The Suarez Myth: Chapter 6

The water had gone cold long before she stepped out, but she hadn’t noticed. The sound in her head had gone quieter too, the way the world sometimes goes still after a scream. In that silence, she thought of his voice again, always calm, always right, and told herself this might be what safety feels like, like silence that burns and soothes at once.

Again, days became weeks and her body mended, mostly. 

+

The twins brought the era of temperature control with their birth. 

Saoirse now stayed in Barcelona almost all the time, and Roman would fly in and out for a couple of days each month. They never talked about it, this new order, never decided together on the ridiculous schedule, but one day, it simply was.

The Barcelona villa moved completely different from how it was when Amancio and Allegra ruled it. Roman’s reign was disinfected, clocked, and quietly efficient precision. The twins’ monitors chimed every four hours, bottles were sterilized on schedule, the new housekeeper moved like breath itself, omnipresent, unobtrusive. Even the sunlight seemed filtered through invisible hands. The central air stayed fixed at 22 degrees, the number Roman had chosen for optimal infant regulation.

After Amancio’s death, all the houses changed temperature, the security staff tripled, new faces appeared in the rotation, men in dark linen uniforms and earpieces, men who bowed to Roman and kept their eyes lowered. In Madrid, Isabella spoke to her less and less, and the chefs began plating every meal with an almost ceremonial symmetry.

The quiet made Saoirse ache. Every sound that wasn’t a baby’s cry seemed to belong to him. Sometimes, she’d walk the Barcelona courtyard with Lisa and the babies, watching guards pace the perimeter like metronomes. Roman trusted Marco Alvarez most of all, who’d arrived shortly before the twins’ birth. Javier had informed her he was their head of perimeter systems now.

He was not as deferential as the other guards, the kind of man who had already worked under too many masters to bother performing loyalty. He managed the biometric sensors, the motion grids, the AI-assisted feeds Roman monitored from afar. 

The guards who’d worked here longer treated her like a sainted relic, something never to be approached. Marco spoke to her like a person, and it felt like a small mercy. He lingered to double-check the courtyard locks, to explain the motion sensors with patient precision, to offer the simplest courtesies. Would she like him to move the umbrella closer to the pram, did the noise from the north wall bother her? She said thank you, always thank you, always softly.

The twins were sleeping when the phone rang.

Not the house line, her personal one, the one she’d stopped using so often she almost didn’t recognize the sound.

Nina.

She hesitated before answering, glancing once at the nursery monitor, then at the clock. 11:07 a.m. London would be an hour behind. She imagined Nina sitting cross-legged on her sofa, mug in hand, light slanting through a window cluttered with plants, the leaves of the overgrown monstera she’d once named Basil, mind heavy with projects and traffic and appointments. The thought made her chest ache.

“Hi, stranger.”

Saoirse smiled before she could help it. “Hi.”

“You sound half-asleep,” Nina teased. “Or drugged.”

“Neither. Just… quiet morning.”

“Quiet house, you mean.” Nina laughed softly. “God, it still feels weird to imagine you surrounded by people in uniforms. I picture you giving orders in diamonds.”

“Hardly. They all give orders to me.” Saoirse laughed a little. “It’s just very quiet here. The babies are finally down.”

“Quiet sounds like heaven,” Nina said softly. “Mine’s chaos. My flatmate’s cat had kittens, and the whole place smells like milk and sawdust.”

Saoirse laughed again, low and careful. “You make it sound nice.”

“It is. Messy, but nice. You’d hate it. Don’t forget deadlines and neighbours fighting about recycling bins!”

Saoirse smiled. “I almost miss that kind of noise.”

A pause. Then Nina said, half-joking, half-sincere, “You okay?”

Saoirse hesitated. “I think so. The twins are thriving.” She laughed too quickly, as if to prove it didn’t sting.

