The Suarez Myth: Chapter 9

At dawn, Saoirse’s feet were numb. 

She pressed her palm to the glass of the window she found herself standing before, watching the sun climb. The warmth against her skin almost felt like touch. And for the briefest moment, she imagined what it would be like if he came home now, just walked in unannounced, as he used to before the silence grew between them. 

But the house stayed still, obedient, and the only breath she heard was her own.

Sunlight soon edged across the curtains, catching the corners of gilt frames, the roses on the nightstand now brittle at their tips. The hum of the house resumed with distant footsteps, water running somewhere, the faint clatter of breakfast trays, for whom, Saoirse didn’t know.

Her head ached, and when she entered the nursery again, the air was cool, too cool. The twins were already fed, their tiny forms wrapped in matching linen. Lisa looked up from arranging bottles. “You were awake again last night, Señora?”

Saoirse paused. “Yes.”

Lisa hesitated, fiddling with a sterilized cap. “Marta said she thought she heard you in the hall around three.” Her tone was careful, deferential, but it made Saoirse’s skin prickle.

She smiled faintly. “I couldn’t sleep. I was just checking on them.”

Lisa nodded, but her eyes flicked briefly toward the window. “Marco was on patrol then.”

Saoirse’s fingers tightened around the crib rail. “Did he… say something?”

“No, señora,” she said quickly, looking down. “Of course not. He wouldn’t.”

But the seed was planted now, the image of Marco somewhere in the dark, maybe seeing her wandering barefoot through the corridor, maybe thinking her strange or pitiful.

Saoirse looked down at the twins, both sleeping again, the fragile peace of their faces like a mercy she didn’t deserve. She smoothed David’s hair, then Mariana’s, and told herself she didn’t care what anyone saw. But she did.

+

The staff always knew everything before she did. 

There were voices in the hall by midday, the sound of heels against marble. When Marta appeared at Saoirse’s door, her expression was that careful blend of reverence and forewarning. “Señora,” she murmured. “Doña Bibiana has arrived.”

Saoirse blinked, surprised. “Bibiana?”

“Sí, señora. She is alone.”

Within minutes, Saoirse was standing in the sitting room, the one lined with old portraits of Suarez ancestors. The scent of her sister-in-law’s favorite tuberose plant had already replaced the faint ghost of white roses. Saoirse was forever in awe of how fast the staff worked, how quickly they changed things to suit whoever they deemed superior in any given room.

Bibiana was all tweed and symmetry, her greying hair pinned perfectly, her jewelry restrained but unmistakably ancestral. She kissed both of Saoirse’s cheeks, her lips barely grazing skin. Saoirse could not help inhaling her faint peppermint essence.

“You look pale,” Bibiana said with an air of concern that didn’t quite mask appraisal, and immediately reminded her of Roman’s last words to her before he left over a week ago. “I thought I’d come see my nephew and niece with their father out of the way. It’s been too long.”

“I’m glad you did,” Saoirse said softly.

They sat. Tea was brought with china, silver, lemon slices cut thin as petals. Bibiana declined sugar. Her gaze, steady and composed, lingered on Saoirse’s face a moment too long.

“You’re alone,” Bibiana asked.

“Roman is traveling again,” Saoirse answered simply, though she knew Bibiana knew this.

“Of course,” Bibiana said, as if it explained everything. “He does so much. We all rely on him.”

Saoirse smiled faintly. “Yes.”

“He does too much himself. I keep telling him to delegate more.” Bibiana stirred her tea, though she hadn’t added anything to it. “And how are you keeping busy?”

The question caught Saoirse off guard. “I have the twins,” she managed to reply.

“Yes,” Bibiana said slowly. “Such beautiful children. But children sleep often at this age, don’t they? What do you do when they sleep?”

Saoirse blinked, caught off guard again. She hadn't had direct conversations that lasted this long in a while… with anyone. “I read. I write… sometimes.”

Bibiana tilted her head. “Oh? Roman mentioned you’re very private about it.”

Saoirse nodded, though something in her chest tightened. “I used to write all the time,” she admitted quietly. “Before. But lately… it doesn’t come.” 

Bibiana studied her. “You mean you’ve lost the habit.”

“Maybe. The silence here is too… complete. It makes my head feel full but empty at the same time.”

Bibiana didn’t rush to fill the pause. “That’s how large houses are meant to feel. Stillness is discipline, something to value.”

Saoirse said before she could stop herself, “Sometimes it feels like it’s swallowing me.”

Bibiana’s eyes lifted then, sharp and unblinking. “Careful with that kind of talk,” she said, her tone still light but her meaning precise. “People misunderstand it. They start asking questions that are better left unasked.”

Saoirse flushed. “I didn’t mean—”

“I know what you meant.” Bibiana leaned back. “Roman married you because you were different. Fresh air in an old house. Don’t confuse that for permission to open all the windows.”

The words landed like a measured slap. It was controlled, not cruel, but final, and Saoirse tried to recover. “I only meant…” A silence stretched between them, polite but taut.

“I’ve heard you’ve been having trouble sleeping,” Bibiana said at last, her tone conversational, but her eyes searching. “The staff worry, you know. They care for you.”

Saoirse’s throat went dry. “They shouldn’t worry.”

“No, of course not.” Bibiana smiled, sipping her tea. “You must miss your own family. England feels very far from here.”

“I’m used to distance,” Saoirse said quickly, then hesitated, fingers tightening around her teacup. Bibiana studied her then, eyes sharp beneath the softness. Saoirse forced a smile. Bibiana returned the smile, perfectly polite, perfectly unconvinced. “It’s just… quiet here, when he’s away. Sometimes too quiet. I don’t think I was made for this kind of silence.”

Bibiana’s spoon paused mid-stir. “You mean loneliness?”

Saoirse exhaled. “Yes. Maybe. I keep thinking I should be grateful. Everything’s so beautiful, so well-ordered… but sometimes, it feels like I’m watching my own life from the outside.” She looked down quickly, as if ashamed of saying it aloud. “I sound ungrateful.”

“Not ungrateful. Just young.” She placed her spoon neatly on the saucer, her movements exact, almost ceremonial. “You mustn’t let sadness make you visible. The world notices cracks, and when they do, they tear at it.”

Saoirse’s eyes lifted, startled by the frankness. “I’m not trying to be visible.”

Bibiana straightened, smoothing her skirt. “You’re a Suarez now. What happens inside these walls stays immaculate, always.” The words felt like both reassurance and threat.

“Okay,” was all Saoirse could manage.

“Everyone is lonely in our world,” Bibiana continued her lecture, and Saoirse looked down at her hands. “It’s the cost of continuity. You have your children now. That should be enough. Make it enough,” she said softly. “The rest of us did.”

Saoirse nodded, feeling the strange, sudden urge to cry.

Bibiana’s teacup clicked neatly against its saucer. “Roman will be home before long. Keep the house in order, keep yourself in order. The rest is noise.”

Saoirse swallowed. “You make it sound easy.”

“It’s not easy. It’s expected.” Bibiana gave a faint, humorless smile. “By the way,” she said, her tone brisk again, “The Foundation board meets next month. You should begin participating again. The birth is far behind you now.”

Saoirse blinked. “Roman didn’t mention it.”

Bibiana adjusted the button at her wrist, unbothered. “He wouldn’t. He thinks he’s protecting you, but public absence becomes gossip. I’ll have the Secretariat send you the minutes. Something, anything, under your name would be useful.”

“I’ll try,” Saoirse said.

“Don’t try. Do. The family looks better when its wives are industrious.” She met Saoirse’s eyes. “Good,” she said finally, as if sealing the conversation shut. “I won’t trouble you long.” She rose then, smoothing her long tweed skirt, every movement deliberate and economical. “May I see the twins before I go?”

“Of course,” Saoirse mumbled.

Bibiana crossed the long hall with her into the nursery, admired the babies with clinical precision, touched none of them, and pronounced them, “Perfect”.

Before leaving, Bibiana paused by the main doors as Saoirse escorted her to them. “Saoirse,” she said, without turning, “The family will start watching you now. It’s what we do when something seems… delicate.”

Saoirse stood frozen.

“Take care of yourself.” Bibiana glanced back once, eyes flat as glass. “And sleep at night, for God’s sake. People talk.”

Then she was gone, the peppermint lingering like a closing door. The silence that followed was colder than before.

Marta appeared a few minutes later to clear the tea tray. She moved quietly, but Saoirse could tell by her lowered gaze that the whole house had already heard every word.

At the window, Saoirse watched Bibiana’s old car glide down the long drive until it disappeared into the cypress.

She touched her wrist, the one Roman had held on her last visit just two days ago, his thumb tracing slow, possessive circles, and wondered if Bibiana could see the same invisible mark he’d left.

She turned back toward the nursery. The twins slept on, unaware, but Saoirse felt a new kind of gaze on her. It wasn’t just Roman’s anymore, unseen and omnipotent, but the family’s. She felt the house swiftly transforming into a mirror, and in its reflection, she wasn’t sure what they saw.

When night came, she tried to obey Bibiana’s last command. She lay in bed, eyes closed, breathing carefully. Sleep at night… people talk. She repeated it like prayer.

Sleep didn’t come.

She was never tired anymore; there was nothing to burn energy on, so how could she fall asleep?

By two, she was pacing again. The marble floor cooled her feet. In the nursery, one of the babies whimpered. David, she thought. She lifted him, careful not to wake Mariana, and held him against her shoulder. The rhythm of his breathing anchored her for a moment.

Quietly, Lisa appeared in the doorway. “Señora,” she whispered, smiling as if she’d just arrived by chance. “Let me help you. I was checking on him.”

Saoirse nodded, surrendering the baby. “He was dreaming.” Her voice came out weak and unsure.

“Yes,” Lisa said softly. “They dream even when they don’t know what of.”

