I tell myself it’s due diligence.
The memory ends where it has to end, at the edge of what I’m willing to admit even to myself in an empty room with a glass I haven’t touched in twenty minutes.
I think about the lobby, four seconds, her hair down past her shoulders, the way she didn’t perform anything for a building designed to make people perform. I think about that moment now with everything I know layered over it, and I understand something I didn’t let myself understand at the time, standing in that lobby watching a stranger walk past me toward a door.
I had already decided. Before the contract. Before the interview. Before I ever saw her in person.
I just hadn’t let myself call it anything yet.
I set the glass down, mostly full, and I sit in the dark of my office with the city outside doing what it always does, and I think about a woman two doors down who just told me that being chosen for my trust isn’t the same as being chosen for love.
She isn’t wrong.
But she also doesn’t know the rest of it, the part I haven’t said out loud to anyone, not Roman, not myself, until tonight. That somewhere between the file and the lobby and every room since, trust stopped being the whole reason.
I just don’t know how to prove that to her now, after everything, with a folder full of evidence that says otherwise.
I sit with that failure for a long time before I finally go to bed.
31
CELINE
I makemy own coffee now.
It’s a small thing. It shouldn’t matter as much as it does, except every morning for two months, he’s been the one filling the second cup, setting it on the counter without comment, and every morning for the last four days, I’ve made one cup and carried it straight to my room instead of waiting for him to come through.
He hasn’t said anything about it. I’ve watched him notice anyway, the way his eyes track the empty space on the counter where his own mug used to sit beside mine.
I tell myself this is necessary. Most mornings, I believe it.
The council dinner on Thursday goes exactly the way it’s supposed to. I sit beside him, I answer Alexei’s questions about the amendment’s progress, I let Viktor’s wife tell me about her granddaughter’s recital, and I do all of it with the samecomposure I’ve been maintaining since the first dinner months ago. Nobody at that table would know anything had changed between us. That’s the point. I’m very good at performing things that aren’t true anymore.
Afterward, I take a separate car, telling Roman I need to stop by the pharmacy, which isn’t a lie exactly, just not the reason I actually need the space. Zane doesn’t argue. He hasn’t argued with anything I’ve decided in four days, which is its own kind of statement, a man who has spent the entire length of our relationship deciding things for me suddenly deciding nothing at all.
I don’t know what to do with that either.
Lena calls Sunday evening, and I answer from my bed, the way I always do, except this time I don’t have the energy to perform brightness the way I usually manage for her sake.
“You sound tired,” she says, twenty seconds into the call.
“I am tired.”
“Tired like the pregnancy, or tired like something else?”
I look at the ceiling. My sister has never once in her life let me get away with the simple answer. “Something else.”
“Is it him?”
“It’s complicated, Lena.”
“It’s always complicated with you two. That’s not an answer.” A pause, the kind she takes when she’s deciding how hard topush. “Do you want to tell me, or do you want me to talk about something else until you’re ready?”
I think about the folder, the four pages, the lock turning in his office door. I think about how much of this I still haven’t told her, the contract’s real origin, the danger that moved her across a country without her knowledge, all of it sitting behind a version of events I’ve kept simple for her sake because she has enough to manage with her own body without managing the architecture of mine.
“Talk about something else,” I say.
She tells me about the garden, about a man at the facility who’s been teaching her chess in the afternoons, about Priya’s plan to learn Dutch properly before they come home. I listen, and somewhere in the middle of her describing a chess match she lost badly, something in my chest loosens slightly.