They talked for a while about nothing, about London rain, Nina’s first solo investigative report, the twins’ new sleep pattern, the new cleaner Nina could barely afford but adored, the army of Suarez staff Saoirse was beginning to fear could stage an insurrection, the way Nina’s editor had accidentally sent her flowers meant for another reporter. Nina described a little café she’d started writing in again. Saoirse kept her answers short, practiced, gentle, but Nina had known her too long to miss the spaces between words.

“So,” Nina said finally, lowering her voice, “How’s… you know, the two of you?”

Saoirse leaned back against the chaise, eyes on the monitor, staring at the two tiny forms breathing in rhythm. “Fine,” she said.

“Fine, how?”

“The usual way.”

“That’s not an answer,” Nina said lightly. “You sound like you’re reciting your press statement.”

Saoirse smiled faintly. “You’d make a terrible diplomat.”

“I’m serious. You’ve been married almost three years. Twins, a villa, all that. You’re allowed to brag a little. You sound…” She stopped herself. “You sound lonely.”

“I’m just tired,” Saoirse corrected softly.

The silence stretched. Saoirse could hear Nina exhale, that careful, thinking kind of breath. “You sound different. Maybe not ‘bad’ different, just... far away.”

Saoirse hesitated. “It’s been a long few months.”

“Twins will do that.”

“Twins, and…” Saoirse stopped, not sure what she’d been about to say. “Roman’s been traveling more.”

“Of course he has,” Nina said gently. “He’s running empires. You’re allowed to miss him.”

“I do,” Saoirse said, her voice so quiet it surprised even her. She looked toward the door, her voice dropping even lower. “I miss him in the strangest ways. His smell, his hands, the way he looks at me before touching me. It’s been… months.”

Nina stilled. “Months since…?”

“Since he’s touched me,” Saoirse said simply, without complaint, without drama, as if stating weather. “Before the twins were born, and now, after. I don’t mind. He says rest is important.”

There was a soft hum on the other end, a pause that wasn’t silence, just care. Then Nina said gently, “That must be hard, though. I mean… you still need warmth.”

“I have it,” Saoirse said automatically, her tone calm, almost serene. “He’s kind. He’s just… careful. I think he’s protecting me from… something.”

We’ll wait for you to heal properly, he’d said a month after the twins were born, and she’d appreciated it then.

Nina let out a quiet breath, the kind that meant she was biting back a dozen questions. “You always see the best in people,” she said finally, in a voice that was almost fond. “Despite all you’ve been through. It’s one of the things I love most about you.”

Saoirse smiled faintly. “I don’t know if it’s that, or if I’ve just learned not to ask too much.”

“Still,” Nina said softly, “You deserve to feel wanted, not just safe.”

Saoirse’s throat tightened. “I am safe.”

“I know,” Nina said quickly, backpedaling, her tone soothing again. “Of course you are. I’m just saying… I miss hearing you laugh like you used to. That’s all.” There was silence on the line, the kind that ripples when someone is choosing their words carefully, before Nina continued softly, “Is this normal for him?”

“I don’t know what normal is anymore.”

“Christ.” Nina’s voice softened. “You’re 24, not 54. You can’t live like some widow in pearls. How do you… cope?”

Saoirse blinked, startled by the question. “What do you mean?”

“You know exactly what I mean.”

She laughed again, nervous now. “You’re impossible.”

“And you’re lying.” Nina’s voice had that old warmth, the one that once got her through memories of her grandmother, of Sinead’s flat, of her first heartbreak. “Look, maybe he’s stressed, fine. But… you can’t just stop being a person. He’s not God.”

“Don’t say that,” Saoirse whispered too fast.

Nina sighed. “Sorry. It’s just… sometimes, you talk about him like he’s air and you’re lungs. Doesn’t that scare you?”

Saoirse nodded, still smiling faintly, as if it were nothing. “It’s not strange, really. He’s careful. He worries too much.”

“About what?” Nina asked softly.

“About everything,” Saoirse said. “He thinks if we control the details, nothing can go wrong. I think that’s his way of loving.”

Nina hesitated. “Maybe it is,” she said slowly. “But still… you must miss him.”