Saoirse lingered by the crib until the tiny chest rose and fell evenly again. When she turned toward the hallway, Marta was there, half in shadow, murmuring to another maid. Their words drifted through the corridor like incense, part pity, part warning.

Back in her room, Saoirse stood at the window until dawn, watching the slow bleed of light over the sea. As the sun rose, she was determined to do better. Bibiana’s words pulsed through her head like an instruction manual. Order, discipline, contribution.

The house moved around her with its usual precision.

After spending most of the morning with the twins and their nannies, she had a late breakfast alone on the balcony, steam rising from the coffee untouched. She opened her journal, the leather spine stiff from disuse. Her handwriting was smaller still, shrinking into itself. She tried to remember everything she’d learned at the Madrid residency about writing even when there was no inspiration, and managed three hesitant lines about light, about silence, about a door that wouldn’t open. Before the ink dried, she tore the page out and folded it neatly into the pocket of her robe.

Afternoon. A call came from the Foundation secretary, who mentioned Bibiana before getting into charitable endowments, gala schedules, and her long-term public “re-engagement strategy”. Saoirse listened, agreed, thanked them. When the call ended, she sat still for several minutes, unsure whether she’d actually spoken. 

Marta informed her that she had wellness treatments scheduled. A nurse came first, quiet and efficient, to attach vitamin drips to her vein, one after the other. Then the facialist, whispering about “helping her feel herself again,” as she worked Allegra’s preferred scent into Saoirse’s skin. By the time the stylist arrived to assess her posture and take her measurements without asking, Saoirse herself had stopped asking why. She just stood there as they measured.

A priest arrived from the family’s favored Madrid parish. His cassock smelled faintly of beeswax. He spoke of patience, grace, and how stillness was a form of faith.

“A wife is a pillar, Señora,” he told her gently, “Stand steady, and you sanctify the house.”

He handed her a stunning rosary made out of baroque pearls and solid gold, blessed by the Holy Father himself. She folded her hands around it and let the sermon wash over her like warm water that left her colder when it passed. When he left, Marta replaced the lilies, Allegra’s lilies, with white roses. 

They called it wellness, but it was calibration, ensuring she still fit the sacred mold Roman preferred. Later, during a chauffeured drive through the estate with Emilio in the front passenger seat, cypress shadows flickered across her reflection in the glass. The nurse, the priest, the air itself, all of it disciplined and curated.

Evening came with letters from charities, swatches of fabric she pretended to select for the nursery redecoration the staff had already planned, silver-framed photos to approve, floral arrangements. Marta brought her tea, and Saoirse asked her opinion about nothing in particular just to hear another voice.

When night came, she felt exhausted enough to believe she could finally obey Bibiana’s last command. She lay in bed, eyes closed, breathing carefully. Sleep at night. People talk. She repeated it like prayer, still clutching the pearl and gold rosary in her left hand.

Sleep didn’t come.

Allegra had been right about the pattern, but wrong about the girl. Saoirse never learned how to turn being needed into power. She only learned how to vanish beneath it.

+

She didn’t remember how many days had passed.

The courtyard was almost blue under the night lamps, a light designed to look like moonlight, calibrated to his specifications. Every perimeter light, every motion sensor, every surveillance feed in the house had a code. Marco knew them all.

He walked his usual route. North wall to terrace, terrace to lemon grove, lemon grove back to the sea gate, a ritual that had become muscle memory. The gravel whispered under his boots.

He liked this hour best, the darkest, earliest hours of the morning when the house was sealed, the guards posted, the cameras still humming, the kind of stillness that made men feel useful. But lately, something had started to unsettle him, not danger exactly, but the absence of it. The air felt too clean, too perfect, like the kind of silence that smothers noise before it starts.

He turned toward the main house and stopped.

Up on the third-floor landing, behind the long window of the west corridor, a figure moved slow, pale, barefoot.

The Señora.

She didn’t look down. She didn’t even seem to see the world beneath her, only the dark reflection of herself in the glass. Her nightgown clung faintly in the blue light, her hair unbound. She was carrying something small, a folded blanket, maybe, or a child’s toy. She set it on the sill, then just stood there, staring at nothing.

Marco exhaled, quiet. He’d seen her like this before, always alone, always in motion, walking the halls long after the lights were out, never frantic, never crying, just… searching.

He thought of Roman Suarez, of men who loved people the way a gardener loves his tools, carefully, conditionally, ready to replace them if they dulled. And yet, he couldn’t bring himself to pity the man, only her. He’d never spoken of it to anyone, not even Javier. But each time he saw her wandering, some private ache twisted in him, the kind you got watching an injured bird that didn’t know it was injured.

He thought of the scholarship letters stacked on his desk upstairs, his daughter’s tuition already paid, her uniform already ordered, and the envelope that had come with no sender, only a single note: 

She hadn't even signed it, but he knew it was her. He understood the message.

Above, Saoirse turned from the window and disappeared down the corridor. The curtain fell back into place. Marco finished his round, pausing once at the sea gate, where the sound of waves against the cliff almost drowned out the hum of the security system. He stood there a moment longer than necessary, staring at the horizon’s dark water with no ships in sight. The Señor owned the water and airways for miles.

When he turned back, the house was perfect again.

Saoirse never meant to stay awake. She just could never breathe well anymore. Sometimes, the quiet made her feel like the house was holding its breath, waiting for her to move so it could exhale.

With the hand that held the rosary, she picked up the folded blanket at the foot of the chair, Mariana’s, and walked into the corridor barefoot, her robe trailing. The marble was cool against her soles, the scent of sterilized air clinging to the walls. She didn’t turn on the light. The dim safety lamps were enough, blue-white halos every few steps.

Down the hallway, she passed the nursery door. Both twins slept, Lisa and Lucia close by, which was new. David and Mari’s small shapes curled into white linen, their breathing amplified like distant surf. She paused, watching the rhythm, inhale, exhale, the only natural sound left in the house.

She moved on. The window at the far end of the convoluted gilded corridor glowed faintly, its glass reflecting her like a ghost. Beyond it, the courtyard lights shimmered against the lemon trees. She could make out one of the guards, a dark silhouette moving along the perimeter path. Marco. He was always there, a steadying constant.

For a moment, she envied him, the certainty of duty, the luxury of a task that could be completed.

Her reflection wavered in the glass. She looked thinner lately. Her hair was longer and too soft at the ends. The lace nightgown slipped from one shoulder. She pulled it back absently and wondered if Roman would have noticed. He always said he liked her hair up, her clothes simple. He would murmur his preferences while touching the hollow of her throat like a seal of approval.

He was still gone. Milan, maybe, or Zurich. She never really knew, did she? Over their brief call this morning, he’d mentioned both cities, but which was it? Or was it both? She leaned her forehead against the glass. The cold spread through her skin. Down below, she thought she saw the guard pause, maybe he’d looked up, maybe he hadn’t, and then move on.

She lifted the folded blanket to the sill, the rosary still in hand, and smoothed it as if it were a sleeping child. Her hands looked translucent in the lamplight. The blanket smelled faintly of milk and the rosewater lotion the nannies used on the twins. It was such a small, clean scent, the kind that made her ache.

She closed her eyes. For a moment, she imagined the sound of Roman’s voice, low, sure, saying her name the way he used to when the world still felt soft around it. Saoirse. That slow, deliberate way, as if the syllables themselves were something he’d built and owned.

Her chest tightened, a tear rolled down one eye.

When she opened her eyes again, she wasn’t sure how long she’d been standing there. The courtyard light had shifted, and the guard was gone.

She turned back down the corridor, past the nursery again. Mariana whimpered softly in her sleep, so Saoirse entered and brushed her hair from her face. She lifted her daughter. The infant’s head rested against her chest, warm and impossibly small.

“It’s all right,” she whispered, pacing. “You’re all right.” Mariana sighed. Saoirse kept walking, her bare feet soundless on the carpet.

Through the open door, the scent reached her, roses, faint but unmistakable. She looked toward the hall table and saw them, a new vase, fresh from delivery earlier in the night, white again, sunlight trapped in glass.

For a moment, she only stared. Then she reached out, brushing one petal with her fingertip, the gold of the rosary’s crucifix clinking against the glass of the large vase. The petal’s softness startled her. Her grandmother’s voice rose in her mind, haunting her, quiet as breath. They thrive on neglect. She couldn’t get it out of her head.

Saoirse smiled faintly, not sure why. She pressed her finger to her lips, then to the baby’s head, as if sealing a secret neither of them could name. She kept walking again, farther than she meant to, past the main living area, past the guest wings, nearly to the eastern wing she rarely entered. Only the rhythm of the baby’s sighs kept her tethered to the moment.

She had just begun to hum an old melody without words as she paced, Mariana cradled to her chest, when she heard the faint padding of soft shoes on marble. The corridor lights were faint blue rings, halos every few steps.

Lisa’s voice followed. “Señora,” she called, barely above a whisper, too gentle to be casual, “You’re awake again?”

Saoirse turned slowly. Lisa stood a few steps away, wrapped in her gray uniform cardigan, hair pinned in the severe way she preferred at night, her expression composed but unmistakably tight. Behind her, one of the auxiliary nannies lingered at the corridor’s bend, pretending to adjust a sconce. There were always two of them, always nearby these days.

“I couldn’t sleep,” Saoirse said. Even as she spoke the words, she saw Bibiana's look of disappointment in her mind's eye. Her tone was even, though she could see Lisa’s eyes move to the bundle in her arms. Mariana stirred, sighing against her chest.

“I know,” Lisa said, stepping closer. Her smile was tender and strained. “She’s restless tonight, yes? I heard her on the monitor and came to check. She sounded unsettled.”

“You heard her?” Saoirse asked, looking down at her daughter. The baby had gone utterly still, as if the world outside the heartbeat she rested on no longer existed.

