Practiced Composure

Amara Brown learned to disappear a long time ago.Five years of catering halls and quiet patience taught her exactly how to become unremarkable in any room, how to hold a tray, hold her tongue, and hold everything else together while she waited for one name to appear on one guest list. The name of the family that destroyed her father, took everything they had, and left her mother a shadow of who she used to be.When she's finally hired into the Whitmore household, not as a guest, but as staff, the plan is simple. Get close. Find the truth. Take it all apart from the inside, one careful, invisible step at a time.She doesn't plan on him.Thai Whitmore is nothing like the family he was born into, quiet where his brothers are careless, decent where his father is ruthless, and far too observant for a man everyone assumes is simply the easy one. He's not supposed to be the reason her hands stop being steady. He's not supposed to be anything to her at all.But the longer she stays, the harder it becomes to tell where the plan ends and she begins, and the truth she came here to find might cost her the one thing she never planned on wanting to keep.Some walls take years to build. It only takes one person to make you forget why you built them.A slow-burn, forbidden-proximity romance of hidden identity, restrained longing, and the cost of finally letting someone in.