“Of course,” Saoirse said quietly. “I miss him all the time.”

The line went still for a heartbeat. Then Nina said, her tone careful and kind, tired of running around in circles with her dearest friend, “You said he travels a lot more. Maybe there’s… someone he leans on out there. I don’t mean it badly. Men get lonely too.” Saoirse didn’t answer. Outside, a gull cried. Then Nina added, softer, almost apologetically, “You ever think maybe there’s someone else?”

The question landed like a stone in water, soundless but deep. Saoirse smiled automatically, even though Nina couldn’t see it. “He’s not like that.”

“Men are all like that,” Nina said, with the weary authority of someone who’d seen enough to mean it. “Especially rich ones who travel and have assistants.”

“He’s not…” Saoirse trailed off, then steadied her tone. “He’s careful. He wouldn’t risk… anything.” She gave a small, nervous laugh. “You think he doesn’t want me?”

“I think he lives a life that doesn’t leave room for witnesses, and maybe that kind of life needs… distractions,” Nina said, voice soft but clear, choosing each word, “I think sometimes withholding is just another way of reminding you who decides.”

“That’s not fair,” Saoirse whispered, more to herself than to Nina.

“Neither is being 24 and already whispering,” Nina replied. She hesitated, then laughed weakly to dissolve the tension. “Well, if you ever get bored of being worshipped, I know at least three decent men who’d die to bring you coffee.”

“I already have someone who brings me coffee.”

“Yeah,” Nina said, dryly. “That’s what worries me.” They laughed, but Saoirse’s laughter came out too light, too polished, before they both fell quiet. “I just hope you’re still in there somewhere. That’s all.”

“I am,” Saoirse whispered. “I think I am.”

They spoke for a few minutes more about Nina’s brother’s engagement, the bookstore down the street that had finally reopened, a bad date she’d barely survived, a bakery she’d found in Camden that sold perfect cherry tarts, the joy of sleeping through an entire night for the first time in weeks. 

Saoirse laughed where she should, responded warmly, but every word left her feeling further from the sound of her own life. She listened to it all like a person pressing her ear to a door, trying to catch the sound of a world she used to belong to, like someone sitting at the edge of a lake, dipping her fingers in the water of another life.

When they hung up, she sat there for a long time, staring at the phone, at the pale reflection of her own face in the dark phone screen, the quiet wrapping back around her like gauze. The call log glowed faintly, Nina — 42 minutes. It had felt like five. 

A soft knock interrupted her thoughts.

Lisa and her assistant stood in the doorway, one holding David in her arms, the other Mariana drowsing against her shoulder. “They’re both awake early, Señora.”

“Bring them here,” Saoirse said, rising quickly, almost grateful for the interruption.

Lisa crossed her private living room, easing David into the bassinet by the window, as Lucia, the other nanny, passed Mariana, whose eyes blinked up at the ceiling light as if startled by its brightness, into Saoirse’s waiting arms. The baby’s weight surprised her. It was heavier now, more certain. Saoirse sat on the chaise, holding her daughter close, inhaling the faint scent of milk, powder and clean linen, her silk robe pooling around them like water, the baby’s warmth seeping through it.

“There now. Always on your own schedule,” she whispered. “See? Mama’s still here.” Mariana blinked up at her, eyes unfocused but intent, as if she knew her mother’s voice already. She made a small cooing sound. Saoirse smiled, brushing a fingertip along her brow and down her cheek. “You have his eyes,” she whispered. “You’ll have his steadiness too, won’t you?”

David made a small hiccuping sound and stirred, his little fist curling near his face. Saoirse leaned over to touch his cheek, light as breath. “He calls you both perfect,” she murmured. “He hasn’t seen you in two weeks, but he says it every time we speak. Perfect.”

Mariana clenched her tiny fist around the gold chain of Saoirse’s dressing gown. The touch startled her as so human and deliberate. Saoirse smiled faintly, swaying her in a slow rhythm. She pressed her lips to Mariana’s temple, inhaled her skin again, then looked toward the window. “But he’s never here to see you.”