Lisa nodded. “Just a small sound, como un pajarito.” Mariana had only whimpered once, but it gave her permission to approach. She reached out and touched the edge of her blanket. “Maybe she is hungry again.” Her gaze flicked, just briefly, toward the long stretch of corridor behind them, but that silent assessment was impossible to miss.

Saoirse suddenly realized how far she’d walked. How far from the nursery. How far from anyone else.

“She wanted air,” Saoirse whispered finally, tightening her hold. “The rooms feel… suffocating at night. They are too clean. You can’t breathe in them.”

Lisa nodded, but her throat worked. “Of course.” She made another slow step forward. “But the monitors didn’t catch movement until you were almost at the east wing.”

Saoirse frowned slightly. “I didn’t notice.”

“I know,” Lisa said gently. “That’s why I came.”

And there it was, the fear she tried to hide. Not fear of Saoirse, but fear for the baby. Fear of what exhaustion, sedatives, and sorrow could do. Fear of the story they would all have to tell if something happened to the babies on their watch.

“I wasn’t going anywhere,” Saoirse said, a little too fast.

“No, of course,” Lisa soothed, even though her eyes betrayed relief. She hesitated. The air between them was fragile, like a thread stretched to its last strand. Then she said, “It’s very late. Let me take her for a moment while you rest. Just until she settles.” She extended her arms slowly, the gesture deferential, practiced, the way one might approach a saint with an offering.

Saoirse held Mariana tighter, the motion instinctive and small. The rosary at her wrist clinked softly against the baby’s head. “She’s not heavy.”

“No, of course not,” Lisa said quickly. “I only meant…” She stopped. There was no safe way to finish the sentence.

“She’s sleeping.”

“I know,” Lisa whispered. “But babies this young startle easily. And… It’s colder near this end of the hall.” A diplomatic way of saying it is not safe for her to be this far from her bed.

Saoirse looked down at Mariana. The baby’s breath warmed her collarbone. She hadn’t even realized she’d wandered so far. Lisa’s careful, reverent posture made the truth sting even more. They didn’t trust her with her own child in the dark.

The silence filled with the hum of the vents, the sigh of the night system breathing for them. Somewhere far off, a clock clicked into the next hour.

Then, almost imperceptibly, Saoirse’s shoulders lowered. “All right,” she said. “Just for a moment.”

Lisa stepped forward. The exchange was careful, reverent, as if handling sacred glass. When Mariana’s weight passed from mother to nanny, the air seemed to tilt, Lisa’s shoulders loosened, a micro-release Saoirse saw despite Lisa’s restraint. Saoirse’s hands hovered a second longer than necessary, brushing the baby’s hair once, twice, as if memorizing its temperature.

The auxiliary nanny observed from her corner, silent, eyes lowered.

Lisa rocked the baby lightly. “She settled quickly tonight,” she murmured, soothing both infant and mother. But Saoirse heard what she really meant: Thank God nothing happened.

Saoirse touched the blanket one last time. “She sleeps easier with me.”

“Yes, sí,” Lisa said immediately. “Of course.” Her voice trembled just once.

Lisa turned to go, murmuring something about feeding schedules. Halfway down the corridor, she glanced back. Saoirse was still standing there in the blue-white light, bare feet against marble, one hand holding the rosary, the other touching the space where her daughter had been.

When Lisa disappeared into the nursery, the auxiliary nanny emerged, her slippers soundless. She met Saoirse’s eyes briefly, bowed her head, and whispered, “Buenas noches, Señora.”

Saoirse didn’t answer. She wanted to follow, to watch them return her daughter gently into her crib, but she couldn’t move.

When she finally returned to her room, she noticed the faint outline of a crucifix reflected in the window. One of the staff had hung it again over the nursery door. It glimmered faintly in the corridor light, as if guarding something fragile or cursed. They rearranged shifts. They listened for footsteps at odd hours. They whispered about la señora irlandesa or la dama del mármol who wandered marble halls barefoot at 3 a.m. with a baby in her arms and a rosary in her fist.

She stood a while longer, watching the soft glow of the nursery monitor, until her eyes blurred.

+

It was nearly dawn when they gathered in the service kitchen, the hour when night-shift blurred with morning-shift. The fluorescent light hummed. Coffee steamed in mismatched mugs. Their voices hovered at the level of breath, careful because the house always felt like it listened.

Lisa rubbed her hands over her arms, warming the goosebumps that hadn’t left since she found Saoirse in the eastern hall.

“She didn’t even hear me call her at first,” she whispered. “She just kept… walking like she wasn’t touching the floor.”

Lucia crossed herself quickly. “I told you. La señora is like a spirit now.”

One of the junior maids who was barely twenty-two and fresh out of Valencia leaned in, eyes wide. “People say the Irish have thin veils,” she murmured. “Between them and the… other side.”

Lucia shook her head sharply. “Don’t be silly, niña. She’s just lonely.” But her voice wavered, betraying the doubt.

The night butler dried a glass with the care of someone who used ritual to steady himself. “It’s the house...” he gestured vaguely upward, to the gilded ceilings and echoing corridors. “...they swallow sound. If you walk long enough in them, especially alone…” He trailed off.

“You start to disappear into the walls,” one of the other maids supplied.

Lucia groaned. “Ay Dios mío.”

Lisa spoke again, voice low and hoarse. “She walked past the east wing with the baby.”

Every head lifted.

“That far?”

Lisa nodded, shame and fear mingling on her face. “I don’t think she realized. She looked… startled when I mentioned it.”

They all fell silent, the kind of silence that carried meaning.

Someone whispered, “Do you think she would ever—?”

“No,” Lisa snapped, more sharply than intended. “No. She loves them. She does. I see it.” But she lowered her eyes, the truth pressing on her ribs.

Lucia poured water into the kettle. “Grief can turn strange, Lisa. My aunt, after the miscarriage, she started sleepwalking. Once, she walked into the garden in the rain and didn’t even wake.”

“This is different,” Lisa whispered.

Marta, who had sat at one corner of the large kitchen island silently reviewing household paperwork, always hesitant to talk about their employers, chipped in for the first time that night, “Since the twins arrived… and since Señor left again, she drifts.” Her voice softened. “Like she’s not sure the ground will hold her.”

Lucia made the sign of the cross again. She did it more often lately. “She moves as if she’s listening for something.” She shuddered. “The walls feel colder when she’s walking.”

“No more of that,” Lisa hissed, though she didn't entirely disagree.

For a long moment, none of them spoke. The maids left the room with Marta to begin the day’s cleaning, though nothing in the untouched house particularly needed it.

When the doors closed behind them, the butler said to the nannies and gardeners, “If you see a woman wandering marble halls at three in the morning, barefoot, whispering to rosaries and shadows, in old stories, she’s a ghost.”

Lisa swallowed hard. “No. She’s alive, and she needs help.”

“Help from who?” Lucia asked. “Señor is never here.”

A gardener looked toward the ceiling, toward the winding halls above. His voice dropped to a reverent hush, “La dama del mármol.” The lady of the marble.

The others shivered because the name fit too well, too beautifully, the quiet figure who wandered Roman Suarez’s golden halls like someone caught between being cherished and being forgotten.

The Suarez Myth: Chapter 8

Before sunrise, the house was already humming with quiet efficiency. 

Saoirse woke to the sound of footsteps on marble, luggage wheels, muted voices, the low mechanical sigh of doors opening and closing. Roman never packed at night. He preferred mornings, preferred to see everything done while he was awake.

Through the open doorway, she could hear Javier speaking with Marco in low tones about the route to the airstrip. Someone was already checking the weather reports, another arranging the jet’s catering. It was the choreography of departure, performed so often that the house itself seemed to move with its rhythm.

Roman emerged from the dressing room in a dark suit, hair perfectly in place, cufflinks catching the early light. He smelled faintly of cedar and something sharper, like new paper and control. Saoirse sat up in bed, the sheet gathered over her knees, her hair loose from sleep.

He came to her side. “Go back to sleep,” he said softly.

She smiled a little. “You’re leaving already.”

“I’ll call when I land.”

He leaned down to kiss her forehead, the same kiss as always. She caught the lapel of his jacket lightly between her fingers before he could straighten. “Stay a little longer,” she said, almost teasing.

He smiled faintly. “If I do, I’ll miss the window for takeoff.”

“Then miss it.”

He didn’t answer, just brushed her hair away from her face. “You’ll have a quieter day without me.”

“I don’t want a quieter day,” she whispered, but he was already standing.

He looked at her for a moment longer, and she thought she saw something almost human flicker behind his calm, a soft pang, a hesitation. But then it was gone.

“Try to get some sun,” he said, as if it were a kindness. Then, after a pause, “You look pale.”

And he was gone. The sound of the door closing was the softest in the house, designed not to echo. Still, she heard it.

When she finally stood, she crossed to the window. Outside, the pitch black car was waiting at the bottom of the steps, flanked by the others. Javier held the main house doors open. Roman stepped out, phone already at his ear. He didn’t look up toward the window.

She thought briefly of Nina, of that midday call days ago, Nina’s voice softened with hesitation. “Don’t you ever wonder if he has… someone else?” Roman doesn’t have time for anyone else, she had said in her head.

But now, watching him through the glass, she wasn’t sure if that was the same thing as being faithful.

The convoy pulled away, silent as a secret. When the last car turned down the long drive, Marta came in quietly to draw the curtains, her hands moving with reverence. “Señora,” she murmured, “Would you like breakfast in bed?”

Saoirse shook her head. “Not yet.”

Marta nodded and left.

The room fell still again. Saoirse sat on the edge of the bed, her fingers brushing the faint warmth left on the pillow beside her. She thought of the twins still sleeping in the nursery, of the way they reached instinctively toward sound and warmth.

She stayed there for a long time, the silence filling the air like something solid. Then she lay back down, eyes open, staring at the ceiling until the light shifted and the day began to move on without her.

