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“Dr. Price.”

I hold his gaze. “Yes. He’s been attentive.”

A small pause.

“Good,” Alester says.

I set the juice down. “Is there a concern?”

“No.” He says it easily, but he doesn’t look away from me right away. “Dr. Price is thorough,” he adds. “I value that.”

“I know.”

“He has known my family for a long time.”

“I gathered.”

Another pause. This one is shorter, but more deliberate.

“I trust him,” Alester says.

I don’t know what to do with that.

It doesn’t sound like a warning. It doesn’t sound like reassurance either. With Alester, even simple statements feel like they have been placed carefully for a reason.

“That must be useful,” I say.

“He was my father’s physician for many years,” he says.

I pause with the glass halfway to my mouth. I knew there was history. Dalton had said enough, though not giving away everything, and back then I didn’t understand why.

“Your father’s physician?”

“Yes. For almost twenty years.” Alester looks down at the folder, but his voice remains even. “My father trusted very few people by the end. Dr. Price was one of them.”

There’s something in the way he says it. Not resentment exactly. Not affection either. Something old and carefully stored.

“He was very good to my father,” Alester says.

The sentence is simple enough, but I hear something under it. Not bitterness exactly. Alester is too controlled for bitterness, or maybe too practiced at hiding it. But there is a weight in the words that makes me look up from the juice.

“Dalton was?” I ask.

“Dr. Price,” he says again, gently correcting me without sounding gentle at all. “Yes.”

I should leave it there.

I don’t.

“What happened to your father?”

Alester’s eyes lift to mine. For a second I think he will tell me it’s private, and honestly, fair. I’m not entitled to the Chandler family medical history just because I’m sitting here with their heir, or possible heir, making me nauseous from the inside.

But he answers. “A long illness,” he says. “Progressive. Difficult at the end.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Thank you.” He accepts sympathy the way he accepts paperwork: correctly, without letting it touch him.