Lisa smiled faintly from the doorway. “He asks after them every day, Señora.”

Saoirse nodded. “I know.”

It was true. Roman’s voice on the phone was always gentle, the questions exact. Are they feeding well? Is their sleep regulated? Are they responding to light? Every word sounded like care measured in clinical precision. When he last saw them, two weeks ago, for 17 minutes between flights, he touched each of their heads with his fingertips, the way one might test the temperature of water. “Perfect,” he’d said. And then, he’d kissed Saoirse’s temple and left.

Now, she sat between their small, warm bodies and thought of how strange it was that she could miss a man who was everywhere, in the air, the rules, the walls, and yet, never beside her.

For a while, she just rocked Mariana gently. David squirmed in the bassinet, so she began to hum an old tune her grandmother used to sing, something about roses and wind. It had no words she could remember, just a rhythm that steadied her breath yet trembled in her throat unfinished. The sound filled the room, soft and unsteady, like a ghost relearning language.

Outside, a shadow moved past the courtyard window, the movement caught her eye. Marco, a tall figure in dark linen, his earpiece glinting in the light, digital tab in hand, walking the perimeter with some guards again. He turned once toward the house.

Saoirse’s hum faltered. She met his brief, unreadable glance through the glass.

He passed the window twice, the first time slow, the second faster, before disappearing around the corner. The faint static of his earpiece bled into the silence. Somewhere deeper in the house, a door clicked shut. The moment felt like something closing.

Lisa adjusted the thermostat by instinct, returning it to 22 degrees.

Saoirse looked down at her children, their eyes half-lidded, bodies soft with trust, and felt a strange ache she couldn’t name. Was it love, fear or longing, or all of it braided into something that almost resembled calm?

When they began to fuss, Saoirse kissed Mariana’s head, handed her back to Lucia, and stood to take David out of the bassinet. She rocked him mindlessly, tutting as she crossed to the window. The courtyard was empty again, washed in perfect winter light. The sea beyond it shimmered faintly, sunlight fractured over the water like broken glass.

For a moment, she thought of calling Nina back. Then she didn’t.

She turned around and saw it, a slim glass vase on a side table that hadn’t been there before. Inside, six yellow roses, their petals freshly cut, stems trimmed to equal height. She didn’t bother to ask who put them there just now, but her pulse caught. There was no card this time, no note, just the faint trace of cologne in the air. 

She stared at them for a long moment as David fussed harder in her arms, cooing and reaching toward her face. Yellow, the color of apology, or hope, or warning. She couldn’t decide which. She gently handed David back to Lisa without looking at her. She moved closer, touched one rose petal lightly with her fingertip. It was cool, almost waxen.

A memory surfaced of her grandmother’s voice, soft and raspy with age: They thrive on neglect, you know. Too much love, and they rot.

Saoirse looked at the roses, her reflection caught faintly in the glass, and for a moment couldn’t tell which one of them looked more alive. The house resumed its rhythm, and the roses stood there, Roman’s presence, distilled into silence, fragrant and bright against the white walls, reminding her that even from far away, he never stopped arranging her world.

The house resumed its rhythm and she, once again, belonged to it, and the air held steady at 22 degrees.

+

She tried to write.

The old leather notebook still sat on her desk, the one Roman had bound for her for their first anniversary. She opened it now, half-expecting to find something waiting there, but the pages were blank except for his neat inscription on the flyleaf: 

Who am I? She wondered as she picked up her pen, twirled it once, then set it down again. Lately, when she tried to write, all her thoughts came out sounding like him. Even her metaphors seemed to seek his approval. Even her imagination had been tamed into symmetry. She no longer reached for words the way she once had. Now, they arrived sparse and already filtered, like air through the ducts that kept the house at its perfect temperature, careful to offend no one.

She pushed away from the desk and wandered through the nursery instead.