By afternoon, the house had settled back fully into its quiet pulse, as if Roman’s absence were simply another room closing. The staff moved through the halls with the serenity of habit. Marta directed the cleaners in low Spanish murmurs, the twins’ staff exchanged soft jokes near the nursery door, and every clock in the villa seemed to tick at the same exact rhythm.

Saoirse hadn’t moved from the bedroom for hours. The sheets still held the faint crease of his body, the scent of him lingering like something she wasn’t allowed to touch. But at some point, she realized she was still sitting in her robe unbathed.

The silence pressed in until she couldn’t bear it.

She slipped her feet into slippers and walked down the marble stairs barefoot, her hand grazing the polished banister as if to prove she was still material. The air smelled faintly of citrus and the faint powdery scent of formula. Outside, the afternoon had settled into a still, bright heat, the kind that made even birds quiet.

The courtyard was empty. The fountain murmured, water catching the sunlight like thin glass. Along the low wall, the latest roses had been arranged in enormous clay pots, their petals trembling from the breeze. 

Saoirse knelt beside them, the tiles cool under her knees. Her reflection shimmered in the water as she reached for one of the roses. Its stem was long, spined, and deliberate. She brushed the petal gently, and it folded beneath her touch.

Her grandmother’s voice whispered back through the years, soft as earth. She didn’t say it aloud, but the memory stung all the same, those same sentences that seemed to tether her.

Behind her, she heard footsteps pause, Marta, standing at the edge of the colonnade, pretending to inspect the shutters. The housekeeper’s gaze lingered on the young woman kneeling before a display of perfect flowers, her silk robe catching the light, her fingers tracing thorns like prayer beads.

Marta lowered her eyes. She had seen this before, this quiet unraveling that looked like grace from afar.

Saoirse rose after a while and wiped her hands against her robe. A thorn had pricked her finger again, a faint bloom of red against pale skin. She pressed her thumb over it, watching the color spread slightly, then fade.

The fountain burbled. The house hummed. She stood there for a long moment, her hand bleeding just enough to remind her that she could still hurt. Then she turned back toward the house.

Inside, the air was cool again, temperature-controlled, 22 degrees, scentless. The citrus gone, the roses stayed behind, untouched but already beginning to curl at their edges. When she closed the door, the wind outside sighed and went still.

Night settled with unnerving precision, every lamp dimmed to its prescribed wattage, every corridor lit like a photograph. The villa was immaculate again, as if Roman had never existed inside it, as if no man had ever breathed here at all.

The house was too quiet. After a dinner of cold lamb served early, the twins tucked in hours before, it felt like all the electricity had been pulled from the walls. But sleep didn’t come.

Saoirse lay awake long after the hour the nurses retired to the nursery’s adjoining suite. The silence was vast but shallow, like a stage set waiting for its actors. Somewhere down the hall, a clock struck midnight. The sound absorbed itself without echoing.

She rested her hand on the pillow beside her, felt the faint impression, like a memory pressed into fabric. She inhaled slightly and then held her breath, expecting his scent to linger there. It didn’t. She turned onto her side, watching the pale shapes of the roses on her nightstand, yellow and white. 

The monitor beside her crackled softly, one of the twins stirring. She sat up before the nurse could respond. 

“It’s all right,” she whispered into the intercom, “I’ve got them.”

She slipped her robe on and padded through the dim corridor. The nursery door opened without a sound. The faint blue glow of the baby monitor painted the room in underwater light. Both cots stood side by side beneath gauzy canopies. David was still asleep, his small mouth twitching in dreams, but Mariana was awake, her eyes open and searching.

Saoirse bent over her. “Shh,” she murmured, brushing her thumb across the baby’s cheek. The skin was impossibly soft, almost warm enough to undo her. She lifted her gently, cradling the tiny body against her chest.

Mariana blinked up at her, then gave the smallest sigh, the sound of a being too new to understand longing. Saoirse began to hum. The melody wavered. Her grandmother had once told her that babies could feel sadness through skin. She hoped that wasn’t true.

Source: Pinterest

She rocked slowly, her shadow gliding across the wall. The air smelled faintly of milk and talcum. “You have your father’s eyes,” she whispered, though the baby couldn’t yet understand her, “But I hope you’ll never learn to look away… the way he does.”

The words hung there.

She kissed Mariana’s hairline and glanced at the second cot. David stirred, stretching, one tiny hand curling into the air as if reaching for someone unseen. She laid his sister down and leaned over him, too, adjusting the blanket the way the nurses always did.

“Shhh,” she whispered, because every sound felt too loud in the still house. “It’s okay. Mama’s here.”

David’s small hand gripped her hair. The sudden contact took her breath. She let him, let him hold on, and she let each cry, each sigh, each search for comfort break the spare perfection of the house.

For a moment, she could feel Roman’s presence behind her, the ghost of his cologne, the quiet correction in his tone, You’re holding him wrong. She straightened her posture automatically, then realized no one was there.

For the first time, she didn’t pretend she was strong. She didn’t think about why he had to do it all, how hard he worked, how far he traveled, how disciplined he was, how much he sacrificed to protect and provide. Tears came without warning, brief and soundless, cutting down her cheeks like something her body didn’t need permission for. She wiped them away before they could fall on the sheets.

What she felt fully was the ache of wanting him, needing him, and still being here alone.

Her fingertip trailed the bracelet on her wrist, her eyes glistening in the new light. The stones caught the glow. That morning, he’d said she would have a quieter day without him. Now, she wondered, quieter for whom?

She kissed the top of each baby’s head and whispered their names. Then she whispered, “I miss him.” No answer. Only the night, and the house that dreamed around her.

The babies breathed evenly again. She left them and walked out into the hallway. The clock ticked on. The sea wind rattled faintly at the shutters.

+

The jet rose through the soft gold of early morning like a thought he’d already finished thinking. The hum beneath the floorboards steadied him. Altitude always did. Below, the Catalan coastline dissolved into haze, its pale stone and blue water giving way to clouds.

He didn’t look back at the house. It was enough to know it existed. Saoirse sleeping or pretending to, he liked to imagine her framed by light, the kind of soft beauty that steadied a house, the twins on their schedule, Marta resetting the air filters, everything calibrated to function in his absence. He opened his laptop before the seatbelt light dimmed.

By the time they crossed into French airspace, Zurich was already awake. Javier’s voice came over the secure line, reciting figures from the Suarez Consolidated portfolio. Roman listened, fingers pressed against his temple. “Restructure the Zurich board. Merge legal and acquisitions. Replace Serrano before quarter-end,” he instructed.

“Yes, sir.”

“And make sure the Foundation’s schedule reflects the new directors. I want Saoirse’s name everywhere Allegra’s used to be.”

Javier hesitated. “She’s… still easing into public work.”

Roman looked out the window. The cloud cover was seamless, like glass turned inside out. “Then she’ll ease faster.”

There was a pause. “She hasn’t reviewed any of the new briefs herself.”

“She doesn’t need to,” Roman said. “It’s symbolic.” He didn’t hear himself sound like Amancio when he said it, that decisive dismissiveness.

Geneva smelled of rain and money. His driver met him on the tarmac, umbrella waiting, convoy ready. They drove in silence through wet streets where embassies gleamed like polished bones.

At 8 am, he was in the tower that bore his family’s crest, thirty floors of mirrored restraint. He felt that quiet satisfaction Allegra used to call providence. She’d walked these halls once, her voice low, her smile precise, speaking to his father’s secretaries as though bestowing grace. He’d inherited her calm, people said. They never mentioned that calm could also be an innocent cruelty practised to perfection.

Meetings began immediately with arbitration councils, shareholders, sovereign fund representatives. Roman moved through them like current. He never raised his voice. He didn’t need to. When he spoke, entire tables shifted direction. When he stopped, no one filled the silence.

When he finally looked up from a projection sheet and said, “This is not efficient,” no one argued.

At noon, a message from Javier blinked on his phone: 

Senora is resting. The twins ate at 11:40. All systems stable.

He didn’t reply, but something in his chest loosened, his shoulders eased like a door clicking back into its latch. The language was clinical, but that was what he preferred. 

Saoirse didn’t need to mother their children. She did not need to do anything. All he required of her was to be constant. The twins were safer, more immaculate, calmer than he ever was, untouched by the chaos that made him. That, too, was his design. Marcela had once accused him of “ruthlessly removing every noise from life.” He hadn’t disagreed. Allegra had hated noise, too.

Lunch was a formality. One hour at the Hôtel d’Angleterre with the Zurich partners who ordered for him out of habit. He didn’t mind. He liked efficiency more than pleasure.

Afterwards, he walked along the quay with a younger partner who was brilliant, ambitious, and reckless enough to flirt without saying a word. He watched her the way a collector appraised a painting, aware of its beauty but unmoved by its meaning. Her laughter was precise, like crystal. She spoke of expansion, of renewable transitions, of optics, while tracing the rim of her water glass with her index finger, and he let her talk. 

He liked watching people perform their usefulness.

When she brushed something invisible from his sleeve, he didn’t move away. But when she lingered, he said quietly, “Be careful, Alina. You mistake engagement for invitation. Don’t.”

Her face flushed as she nodded. He smiled faintly, and the moment passed. He admired her poise even in retreat. Allegra would have approved.

Evening came dressed in rainlight. Geneva’s lake turned black and still. From his office’s penthouse suite, Roman could see the reflection of the city lights trembling over water. He stood by the window, shirtless, a glass of mineral water untouched beside the laptop.

On the screen, projections, contracts, a thousand lives bending toward his will. In another window, the Barcelona villa’s surveillance feed lay open with security logs, infant-room temperature, entry timestamps. He scrolled once, reading without seeing as he thought of Saoirse’s voice that morning, how soft and uncertain it was when she asked him to stay. 

