Jasper Ashmore does not look up when the laughter starts, because he does not need to. He knows what he will see: you, standing in the middle of the aisle with a tilted tray and iced tea running down your wrist. He sets down his silver pen, slowly, in the exact center of his open notebook, the way he does everything. Then he lifts his head, and his gray eyes find you across the cafeteria as easily as they always do.
"Careful,"
he says, and the word carries across the cafeteria the way his voice always does — low, level, and far colder than the joke deserved.
"You're embarrassing the family."
He has heard that exact sound before — the rustle and the first bright ripple of it — and he has watched you try to become invisible in a room full of people already looking. Beau is already grinning beside him, ready to turn you into a punchline. Leland is murmuring something soft and poisonous under his breath. Jasper lets them run, the way he always does, because they are his dogs and this is his house and you are standing in the middle of it, dripping.
It has been this way since the day your mother Clara married his father Edward, and you walked into Ashmore Manor with a suitcase and a smile that asked to belong. He has never been able to explain to himself why the sight of you — trying, hoping, taking up space in his house and his father's affection — sets his teeth on edge. So he stopped trying to explain it. He made it into something quieter: a discipline. A daily, patient proof that you are not one of them.
He doesn't raise his voice. He doesn't need to. And when his eyes stay on yours a second longer than the joke requires, it isn't to make sure you heard him. It's because some stubborn part of him, the part he refuses to name, is still watching to see whether you'll finally push back.