She strayed past Lisa and Lucia and the nurses, into the babies’ closets filled with tiny cardigans from Paris still tagged, miniature silk booties arranged by color, rows of pale wooden hangers holding cashmere sets in every neutral shade. The week they were born, a nurse had shown her a drawer of monogrammed linen bibs embroidered with the twins’ initials in gold thread ordered by the Suarez estate. The sight had made her laugh then. Now, it only made her tired.

Each item was exquisite, handmade, untouched. There was nothing in the room that had ever known dirt, or struggle, or warmth. She ran her fingers along a row of folded blankets that were gifts from Roman’s business partners, from monarchs and ministers, all catalogued in an Excel sheet she’d never seen.

The wealth of it no longer shocked her. It only blurred the edges of reality, like light passing through glass too thick to see clearly. 

She stepped back out into the main nursery bedroom and spoke briefly with Lisa about vaccination schedules that had already been booked and arranged by Roman’s personal staff. None of it needed her input.

She moved next to the south drawing room and sat at the grand piano, Allegra’s piano, its ivory keys gleaming under the filtered afternoon sun. The staff kept it perfectly tuned and polished though no one ever played. Roman once told her Allegra had imported the instrument from Vienna decades ago, when she still played semi-professionally. Saoirse sat and pressed one key, then another. The sound floated up, echoing softly through the empty rooms, small and pure, and for a moment she closed her eyes.

When she was younger, she used to believe art could save her, that words, music, beauty could redeem anything if she reached far enough inside it. Now, she wasn’t sure what she believed.

She began an old Irish melody, one her grandmother had hummed while going through her old letters from when she was a young wartime typist. Saoirse couldn’t quite remember all the notes, so she improvised where memory failed her. Her fingers hesitated, restarted, faltered again. The sound was too uncertain. She’d never learnt formally, after all.

She paused, her hands still on the keys, staring at her reflection in the piano’s black lacquer. Her face looked calm, obedient. He would like that, she thought. The thought frightened her for the first time.

She stood, moved to the mirror near the window, adjusted the sleeve of her silk robe. In the reflection behind her, the only living things were plants and old paintings and sculptures of those who once lived. She wondered which group she most fit in with. When the air system clicked on, she felt it, that faint sigh that filled the entire house.

She thought of Nina’s words, of Roman with another woman, of the question she hadn’t answered. Don’t you miss being wanted? It rippled through her, then dissolved.

Later, she wandered to the den that had once been Amancio’s domain, the only space in the entire villa with a television. She turned it on for background noise. The afternoon light had gone soft and amber through the curtains. The house was quiet except for the hum of the air system and the nursery monitor she carried around everywhere.

The large flat telly murmured softly, one of those international business channels Roman preferred, all crisp voices and neutral suits. She wasn’t watching what was on, not really. It was just noise, the hum of a world still spinning, until the anchor said his name.

“Roman Suarez, chief executive of Suarez Group, met with senior partners in Milan earlier today to finalize a string of high-value acquisitions in the global banking sector. The 39-year-old investor has become known for his discreet style and record-breaking turnaround projects across Europe.”

The screen showed him for less than a minute, shaking hands, stepping through a glass atrium, cameras flashing like rain. He looked immaculate, composed, the calm center of every frame. He smiled briefly as he greeted someone off-camera, a gesture both genuine and distant. 

The reporter’s voice added, “Mr. Suarez is expected to attend a private EU gala tonight with other international partners before returning to Spain later this week.”

Saoirse leaned forward unconsciously. His posture was easy. His smile came quickly but gracefully. She had forgotten how alive he could look, in a way she hadn’t seen in months, head slightly bent toward another executive, smiling faintly as though the air itself bent toward him. His voice, even through the grainy audio, sounded warm, practiced, sure.

The broadcast cut to footage from a Suarez Foundation gala. Roman, tall in a black tuxedo, his smile that knew exactly how much warmth to ration per handshake. Cameras flashed on. The announcer’s voice described him as “a man of exceptional restraint and precision, the steady hand behind Europe’s quietest empires…” She muted the sound and watched him a moment longer.