He had wanted to tell her he admired how she’d adapted, how she’d become almost ethereally serene in his absence. Allegra had said once, “Peace in a woman is the rarest luxury a man can afford.” He hadn’t understood it then… until he met her.

At 22:00, he typed a message:

Everything all right?

Five minutes later, she replied: 

Yes. 

It’s quiet as always.

He stared at the words for a long moment, then closed the window.

Later, dinner with the Swiss finance minister over cigars, brandy, and polite corruption. The conversation drifted to football. Someone joked about his club’s victory last week. Roman smiled, said nothing. He knew the exact revenue bump it had generated, down to the decimal.

When they toasted, he thought briefly of the twins, of Saoirse, her hair loose that morning, the way she’d said then miss it. The words had almost moved him, though not enough to stay. And she’d agreed to let him go too easily. She always did. That frightened him sometimes, the way she yielded like silk.

He thought of Amancio, who’d ruled through fear and fists, and felt a kind of pride in his own refinement. He never raised his voice, never struck, never shouted.

Back in the suite, he removed his watch, laid it beside his phone. The room was immaculate, ironed sheets, white lilies in a glass vase, his mother’s preference maintained by habit even abroad, the staff’s unspoken homage. He’d replaced the tradition with the roses Saoirse preferred in Barcelona but he still preferred his mother’s lilies around him everywhere else. 

He loosened his shirt and stood at the window again, the city’s hum pulsing below like a mechanical heart. Tomorrow afternoon would see him back in Madrid, and by nightfall, Singapore for ten days of investor summits, refinery audits, and bilateral meetings over an Eastern Corridor expansion. The work required his presence, and entire ventures hinged on it. He knew he’d promised to return to Barcelona soon, but he’d delayed this trip twice already.

The twins were still so new, their presence unsettlingly fragile. Even with the staff in place, the nurses and nannies on rotation, Lisa making the expert pediatric decisions, he preferred Saoirse close to them. She steadied the rhythm of the house, the quiet order he’d built around them. 

Barcelona did that too. It contained things. The family seat was precise, familiar, walled against excess. Bibiana kept reminding them it was where Suarez heirs were meant to begin, and lately, he’d found that thought comforting. The other homes carried too much motion, too many interruptions. Barcelona was stillness, and he wanted Saoirse still, the twins at her side, the house orderly, the days measured. He wanted, needed, to return to that same peace every time he returned.

He would tell her, perhaps, when they spoke next, that she could start travelling again, in increments, once the twins turned one. A luncheon, an exhibition, something quiet to ease her back into the world. Madrid first, perhaps Paris or Milan later. For now, she would remain where everything was contained.

He poured himself a measure of bourbon he wouldn’t finish and checked the time difference. Barcelona was an hour behind. The twins would be asleep. Saoirse, perhaps, walking the halls again, the way Marta said she sometimes did.

He’d never told her to stop. He liked knowing she still moved through his spaces while he was away, like proof of gravity. When they first met, her simplicity soothed him. She wasn’t grasping, argumentative, or ambitious in the way the women he grew up with often were. She listened and gave him a sense of being understood without being challenged.

That calm became his refuge from the noise of business and family politics, so he began to measure his equilibrium through her, whether she was peaceful and available. He started coming home to recover inside her silence. He didn’t really need her companionship, but when she was quiet, he felt whole, and when she was restless or distant, he felt disoriented. 

He organized her days, edited her public presence, protected her from the world. He told himself he was shielding her from gossip, ambition, exhaustion, but he was really safeguarding the stillness that sustained him. He resented anything that disturbed her composure, her friends, the news, even her writing, so his love turned prescriptive. Don’t watch that, don’t travel, don’t overthink, don’t feel too much.

He kept her peaceful by keeping her small, but the version of small that look very much like a valuable virtue, like modesty or humility.

Sometimes, when he watched her sleep, he thought of his grandmother. The woman who’d once taught him that order was like salvation. As a boy, he’d heard stories of her immaculate estates, how she ran them with a precision that bordered on devotion, how Amancio had inherited his fortune from her and her alone, his father long dead. She’d believed beauty existed only where nothing moved out of place. He’d inherited that faith like an heirloom.

She was already 100 years old in his earliest memories of her, but he’d never known a fiercer woman. Mariana bore her name. He told himself it was sentiment, but perhaps it was hope, the wish that something of her fierceness might pass on.

He went to bed at two, sleep shallow, pulse steady. In the dark, the room hummed with regulated air. In Barcelona, the villa would be doing the same, every vent whispering at 22 degrees. Roman closed his eyes and dreamed nothing. He only needed stillness and control, and he had those.

+

Four years ago. 

The afternoon had been too still, the kind of heat that flattened sound. Roman remembered the smell first. It was rosemary, linen, the faint citrus of Allegra’s perfume lingering in the shaded hallways.

She was in the loggia, seated beneath the stone arches that looked out over the Tuscany vineyard her father had given her. A newspaper lay open on her lap, her hand resting lightly on the center. She looked up when he entered, her smile small, knowing.

“So this is the girl who writes poems,” she said in standard Florentine Italian, in that patient tone that could slice through any defense.

Roman poured himself a glass of water from her carafe before answering. “She’s more than that.”

“Mm.” Allegra turned a page of the fresh-off-the-press sheets without looking at it. “They’re always more than that, aren’t they, at first? How old is she?”

He didn’t answer, and that was answer enough.

Allegra’s voice softened, though her eyes did not. “You were already running companies at that age. At 21, I was hosting diplomats. And she’s… writing poems.” She flipped another page, inwardly noting what events were relevant to her circuit, and how all the public news was entirely cooked up. “She’s barely begun to know the world… barely begun to understand the cost of anything,” she mumbled that last part.

He didn’t rise to it. “She’s clever. And not the kind of clever that wants to be seen. The kind that listens.”

Allegra’s eyes flickered toward him. “Listens to you, you mean.”

He paused, considering. “Yes.”

That amused her. She closed the papers. “And that’s rare now, I suppose.”

“It is. She listens because she understands,” he said quietly. “And she sees me.”

“Ah.” Allegra folded the paper neatly, aligning its edges with meticulous care. “Where does she come from, this clever listener of yours?”

“London. Originally Newcastle.”

“Ah.” Allegra’s mouth curved faintly. “Working stock.” She said it without malice, but with that effortless cruelty of those who had never needed to climb. “And you think she’ll bear the weight of your father’s name?”

“She doesn’t care about that.”

“That,” Allegra said, “is either very good or very dangerous.”

He said nothing.

“Women who don’t care for our world, who enter it unaware or indifferent to its currency usually end up breaking under it.” A long pause. “You forget how precise it is, how it measures worth in gestures, accents, silences…” 

Her tone remained cool, but her meaning bit deep. “You’re thirty-six, Roman. I’ve watched you pass through rooms full of women who knew how to match you… and you never paused for one. Now, you choose a girl young enough to be dazzled, and you call it peace.”

“She isn’t dazzled,” he said, his voice tightening. “She’s grounded and still, and she knows who she is.”

Allegra’s expression softened into something almost pitying. “No one knows who they are at twenty-one. Least of all the ones who’ve had to climb.”

He met her gaze, unflinching now. “You think I’ve lost judgment.”

“No, I think you know exactly what you’re doing,” she replied. “What does she want from you?”

He held her gaze. “Nothing.”

“She wants nothing from you yet, and that makes you feel safe. But women who want nothing are the ones who learn fastest how much power that gives them.”

“She’s not like that.”

“They all are,” Allegra said simply. “Eventually.”

“You underestimate her.”

“And you overestimate love. It’s never enough in our family.” She studied him for a moment, her only son, Amancio’s heir, always the calm in the house of storms. “That’s precisely what frightens me. She wants nothing, so she’ll find power in being needed, and you won’t notice it until she stops asking.”

“She won’t stop asking,” he said, too quickly.

“Figlio mio.” Roman loved when his mother’s Tuscan gorgia of consonant sounds jumped out just a little whenever she said those two words. It was the closest she ever got to warmth, the her voice always stayed gentle. “They all stop eventually. If she’s wise, she’ll learn that your love depends on her peace.”

“She doesn’t need to learn that,” he said, looking away. “She already is peace.”

At that, Allegra reached for her glass of wine and regarded him with quiet, tragic fondness. “You think you’ve found me again,” she murmured. “But she’s not me, Roman. And you can’t remake her to be.”

He didn’t answer. 

Somewhere behind them, cicadas shrilled, their hum rising like static through the stillness. Allegra sighed, setting down her glass. “Bring her here when you’re sure. I’ll know what she’s made of.”

He nodded, though he never did. Saoirse would never set foot in that particular house, Allegra’s haven, while Allegra was alive.

Years later, Roman would remember this conversation, the stillness of that afternoon, and understand too late that what his mother had seen in him, what he called love, was only the quiet beginning of conquest.

The Suarez Myth: Chapter 7

The house was different. 

The hum of quiet had changed tone. She woke to the sound of laughter and soft footsteps that were not the usual maid or nurse. Voices drifted from downstairs. One was his. 

Roman was home. For a second, she thought she was dreaming because the sound was too easy, too human. Then Marta knocked softly and peeked in. “He’s downstairs, Señora.”

Saoirse sat up slowly, heart unsteady. The bed beside her was smooth, untouched, but through the half-open door she could hear him, Roman, speaking low, amused, the kind of voice he used in public when he wanted people to feel at ease.

By the time she came down, the dining room doors were open, and the morning light spilled in gold, turning the kitchen into glass. Roman stood at the long marble counter, sleeves rolled to his elbows, the twins’ bottles already warming in a bowl of water. He looked completely at home in the order he’d built, a God returned to his heaven.

“Good morning,” he said, smiling as if they’d seen each other just yesterday. His voice was light, even tender. “I couldn’t sleep in Milan, so I flew back early.”

Saoirse crossed to him, still barefoot, still half-dazed, too happy to see him to even speak.

