CELINE
Lena is foldingher clothes into the suitcase Priya sent over from Zurich, the one with the wheel that still hasn’t been fixed, and she’s humming something under her breath the way she used to before any of this started.
“The doctor cleared me to travel properly,” she says, tucking a sweater into the corner. “Regular checkups instead of the facility. I miss the house, Celine. I miss my own bed and the creak outside my door and the soap that smells like Mom’s.” She looks up, smiling, entirely unaware of what she’s about to ask. “You’ll come with me, right? Pack a bag, we’ll go home together.”
I stand in the doorway of the guest room and the question sits there longer than it should before I answer it.
Home. The house on Mercer Street, the floors that creak in three places, the kitchen where I burned eggs what feels like a lifetime ago. My house. Our house. The only thing our parents left us, the place I have ached for in quiet, physical ways every single night I’ve slept in a penthouse fifty-three floors above the city.
“I’ll help you pack,” I say.
It isn’t an answer. Lena, sharp as she’s always been even now, catches it.
“That’s not a yes.”
I sit on the edge of the bed. “I don’t think I’m coming, Lena.”
She stops folding. Looks at me properly, the way she looks at me when she’s deciding whether to push or wait. “Because of the contract? The appearances?”
“No.” I say it honestly, surprising myself with how easily it comes. “Because I don’t want to leave.”
I help her finish packing. I arrange the car, the security detail Roman insists on for the drive even though the threat is gone, because some habits don’t unlearn themselves overnight. I hug her at the door for a long time, longer than the goodbye actually requires, and she pulls back and looks at me with an expression I recognize from every important moment of our lives together.
“You love him,” she says. Not a question this time.
“Yes.”
“Then go tell him that instead of standing here telling me.”
She kisses my cheek, climbs into the car, and is gone, the broken wheel of her suitcase the last thing I see before the elevator doors close on the lobby below.
I stand in the foyer of the penthouse for a long moment.
Then I go to find him.
He’s at his desk, jacket off, the late afternoon light coming through the window behind him in a way that makes the whole office feel softer than it usually does. He looks up when I come in.
“Lena get off alright?” he asks.
“She did.”
“You didn’t go with her.”
“No.” I close the door behind me, not for privacy from anyone, just because this conversation needs a closed door the way important conversations always seem to in this apartment. “She asked me to. Genuinely expected me to say yes.”
“And you didn’t.”
I cross the room and stand in front of his desk, the way I have a dozen times before in anger, in fear, in every difficult conversation we’ve had since I found page fourteen all those months ago. This time feels different standing here. Quieter.
“I’ve spent months looking for a way out of this,” I say. “You know that better than almost anyone. Two lawyers, an offshore diagram with six entities mapped across four jurisdictions, a locked room I still haven’t found the key to. I haven’t stopped looking because I failed. I want you to understand that clearly. I am, if nothing else, very good at finding things other people don’t want found.”
“I know that.”
“I’m telling you I’ve stopped looking. Not because the door doesn’t exist. Because I don’t want to walk through it anymore.” My voice doesn’t waver, though something in my chest does, the vertigo of saying a true thing out loud for the first time. “I had a real choice today. My own house, my own bed, my own life waiting exactly where I left it, completely free of you and your council and everything this contract has cost me. And I stood in that doorway and I realized I didn’t want any of it if it meant not having this.”
He’s quiet for a long moment, and I watch him try to find words, his jaw working once the way it does when something costs him more than he’s used to spending.
He doesn’t find them.