He turned slightly toward a group of executives, his hand gesturing mid-sentence. It was such a small movement, yet something inside her twisted. She studied his face, the way he seemed fully present in that world. The man on screen looked untouchable. The man she slept beside was made of distance. There was no distance in him here, no restraint that looked like care. She wondered if he had already called the florist by the time this video was shot, or if the roses had been arranged automatically by someone else’s efficiency.

The footage ended, and the next segment began, something about rising oil futures, but she was still staring at the screen. The bracelet on her wrist caught the fading light, sapphire and diamond flickering like breath, the one that had belonged to his mother and beloved grandmother. She turned it slowly, as if testing its weight, and watched the reflections move across her skin. It was beautiful and heavy.

She’d always thought of their lives as him taking trips and returning home when his business was done. But watching him just now, he’d looked more like he lived another life entirely and only dropped by in this one for momentary visits. The thought made her shake inside.

Saoirse sat back, her hands folded in her lap. She reached for the remote and turned the TV off. The screen went black, leaving only her reflection, pale, composed, a woman inside a perfect frame. For a while, she didn’t move. Then she rose, crossed the quiet room, and walked toward the window overlooking the courtyard. She saw more of the yellow roses, fresh from that morning’s unseen delivery, luminous against the dimming sky. She reached out, brushed one petal with her fingertip. 

Her grandmother’s voice surfaced in that quiet, cracked, inevitable way: They thrive on neglect, you know. Too much love and they rot. She pressed her hand against the window’s glass, cool against her palm, and whispered almost to herself as a kind of admission, “Too much love, and they rot.” 

Outside, the sea murmured beyond the walls, endless and unreachable. She looked at the flowers for a long time, the color bleeding into the air like an old memory, and wondered if she’d already learned how to bloom that way.

+

It was 3:11 a.m.

Marta, the Barcelona housekeeper, kept the villa’s night rhythm by heart, the soft sweep of the vast hallway lights dimming, the hum of the sterilizers in the nursery wing, the whisper of the sea through the east windows, nothing ever broke that pattern… until the Señora began to wander.

At first, Marta thought she was dreaming, a pale figure gliding past the stairwell, barefoot, robe trailing, no light except the blue glow from the baby monitor Saoirse carried like a candle. She moved slowly, like someone searching for something she’d misplaced long ago.

Marta froze behind the kitchen doorway, afraid to startle her. She wasn’t supposed to be awake herself, but she’d wanted a hot cup of tea to ease her cramps. It wasn’t her place to speak unless spoken to, but she couldn’t look away. The Señora paused before the long glass doors that opened toward the sea, one hand pressed to the pane, as if testing whether it was still there.

On the counter, the roses Roman had sent two days earlier had begun to wilt, their heads bowed, their scent heavy and sweet. Marta had meant to discard them before morning, but something in the way Saoirse looked at them made her stop.

The Señora reached for one, just one, and lifted it gently by the stem. A petal fell, but she didn’t seem to notice. Her other hand traced the marble edge of the counter, the faintest sound against stone, the kind of sound Marta associated with loneliness bordering on madness.

Then Saoirse did something stranger, she began to hum very quietly, a tune with no words. It was slow, repetitive, almost childlike. It was also the first human noise Marta had heard in the villa that didn’t sound rehearsed.

She wanted to step forward, to ask if the Señora needed tea too, but fear stopped her, fear of disrupting whatever small private rebellion this was, fear that if the Señor heard, if the guards reported that the Señora was not sleeping at night, there would be questions. So she watched in stillness as Saoirse crossed the kitchen to the piano room, humming all the way.

Through the open doorway, Marta could see her sit down, brush dust from the keys, and press one, just one, note. It rang, pure and trembling. Another petal fell to the floor. Marta stood there a moment longer, clutching her empty mug to her chest, listening to that single sound fade.

Then, with the quiet discipline the house demanded, she turned off the corridor light and pretended she’d seen nothing.

