Page 56 of Knocked Up By the Silver Foxes

I want that more than I want the Célestes and the Vivienne-Valentinas and every other uncomplicated option that has presented itself in the last two weeks and I cannot do a single thing about it because we agreed. Space. Don’t crowd her. Let her breathe.

She’s breathing.

Raphael is keeping her excellent company while she does it.

And I’m on my terrace watching the south courtyard like a man with genuinely no dignity left.

I catch myself doing it again this afternoon.

There’s a group of investors out on the south terrace for a private tasting, people Killian has cultivated for years, the kind of meeting that runs itself if you’ve done the relationship-building right and Killian always has. I’m not technically required to be present but I’m here because being useful is better than sitting in my suite thinking about a woman I’m supposed to be giving room to.

Harper comes through the courtyard below with Raphael. They’ve got coffees and they’re clearly in the middle of something, her talking, him walking beside her with his head angled toward her in the attentive way he has. She says something and he laughs and she does too and she puts her hand on his arm briefly, not romantic, just the easy physical punctuation of two people who have gotten comfortable with each other.

I watch them cross the courtyard.

I know how I look right now. I know exactly how I look because I’ve been on the other side of this before, I’ve been Raphael in this scenario, the one who’s there and present and getting the version of someone that someone else is missing, and it’s not a good feeling to be the one watching from the balcony.

I look like a man who fell for something he told himself he was too smart to fall for.

I look like every person I’ve ever privately felt sorry for.

I pick up my drink and go back inside.

My laptop is open on the table in my suite and I sit down in front of it with the specific, determined energy of a man who has decided to do something productive about his situation even if the something productive is deeply avoidant in nature.

I have emails. Actual emails. From actual people about actual investments that require my actual attention. Kyle has been forwarding things for two weeks with an increasing level of increasingly-professionally-worded concern that I can tell he’s rewriting several times before sending and I have been opening them, reading the first two sentences, and closing them. This is not how I run my business. I’ve made more money by thirty-five than most people see in three generations and I did it by paying attention to things and right now I am paying attention to one thing exclusively and it’s not working.

So.

I’m going to respond to the emails.

I’m going to respond to the emails and schedule the calls I’ve been rescheduling and read through the portfolio update Kyle sent me on Thursday that I bookmarked and did not read. I’m going to do my job, which I’m actually good at and which actually requires no emotional processing whatsoever, and I’m going to do it for the rest of the afternoon like a functioning adult professional person.

I open Kyle’s email.

I read it. Actually read it, all the way through, and there’s a Milan meeting I’d pushed twice that needs to happen before the end of the month or the window closes on a deal I’ve been building toward for eighteen months. There’s a portfolio review for the hospitality fund that three of my investors have been patient about. There’s a property acquisition in the seventh arrondissement that needs eyes on the ground.

I have actual work.

Real work. Work that matters and that I’ve been neglecting because I’ve been haunting a vineyard in Bordeaux like a man who doesn’t know how to be in the same building as someone and not go to her.

I start responding to emails.

It takes me forty minutes to get through Kyle’s backlog and I don’t think about the courtyard once, which feels like a genuine personal achievement at this point.

When I finish I sit back and look at the screen.

Milan is a real reason to be somewhere else for a week. A legitimate, professional, non-pathetic reason. It would give Harper actual space instead of this performance of giving her space while internally counting the hours since I’ve seen her. It would give me something to do with my brain that isn’t this.

I look at the Milan calendar block on my screen.

I look at the courtyard through the window. Empty now. Just the afternoon light across the stone.

I look back at the screen and book the flight.

Then I close the laptop and sit in silence and feel, for the first time in two weeks, something that isn’t quite peace, but is at least less like torture.

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