“I wanted to surprise you,” he continued, leaned in, and kissed her cheek. His skin smelled faintly of cedar and the long night of airports, closed-door meetings, disinfected air.

The twins stirred in their bassinets on the floor nearby, cooing softly. Roman knelt beside them, adjusting one’s blanket with surprising tenderness. “They’re growing fast,” he said, as if noticing for the first time. “Mariana’s going to have my eyes, I think.”

Saoirse stood there, still not trusting herself to speak. He looked up at her once, the faintest question in his expression.

“Have you eaten?” he asked.

“Yes,” she lied. “You?”

“Not yet. Sit with me.”

Over breakfast, he asked gentle, ordinary things. Had she been resting? Did the staff make things easier? Did she go out much?

“Not really,” she said. “Only once or twice. I went into the city last week for a few hours.”

He didn’t look surprised. He didn’t even pause, just buttered his toast, poured more coffee. “I know. Emilio mentioned it.”

Saoirse froze. “Oh.”

Roman smiled, kind, patient, unreadable. “You don’t need to ask permission, you know that. I just like knowing where you are.” He’s said it so many times, the way someone might say ‘I love you’. Then he reached across the table and brushed a crumb from her wrist. The gesture was soft enough to feel like affection, deliberate enough to feel like ownership. 

As if like a flash, she remembered Nina’s questions, the thought of ‘someone else’. She opened her mouth and thought she’d ask him, but in the end, she couldn’t bring herself to. She couldn’t even imagine it.

They ate mostly in silence after that, the quiet clink of silverware, the twins’ gentle murmurs from the corner, the staff hovering. Roman spoke once more, halfway through his coffee. “I think we’ll move back to Madrid next month,” he said. “Darn all the nonsense about tradition. The security and order there will be better for the children.”

Saoirse nodded automatically. “Of course.”

He smiled again, like he was grateful for her agreement. “Good.”

When he left the table to speak with Javier and Marco, she stayed where she was, fingers resting lightly on the cup he’d used. It was still warm.

She got up and stood by the bassinets. David slept with his lips parted. Mariana’s fingers twitched. Saoirse brushed their hair back, light as air. The bracelet glinted on her wrist. The ring glinted on her finger. She turned toward the window.

From there, she could see the gardeners offloading another delivery, boxes of white, pink, and yellow roses stacked neatly on the terrace. The scent was already drifting in through the half-open door, faint and relentless. She didn’t move to close it.

Roman’s voice on a call echoed faintly from the next room, calmly and assuredly issuing instructions to someone miles away. Saoirse looked at the flowers again, their perfect heads nodding slightly in the breeze. Peace looked beautiful on her, and she was beginning, almost imperceptibly, to believe him.

That night, dinner was already half over when Saoirse realized she hadn’t said ten words.

Roman was talking, something about Zurich, about a fund he’d absorbed and the strange courtesy of men who smiled while surrendering. He spoke with that calm precision that made everything sound inevitable.

She nodded when he looked at her, smiled when he paused. The wine was white and cold, his glass always half-full, hers barely touched.

When he said, “I’ll probably need to leave again next week,” she almost spoke. Almost said, You just got back. Almost said, I miss you too much when you’re gone. Almost said, Don’t go.

She waited for a space, but his words moved seamlessly, like waves closing over themselves. When the silence finally came, it was a wall, and Saoirse’s throat ached with unsaid things, but she reached for her glass instead. 

“The babies have started smiling,” she offered softly. “David laughed when Lisa tickled him yesterday.”

Roman looked up, smiling the way one does at a charming headline. “He’s strong. He’ll do well.” He didn’t ask for details. He never did.

The silence returned, this time shaped by the clink of his fork against porcelain. Saoirse felt the old reflex, the tightening behind her ribs, the instinct to fill the quiet, and fought it down. She had learned that his peace depended on her restraint.

When he finished, he dabbed his mouth, placed the napkin beside his plate, and said, “You’re quieter these days.”

The words startled her. She set the glass down carefully. “Am I?”

He nodded, smiling slightly. “I’m not complaining. It means you’re content.”

Content. She smiled back the way someone might at a doctor who’d just said the wound’s healing nicely.

He reached across the table, brushed a loose strand of hair from her temple, his fingertips cool. “You make the house feel calm,” he said. “That’s all I ever wanted.”

He smiled and stood and left after commending their chef. She stayed at the table again, staring at their plates, his half-empty, hers barely touched, and thought about how quiet love could become before it stopped sounding like love at all.

The air system sighed on, steady as breath.

That night in bed, he told her as if it were a trivial thing. “We’re going to the match tomorrow,” he said, glancing at his nightstand before placing his phone on it.

“The match?” she asked, confused.

“Against Girona,” he said. “It’s a home fixture, and it’s the last of the quarter. It’s the furthest they’ve gone in years. We should be there.”

We. She didn’t know what he was talking about, but she also hadn’t heard him say ‘we’ in weeks, maybe months.

He turned to her now. “You’ll come with me.”

She blinked, unsure if she’d misheard. “You mean… out?”

His smile was soft, indulgent. “Yes, out. You need air. And people should see you.”

The way he said it made her throat tighten. It sounded like a compliment, but also an order. He didn’t ask if she wanted to go. He never did. But she said, “Of course,” anyway, because it felt like sunlight cracking the shutters.

He leaned over to kiss her cheek and said, “Sleep,” as she inhaled his clean, lightly misted skin from his long evening shower.

In the morning, their bedroom smelled of pressed linen and perfumes Roman had commissioned for her over the course of their marriage, all soft mish-mashes of the rarest of floral scents. Marta and two stylists moved around her quietly, opening garment racks Javier had sent up before she woke to find Roman gone. Everything in neutral tones like camel, ivory, navy. He let her choose from an array, but he selected the array.

“Not too formal,” one stylist murmured as Saoirse touched one dress. “Señor prefers simple.”

Roman appeared briefly as they dressed her, gray t-shirt perfectly pressed, his voice low and unhurried. “Keep her hair down,” he said, touching a strand without looking at her. He was gone before she could answer.

When she saw herself in the mirror, she tried to embody the woman there, in cream cashmere, pearl studs, her face pale but composed. She looked perfectly fine, perfectly nothing.

They flew in one of the smaller jets, just the two of them and Javier. Roman sat with his laptop open, his screen split between a stock graph and encrypted messages from the club’s CEO.

He barely looked up. “You’ll like this one,” he said absently. “We own most of the stadium’s west complex. My father invested when they were broke. People forget we kept it alive.”

She nodded. “Which club is it again?”

He smiled faintly. “Deportivo Aragón. It’s not fashionable enough to be Barcelona FC, but also not local enough to be sentimental. That’s why I like it.”

She looked out the window, watching the coastline blur below. For the first time in months, she felt movement, actual, physical movement, something the walls in Barcelona never allowed.

When he reached across the aisle to adjust her blanket, his touch was brief, practiced. “Try not to look so nervous,” he said. “They’ll think I’ve been hiding you.”

She smiled. “Haven’t you?”

He looked at her then, properly, and said, almost tenderly, “Just preserving something precious.”

The car wound through the old streets of Zaragoza, police escorts keeping distance on either side. The stadium lights shimmered ahead like a crown. Saoirse could see the press barricades already waiting.

Inside the car, Roman’s phone buzzed. “Bibiana’s husband’s already there,” he murmured as he read the screen. “He wants to be seen shaking my hand.”

“Do you want to?”

He gave a small laugh. “Want has nothing to do with it.”

He took her hand loosely, as though guiding a child across a road. “They’ll ask for photos. Smile, but not too much. And if anyone asks how the twins are, say ‘perfect.’ Don’t elaborate.”

She nodded. “All right.”

He leaned back, studying her face. “You’ll do fine. You always do.”

The flashbulbs started the moment they stepped out of the car. Roman’s name surged through the crowd like a wave. “Suarez! Señor Suarez!”

He didn’t flinch, didn’t pause, but the cameras adored him, his measured stride, the clean angles of his face, that aura of impenetrable calm. He raised a hand briefly, smiled just enough, then placed a guiding hand on Saoirse’s back.

She moved beside him, quiet and composed, the embodiment of his myth, the elusive Mrs. Suarez. The photographers murmured her name uncertainly, trying to recall it. One whispered, “Irish, isn’t she?” Another, “You’d think she was porcelain.”

She heard none of it clearly. The noise was too big. The chanting, the stadium lights, the smell of grass and sweat and fireworks. It all felt like weather.

They entered through a private gate, up the marble stairs to the family box. Security closed the door behind them, and the noise dimmed. The game had just started. From up here, the pitch looked unreal, like a moving painting, the players running patterns in miniature. Roman stood at the glass, hands in his pockets, the owner watching his creation. His brother-in-law stood beside him, older yet somehow lesser.

People came in and out, executives, politicians, a few familiar faces. Roman spoke to them easily, his tone measured, charming even. Saoirse sat behind him, smiling when introduced, nodding when appropriate. Her gaze followed Roman’s reflection in the glass, the tilt of his head, the control in his stance.

She tried to still her hands as the crowd’s incessant roars vibrated through the glass, too big for her chest. For months, she’d lived inside the soft hush of the villa with nursery lullabies, monitors beeping, the small sighs of babies half-asleep. Out here, the noise felt alive, almost cruel.

She told herself to breathe normally, to smile when people entered the box, to look like she belonged in this light. But her throat tightened each time the crowd surged. She wondered if the twins were awake, if Mariana was crying the way she sometimes did at dusk, that cry that sounded like a song breaking.

Halfway through the first half, he turned to her. “You all right?”

“Yes.”

“You’re quiet.”

She smiled faintly. “You like me quiet.”

He leaned closer, his voice soft enough for only her to hear. “Don’t confuse liking with need.” He tilted his head, amused. “I like you composed.” His tone this time carried that familiar undertow of affection phrased as instruction.

