“I gathered.”
A young man I don’t recognize approaches a moment later, junior enough in the organization’s wider structure that I’ve never had reason to learn his name, and he introduces himself to Celine.
He asks intelligent questions about the foundation work she’s been quietly involved in through Orlov’s wife. She answers all of them, sharp and warm in equal measure, and the young man leaves the conversation looking like he’s just had several assumptions corrected at once.
I watch this happen four more times over the course of the evening. Different people, different conversations, the samerecalibration each time, a woman dismissed before they met her, becoming someone they leave the conversation respecting.
I find myself no longer working the room the way I usually do at functions like this.
I find myself simply watching her instead.
Petra catches me at it near the terrace doors, amusement clear on her face.
“You’ve been standing in the same spot for twenty minutes,” she says.
“Have I.”
“Watching your wife hold court with half this gathering.” She follows my gaze toward Celine, currently deep in conversation with three women I know to be notoriously difficult to impress, all three of them visibly charmed despite themselves. “Orlov says you used to work a room like a man closing deals. Tonight, you look like a man who’s forgotten the room exists.”
I don’t have a response to that. She isn’t wrong.
I think about the woman in the lobby all those months ago, hair down, walking past me without performing anything for a building built specifically to make people perform.
I think about every room since, every council dinner, every gala, every moment I watched her with the calculating attention of a man assessing an asset’s performance.
Tonight isn’t that. Tonight I’m not assessing anything. I’m simply watching the woman I chose for reasons that started strategic and stopped being strategic somewhere along the way. She’s carrying my child, commanding a room full of people whowould have dismissed her on sight a year ago, and the weight in my chest sits differently than it has at any function before this one.
I cross the room to her side, not to manage the conversation, just to stand near her.
She glances at me, a question in her expression. “You don’t need to rescue me,” she says quietly. “I’ve got this.”
“I know. I just wanted to be near you.”
Her face softens at that, soft in a way I rarely see from her in public, and she leans slightly into my side without breaking stride in the conversation she’s holding with the three women beside us.
I stay there for the rest of the evening.
The drive home is quiet, her hand resting in mine across the seat, the city lit and indifferent around us, the way it always is. I stroke my thumb gently over her ring.
“Henrik asked about names,” she says again, almost to herself.
“What did you tell him?”
“That we hadn’t decided yet.” She looks at me. “Have you thought about it? Names.”
“A few.”
“Tell me.”
I don’t, not yet, some private superstition urging me to keeping the names close until we’re certain, but I tell her I’ll show her the short list this week, and she accepts that with a small smile that stays with me the rest of the ride.
The elevator ride up is quieter still, both of us tired in the good way.
Inside, the penthouse dark and settled around us, I help her out of her clothes with hands that are no longer steady the way they were with the necklace earlier, something charged building between us that has nothing to do with fear or argument or proximity this time.
It’s simply this. A man who spent an entire evening watching his wife, and a woman who let herself be watched without needing to perform anything beyond exactly who she already is, a current building between them that has nothing to do with fear or argument or proximity this time.
I remove the deep blue dress slowly, my fingers tracing the zipper down her back. The fabric pools at her feet, and she steps out of it, left in only a lace bra and panties that sit low beneath the full, heavy curve of her belly.
