“I want to revise the language together,” I say. “This week. Not because what you wrote is wrong. Because I want my name on it as someone who actually helped build it, not someone who was simply copied on the result.”
“Alexei can have the team ready by tomorrow.”
“Good.”
I close my laptop. I don’t leave the room immediately, sitting instead in the quiet that’s settled between us, different fromevery previous silence we’ve shared in this office. Not a wall. Not the locked door from the file confrontation.
The closest thing yet to two people who have finally found the actual shape of the problem after months of circling it from different directions.
“I’m still angry,” I tell him.
“I know.”
“I’m staying anyway.”
“I know that too,” he says, and something in his voice carries real gratitude this time, not assumption.
I sit with him a while longer before either of us says anything else, the city moving on outside the window the way it always does, indifferent to the small, difficult progress happening in this one room above it.
40
ZANE
The amendedguardianship document sits on my desk with her handwriting in the margins, three full pages of notes in her careful, slanted script, clauses she’s rewritten entirely and others she’s left untouched with a check mark beside them indicating approval rather than oversight.
I read through it again before I leave for the evening, not because I need to confirm the language, Alexei’s team finalized it two days ago, but because I want to look at the proof of what actually changed between us this month. Not a promise made once in an office and forgotten by the next crisis. A document with both our names woven through every clause, hers in pen, mine typed beneath it, equal weight given to both.
I fold it into the drawer and go to find her.
Orlov’s annual gathering runs larger than most events on the calendar, the full breadth of the organization’s adjacent circlepresent rather than the tighter council functions we’ve managed most of this year.
Celine is seven months along now. She draws attention whether she wants it or not, and her doctor has been clear that travel and long evenings will need to stop soon. This is, by every practical measure, the last function she’ll manage before the child arrives.
I watch her dress for it from the doorway of her room, deep blue this time, the fabric cut to accommodate rather than disguise, and she catches my eye in the mirror.
“Last one for a while,” she says.
“I know.”
“Don’t make it weird.”
I don’t make it weird. I help her with the clasp on her necklace instead, my hands steadier at the task than they have any right to be, given how unsteady the rest of me feels watching her in that mirror.
The house is full by the time we arrive, voices and music and the hum of a gathering large enough that no single conversation dominates the room. Celine moves through it without needing me beside her the way she once did, greeting people by name, asking after a daughter’s wedding here, a business venture there.
Henrik finds her near the bar an hour in.
I watch from across the room, close enough to intervene if the conversation turns the way every previous interaction with Henrik has turned, distant and unacknowledging. It doesn’t.
He says something to her I can’t hear, and she laughs, genuinely, her hand briefly resting against her stomach the way it does now without her seeming to notice, and Henrik’s expression shifts into something I haven’t seen from him in the entire time I’ve known him.
I cross the room afterward, curious despite myself.
“What did he say to you?” I ask once Henrik has moved on to another conversation.
“He apologized,” she says, still looking faintly surprised by it herself. “Said his opposition was never about me personally, that he’d misjudged how this would play out, and that watching me hold a room like this for months convinced him he was wrong about more than he expected to be wrong about.” She shrugs. “He also asked if we’d considered a name yet. Apparently, that’s his version of an olive branch.”
“Henrik asking about names is a genuine event.”