She nodded, hands folding in her lap. She wanted to lean toward him, to whisper something ordinary, something human, but as if the moment hadn’t happened, he looked back toward the field and applauded a goal. She glanced flittingly at Esteban, Bibiana’s husband, before facing the pitch.

Javier informed him that the CEO was here just moments before the suited middle-aged man walked in, nervous and deferential. He murmured his greetings in Spanish, bowed slightly, and asked Roman something presumably about the club or the match.

Roman didn’t look at him as he responded, but the man nodded as though he were taking dictation from a deity. Roman’s phone buzzed. He answered it without stepping away, listened for a moment without saying a word, then ended the call. He turned to Esteban, telling him something (again, in Spanish) about financiers and the Easter mass, or something. Saoirse looked down at her hands in her lap. 

His voice stayed calm, even when the stadium erupted with another chant of ‘Suarez!’ He was half in this world, half elsewhere, always composed, always orbiting himself.

By the end of the match, Deportivo Aragón had won. The box erupted in polite applause. Flashbulbs went off outside the glass, Roman and Saoirse silhouetted in the strobe.

She turned slightly to him. “They’re happy.”

“They’ll forget by Monday,” he said. “It’s business.”

As Saoirse stared at both the players celebrating and those mourning their defeat, the coach appeared at the door, flushed from the pitch, all sweat and charm. Roman’s smile was surgical as they spoke, as the coach laughed a little too loudly, as his eyes flicked briefly toward Saoirse, just long enough to betray curiosity. 

“Señora Suarez, it’s a privilege,” he said, stretching his hand out to her.

Before Saoirse could reply, Roman’s hand rested on the back of her chair, his posture casual, but the coach shifted back and smiled at Roman again. Saoirse looked down, cheeks warm. The room went silent except for the hum of the crowd outside.

When they stepped outside, the cameras flared again. Someone shouted her name, “Señora Suarez! Look this way!”

Roman’s hand pressed lightly against her back. His smile was perfect.

In the jet, she watched him read through emails again, unbothered by the hour.

He closed the laptop only once and looked at her wrist. “You wore the bracelet,” he said, referring to the diamond and sapphire heirloom.

“You asked me to.”

He smiled, and she smiled. 

“It suits you,” he said.

“You said it would,” she replied, her voice quiet but warm, grateful to be spoken to at all.

Outside the window, the lights stretched like gold threads over black water. Spain glittered beneath them, a mosaic of cities and rivers glowing in the dark. She tried to memorize it, but could only imagine the twins asleep in their cribs. She thought of how Mariana had smiled that morning, of David’s hand clinging to her hair. 

When they landed back in Barcelona, she whispered, “Thank you for taking me.”

He kissed her forehead, the soft, controlled kind of kiss that never smudged anything. “Of course,” he said. “It was good for people to see you.”

She lingered, hoping he would turn his face toward hers, to close the distance. When he didn’t, she whispered, “I missed you.”

He smiled faintly, already stepping ahead of her toward the waiting car. “Then you enjoyed yourself.”

She followed, the night air cool against her skin, the noise of the match still faint in her ears. In the car window’s reflection, her face looked ghostly beside his.

As they drove through the gates, she glanced down at her wrist, the bracelet’s sapphires catching the passing lights like tiny eyes. It felt heavier now. She turned her hand over once, twice, testing whether it could just slip off. It didn’t.

By the time Saoirse woke up to yet another morning that made the previous night feel imagined, the bed beside her was empty. She could tell from the absence of scent that he’d left it hours ago. Roman never left traces. Outside the windows, the Barcelona light had shifted to that pale blue that made marble gleam and people disappear.

She rose, showered, and dressed slowly, the faint ache of travel exhaustion still clinging to her skin. The Suarez bracelet lay on the bedside table, still closed around the same idea of belonging. She fastened it again before she could talk herself out of it.

In the nursery, the twins were awake. The room smelled of milk and powder and soft, humming order. Lisa, Lucia, and the two nurses moved quietly between the cots, their efficiency almost reverent.

“Good morning, Señora,” Lisa murmured, stepping aside.

Saoirse knelt beside Mariana’s crib first. The little girl’s eyes followed the light, her mouth forming small, wet circles of sound. Saoirse smiled faintly, tracing the baby’s cheek with her finger. “You’re growing too fast,” she whispered.

David was fussier, his cries brief but sharp. She lifted him, feeling his warmth against her chest. His tiny hand caught the chain around her neck. She didn’t realize she was crying until one of the nurses offered a handkerchief.

“Just tired,” Saoirse said softly. She liked these moments, the milk-warm smell of their skin, the tiny fingers curling against her. But even this tenderness felt borrowed, as though she were tending something Roman had loaned her.

When the babies drifted back to sleep, she stood for a while, watching them, the way their chests rose and fell in sync. It always calmed her. It also reminded her of how easily she could disappear into this life, how the house could absorb her completely, like water poured into marble.

She wandered to the terrace. Barcelona spread below, glass roofs, distant bells, a wind carrying salt. It could have been any morning of any year.

She heard him before she saw him, Roman’s voice carrying down the corridor as afternoon came, calm, decisive, issuing quiet orders to Javier. “No, not this quarter. Tell Zurich to wait.” Then, softer, “And inform Bibiana I’ll see her later today. She wants to bring Esteban.”

He entered the terrace a moment later and told her, “I have calls. They’ll visit at four.”

“Bibiana?” Bibiana and Esteban de Rojas never came unless Roman was in town.

He nodded and pulled off his jumper. “Try not to overthink the match,” he said, almost kindly. “You were perfect. The press loved you.”

“I didn’t do anything.”

“That’s what they liked.” His eyes flicked briefly toward the hallway. “Keep them near the terrace when they wake. Light’s good for them.”

She hesitated. “Would you like lunch first?”

“I’ve eaten.” He leaned in, brushed her cheek with his thumb, a gesture soft enough to disguise instruction. “You did well yesterday. Just stay like that.”

When he left, the room seemed to exhale. Saoirse stood there, half-smiling, half-frozen. Stay like that. It sounded like praise or a leash.

His presence snapped everyone into frozen alertness once more. The staff, Lisa, Marta, all unseen. But by late afternoon, the house had changed temperature again. Marta supervised the florists, the silver trays, the re-pressed napkins. Roman went up to change his shirt, then glanced at her when they met in the big drawing room, a small, assessing look that passed for affection. 

Bibiana arrived precisely at four, her husband in tow, tall, silver-haired, wearing that faint air of hereditary entitlement, easy confidence and faintly patronizing warmth. When the door opened, the air shifted. Roman greeted them first, effortlessly polite. “Sister.” He kissed both cheeks. Saoirse stood beside him, a porcelain accessory in pale silk.

Bibiana’s voice was smooth but edged with curiosity. “We thought you'd linger in Milan through the utilities supply chain exchange.”

“Change of plans.”

Saoirse stepped forward finally. “It’s lovely to see you.”

Bibiana smiled thinly, almost kindly. “And you. You look... well. Motherhood suits you.”

Saoirse murmured a thank-you, unsure where to rest her eyes.

Esteban launched into conversation immediately, fund structures, club performance, some new tax revision in Madrid. Roman listened with that serene focus that made everyone else overcompensate. He didn’t sit until they did.

They talked for nearly an hour about La Fundación Suarez’s next gala, Easter mass (again) at Santa María la Real, the royals who might attend, the Goyas’ new art wing, the Duquesa de Alba’s grandchildren, someone’s renovation in Milan. The names blurred together for Saoirse, an endless litany of people she’d never met but was expected to understand.

Once or twice she opened her mouth to speak, but Roman’s thumb brushed lightly against her wrist, a quiet tethering, part reassurance, part warning. His hand stayed there, fingers slow, deliberate.

Bibiana turned to her once, eyes cool but not unkind. “You must be proud, Señora Suarez. Roman has transformed everything your father-in-law built.”

Saoirse answered softly, “He’s extraordinary.” Roman’s thumb moved once, tracing a small circle on her skin. 

When Bibiana mentioned Marcela’s children and asked after the twins, his tone softened. “They’re thriving,” he said, expression unreadable. “You may see them after tea.” He didn’t really like anyone touching them, not even family.

Bibiana raised a brow. “We wouldn’t dream of disturbing them if they’re resting.”

“They’re well-trained,” Roman said lightly. “They don’t disturb easily.”

The remark was half-joke, but something in Saoirse’s stomach twisted.

Bibiana turned to her and again said, “You must be proud. Two already.”

Saoirse smiled. Bibiana had said the exact words to her before. Two already. “They’re perfect,” she said, the phrase Roman had trained into her.

“And how do you find life here all the time? I imagine it’s... quieter than Madrid or London, but not quite as dull as Como.”

“It’s peaceful,” Saoirse replied. It was Bibiana who always reminded her the importance of raising Suarez heirs in Barcelona through their early years.

Roman’s fingers tightened around her wrist, barely, but enough for her to feel it. “She prefers it that way,” he said. “She’s not like us.”

The room laughed politely.

Bibiana studied her brother, then, something sharp in her gaze, “You’re protective as ever.”

He smiled back. “Family requires it.”

When tea was served, the conversation turned to donors, property acquisitions, Vatican circles, topics so far removed from Saoirse even after almost three years of marriage into this world that the words slid over her like static. She sat still, composed, her pulse steady beneath his touch.

Once, when Esteban addressed her directly, “You should go to Geneva in the spring, Señora, see Marcela’s new gardens,” Roman answered for her, “She’s not traveling much just yet.”

“I’d like to,” Saoirse said quietly.

Roman’s hand moved again, his thumb tracing the back of hers in that maddening, tender rhythm. “Perhaps when the children are older.”

She smiled for the room, but her voice caught on the edge of something unsaid. Bibiana noticed, though she said nothing. Her eyes lingered briefly on Saoirse’s face, then on Roman’s hand, still holding hers.

