hand and the smell of seared beef filling the air. He didn’t turn when she entered, but she saw his shoulders shift—a recognition of her presence that he didn’t acknowledge.
“Owen told me about the drones,” she said.
“Three of them. Commercial models, modified for extended flight time and high-resolution imaging.” He flipped the steak with practiced precision. “They’ve been circling since four. I’ve already filed a complaint with the FAA and had my legal team draft a cease-and-desist. It won’t stop them, but it creates a paper trail.”
“And if they try something more direct?”
He set down the spatula and turned to face her. In the low light, the structure of his face seemed sharper—the angles of his jaw, the line of his brow, the way his mouth settled into a flat line that betrayed nothing. He had always been good at that. At giving nothing away while calculating everything.
“Then Owen handles it,” he said. “That’s why I pay him.”
She wanted to press, to demand more specifics, but something in his expression stopped her. There was an exhaustion there that she recognized—the particular weight of someone who had been carrying a burden alone for so long they’d forgotten what it felt like to put it down.
“Max asked if you were going to be his father,” she said. “Or just a man who signed a paper.”
Rowan’s hand stilled on the counter. For a long moment, he said nothing. The clock on the wall ticked. The city hummed beyond the glass. Then he reached for a plate and slid the steak onto it, the motion precise and deliberate.
“He’s seven years old,” Rowan said. “He shouldn’t have to ask that question.”
“No. He shouldn’t.”
He carried the plate to the island and set it down, then pulled out a stool and gestured for her to sit. She didn’t. They stood on opposite sides of the marble, the space between them filled with seven years of silence and a boy who had inherited both of their best and worst qualities.
“I spent the afternoon going through your files,” Rowan said. “The Ravenwood custodial claim, the harassment complaints, the stalking incidents you reported to the LAPD. You documented everything.”
“I learned from the best.”
A shadow crossed his face. “You learned from me, but you didn’t call me. You didn’t tell me about Max. You let me miss seven years of his life because you decided I couldn’t handle it.”
“I decided you wouldn’t believe me.” Her voice came out harder than she intended. “I was twenty-three years old, Rowan. Twenty-three and pregnant with the child of a man who had spent the previous six months convincing me that love meant letting him push me away. What was I supposed to do? Show up at your door and tell you I was carrying your baby, hoping you’d somehow become a different person?”
“I deserved the choice.”
“You had a choice. You chose to end things with me in a hotel room in Buenos Aires because your father told you I was a distraction.” She stepped closer, the words burning in her throat. “You chose your career. You chose your family name. You chose everything except me, and I was not going to let you make that same choice about our son.”
The silence stretched. The clock ticked. The steak cooled on the plate between them.
Rowan looked at her, and for the first time since she’d walked into that conference room, she saw something crack behind his eyes. Not the cold calculation of a producer evaluating a deal, not the strategic patience of a man who had built an empire from nothing. Just a man, standing in his kitchen, realizing the cost of decisions he had made eight years ago.
“I was wrong,” he said.
The words hung in the air, unexpected and raw.
“I was wrong to let you go,” he continued. “I was wrong to believe my father when he told me that love was a liability. I was wrong about a lot of things, Nadia. But I am not wrong about this.” He gestured toward the guesthouse, toward the boy who was probably still watching the curtains for shadows. “That is my son. And I am going to protect him. From the Ravenwoods, from my family, from anyone who tries to take him. But I need you to trust me. I need you to stop making decisions for both of us.”
She wanted to argue. She wanted to list every reason why trust was a luxury she couldn’t afford, why giving him access to Max meant giving him the power to break her again. But she looked at his hands—hands that had signed the custody agreement without hesitation, hands that had held her once like she was something precious—and she felt the walls she had built start to shift.
“One step at a time,” she said. “That’s all I can give you.”
He nodded, and the tension in his shoulders eased by a fraction. “One step at a time.”
They stood in the kitchen, the night pressing against the windows, the city glittering beyond the glass. On the counter, her phone buzzed—a text from Owen, updating the drone count. She didn’t look at it. She was looking at Rowan, at the set of his jaw and the steadiness of his gaze, and she was trying to remember how to trust a man who had once been her entire world.
Rowan’s hand lingered on the small of her back for a moment too long. “You should have told me the second you saw the Ravenwood name on those papers.” He paused. “And you should have told me the second you found out you were pregnant.”