Soon, the visit ended and night-light painted everything in the same muted gold as the chandeliers downstairs, as if the house itself refused darkness. The silence stretched out again.

Her bracelet—his mother’s, his grandmother’s—caught the glow each time she shifted her hand. She traced the cool stones absently, thinking how they always looked alive under light but felt dead against skin. She rubbed the inside of her wrist where his fingers had been, that phantom pulse that felt almost like love echoing still.

She tried to remember what she’d said at dinner, what she hadn’t. You did well. Stay like that. The words replayed like a lullaby with teeth.

The window was half open. Outside, the gardens breathed with invisible life, the sound of waves below the cliff, a single night bird, the low hum of security lights sweeping the path. Somewhere in another wing, a clock chimed nine.

She thought of the match again, the crowd roaring, the lights, the press flashing like gunfire, and then of his hand on her chair, the way the coach had fallen quiet mid-greeting. Everyone had understood it immediately. Everyone except her. She looked down at her hands. They didn’t tremble. The control had already seeped back in, slow as morphine. This house, his world, had its own way of teaching stillness.

For a moment, she imagined Roman watching from the doorway, approving quietly of this serenity, this composure. Peace looks beautiful on you.

Roman wouldn’t come to bed until well after midnight, so she sat in the rocking chair they kept in the drawing room and let the motion lull her. The bracelet glinted, the roses from yesterday stood in a vase by the window, already beginning to droop. Outside, the sea kept moving. Inside, the house slept for her.

The chair’s rhythm steadied her until the edges of the room began to soften. The hum of the monitor, the whisper of the sea, all of it folded into something almost tender. She leaned her head back, the bracelet cold against her wrist, the babies’ breathing syncing with her own.

Her eyelids slipped closed for once.

At first, it was only colour, green after rain, grey stone, the pale wash of northern light. Then, she was there again, in her grandmother’s small garden behind the Newcastle house, the narrow plot that always smelled of earth and rusted metal. She was crouched in the dirt, brushing soil from her palms. The roses were scraggly, stubborn, their petals bitten by frost. She could hear the sound of the old woman’s breathing from the kitchen window, rough and shallow.

Saoirse turned toward her, but she wasn’t there anymore, only the sound of waves against rock, the scent of lilies choking the air.

The garden tilted. The roses bent toward her like witnesses. One of them whispered, Stay like that.

She woke up with a start. The house was utterly still, lit by the low blue of dawn filtering through the terrace doors. Her neck ached from the chair, and for a second, she forgot where she was.

Then the sound of the automated shutters began to rise, their mechanical hum swallowing the quiet. The villa was waking itself, calibrating its light and temperature for the day, indifferent to the woman sitting alone in the drawing room.

She rose, and when she turned toward the door, the mirror beside it caught her reflection, barefoot, silk creased, hair loose. For a fleeting moment, she saw her grandmother’s face over her own, thin and pale and patient.

She blinked, and it was gone.

The house was awake now, and so was she. But something about her sleep lingered, the way the roses had leaned toward her, the way their thorns had glinted in the dreamlight. She touched her wrist where the bracelet rested and whispered, almost to herself, “Still thriving.”

Then she opened the double doors to the hum of footsteps, the scent of coffee, and the quiet precision of another perfect morning.

The day unfolded like a performance of calm, soft and mercilessly blue. Breakfast was served out on the terrace. It was the odd pastry, fruit, coffee, sunlight precisely balanced across the tablecloth. The light filled every corner of the terrace, gentle and absolute, the kind that revealed more than it forgave.

The twins had been wheeled out in their prams, both asleep, both perfect. Saoirse sat in her robe with a book open but unread, its spine balanced between her fingers. 

Roman came down later than usual, hair still slightly damp from the shower. It was one of those rare mornings when he lingered. He smelled faintly of cologne and saltwater. He must’ve gone for an early swim again, alone. His jumper sleeves were rolled up, wristwatch gleaming, skin touched by sun. It shouldn’t have made her heart flutter the way it did, not after all these months of distance, but it did.

“You’re up early.” He poured her coffee himself. “And you’re reading again,” he said, glancing at the page without really looking.

“I’m trying to,” she answered, smiling softly. “It feels like I’ve forgotten how.”

“You just need discipline,” he said, tearing a croissant neatly in half. “You always were too gentle with yourself.”

She tilted her head, amused despite herself. “You make it sound like I’m a project.”

His mouth curved faintly. “You are. A successful one.”

She laughed, a small, genuine sound. “Is that what you tell all your mergers?”

“I don’t usually marry them.”

It wasn’t a joke, but she laughed anyway. It felt almost easy, this back-and-forth, the first sliver of warmth in weeks. She looked at him and thought maybe this was the beginning of something soft returning, the smallest pulse of the life they used to have.

“I couldn’t sleep,” she said, smiling.

“I noticed last night.”

She lowered her eyes. “I’ve gotten used to the sound of the babies breathing. When I don’t hear them, I wake.”

He hummed. “That’s maternal instinct. You’ll grow out of it.” She tried to laugh. “It’s meant to fade.” He smiled faintly and reached for her own croissant, slicing it open with the same neatness he brought to everything. “You’ll start to feel more like yourself soon.”

He offered it to her. She took it but didn’t answer. Myself, she thought, but couldn’t remember who that was anymore.

He glanced at her book again. “What are you reading?”

“I’m not sure yet.”

“Then choose something else that’s actually worth reading.” He smirked.

“I was thinking of poetry.”

He looked up briefly. “You’re still on that?” His tone was neither unkind nor sensitive. “You used to have a sharp instinct for structure. Don’t lose it to sentiment.” And just like that, he dismissed something that had once been the most important thing to her, that could’ve been her entire career.

Saoirse smiled, quiet, accepting. “I’ll try not to.”

They sat in silence for a while. The twins remained asleep in their prams, one small hand twitching, one pacifier rolling to the floor. She bent to pick it up before Lucia could. The motion drew the robe tighter across her chest, and when she straightened, she felt his eyes flicker toward her then away again, immediately, cleanly.

Her face warmed. She took a sip of coffee, though she could barely swallow it.

“I was thinking,” she said softly, “We could take the babies down to the beach later. Just for air.”

He smiled, indulgent. “There are too many cameras there. Later, maybe.”

She hesitated, then tried again, “Or we could go somewhere else, just us—”

The phone on the table began to vibrate. He didn’t hesitate. “Marcela,” he said, already answering. The shift was instant. His voice was cooler, fluent Spanish filling the air like music she couldn’t translate. It was efficient but touched with fraternal courtesy.

Saoirse’s smile faded as his voice took on that rhythm she knew too well, the one that turned every conversation into a negotiation. She turned her gaze back to her book, though she still didn’t read.

“Of course, I saw the numbers,” Roman was saying in Spanish. “No, no, that’s the old projection… Geneva’s board will follow once Zurich confirms.”

He paused, listening before a quiet laugh, the kind reserved for family. “I’m aware. Bibiana mentioned it. We’ll make the adjustments before Easter.”

Saoirse sipped her coffee slowly, her reflection wavering in the cup. The words blurred together into royal patrons, foundation funding, dinner invitations, but his tone carried that familiar certainty that closed every door she didn’t have the key to.

After a few minutes, he said lightly, “No, I’m not alone. She’s here.” A pause. “She’s well. The babies are well. She’s reading.” Another pause, then softer, “Yes, I’ll tell her you asked.” He hung up, slid the phone aside, and looked at her as if nothing had happened. “Marcela sends her love.”

Saoirse smiled faintly. “That’s kind.”

He nodded once and reached for his coffee again, the conversation already gone from his mind. For a long moment, she just watched him, the sharp planes of his face, the faint shadow at his jaw, the stillness that seemed to exist around him like air pressure. There were times she still wanted to reach out, just touch his hand, pull him back into some kind of warmth. But every time she almost did, she felt the invisible wall between them, that composed, polite, unbreakable wall.

A knock came at the terrace door. Javier entered, unobtrusive as ever, tall, greying, an envelope in his hand. “Forgive me, sir. Geneva confirmed the board dinner for Tuesday. Your flight’s been shifted forward.”

Roman didn’t even look surprised. “Tomorrow, then.”

“Yes, sir.” Javier’s eyes flicked briefly to Saoirse, then back to Roman. “I’ll have Marco coordinate the security detail.”

“Fine.”

Saoirse stared at the table. “Tomorrow?” she asked quietly.

He glanced at her, as if surprised by her surprise. “Just a few days.”

“How many?”

He smiled. “You’ll hardly notice. I’ll have the pilot on standby.”

Her throat tightened. “The twins…”

“They’ll be fine.” His voice softened. “You’ve been doing wonderfully with them.”

She wanted to say we’ve been doing nothing together, but the words felt childish. Instead, she swallowed. “You’ve only just come back.”

He reached over and held her wrist. “And I always come back.” His thumb brushed once, slowly, over her pulse. “You know that.” The gesture made her dizzy, the gentleness of it, the false warmth it carried.

When Javier left, she said quietly, “I thought maybe… we’d have more time this week. I thought you’d stay longer this time.”

“I can’t. Not now.” He looked at her then, something unreadable flickering behind his calm. “You shouldn’t count time by my travel schedule,” he said softly. “You’ll drive yourself mad.” The words were tender, but they landed like a door closing.

He rose, brushed a crumb from his sleeve, and leaned down to kiss her cheek. “Read something good,” he murmured. “Keep your mind occupied.” The warmth of his breath lingered as he left.

Saoirse sat there long after he was gone, the page in front of her still untouched. The sound of the sea returned, soft but endless, and when the wind lifted, a few yellow petals drifted from the vase on the table onto her lap. She looked down at them and smiled faintly.

The twins stirred. She rose and went to them, still smiling through the ache that could never quite leave.