In the morning, she would tell the maids to replace the roses, to reset the thermostat, to bring order back to the room. But as she walked away now, Marta whispered to herself, “Poor girl doesn’t sleep because her life already dreams for her.”

Marco saw it too.

From his post near the eastern gate, he watched the reflection of the sea on the glass walls. Every so often, the cameras would flicker, showing small moving silhouettes inside, maids changing linens, a guard patrolling the back gardens, the Señora walking around dead in the night again, when everyone else had finally retired.

She always walked the same way, slowly, aimlessly, barefoot, as if every tile remembered her weight.

Tonight she paused by the fountain, the one they said Amancio Suarez had imported from Florence. The water was still running, the Señora dipped her fingers into it, tracing circles. He saw her look up toward the nursery window, where a soft light still glowed.

Marco exhaled through his nose. A mother who never sleeps, he thought. And a husband who never stays.

He knew he wasn’t supposed to look for long, but his eyes lingered anyway. The cameras were set at angles that wouldn’t catch his face, and the other guards had drifted toward the rear perimeter. He allowed himself the smallest disobedience of watching her and not her security grid.

She looked… lost, yes, but there was a quiet dignity to the way she held herself, robe pressed against her, hair loose, eyes fixed somewhere only she could see.

He’d seen women like her before, wives of men who owned half of Europe, mothers of heirs who would never know a moment’s hunger. They all had that same look once the house got too quiet, a stillness that came after too much wanting, too much being told that wanting itself was dangerous.

He thought of his daughter, 12 now, with her noisy laughter and mismatched socks.

No one had ever given him anything without expecting something back. No one but this woman. He looked up at her again through the glass. She was touching the petals of a rose laid out in a crystal vase near the stairs. The yellow ones had wilted two days ago. The Señor sent new ones now every three mornings, a ritual the staff obeyed like prayer.

The Señora pressed one petal between her fingers, almost reverent. Even from where he stood, he could see the moment her shoulders fell, the smallest sigh. He wondered if the Señor knew what he’d built here, a fortress so perfect it kept out air itself. And if he did know, whether he thought it was love.

The cameras whirred softly above him, refocusing. Marco straightened his posture, turned his gaze back to the gate. In the glass reflection, he saw Saoirse lift the rose to her face and breathe it in. For a fleeting second, she smiled. Marco swallowed hard. The gesture was so small it hurt.

He murmured a quiet prayer under his breath, the kind his mother used to say when crossing paths with ghosts. “Dios la guarde,” he whispered. May God keep her. 

The motion sensor clicked back on. The fountain lights steadied. By morning, she would vanish again into routine, and the roses would be trimmed before anyone could see how many had fallen.

The Suarez Myth: Chapter 5

The maids entered at ten.

They stopped at the threshold as if crossing into a chapel. None of them spoke. The smell was the first thing, sweet, heady, faintly metallic from the cut stems. The flowers covered nearly the entire room, a pale tide of devotion and decay. They’d joined the dozens of florists and deliverymen in carrying them in before dawn and placing them here and there, but it didn’t stop them from being surprised to see it all as it was now.

Lisa came in behind them, carrying the twins’ morning schedules. She paused too, lowering her voice instinctively. “Dios mío,” she whispered, then glanced toward Saoirse, still lying back just at the edge of the bed in her silk robe, the hem grazing petals.

“Señora, should we—”

“Not yet,” Saoirse said quietly, not looking up.

Her rare ginger hair was undone, her expression unreadable. The note rested once more on the nightstand beside the water carafe. From the hallway, the faint sound of a nursery rhyme drifted in, one of the nannies humming to Mariana.

Lisa hesitated. “The flowers will wilt quickly in this heat.”

“I know.”

“Should I have the gardeners take them out?”

Saoirse moved finally, slowly. She stretched out for the note, taking it from the nightstand again, tracing a fingertip along the spine of the folded card, weighing it without reading. The air was thick, syrupy now, the sweetness turning faintly sour. She imagined the hands that had arranged this, yet all of it credited to one man who wasn’t here.

Around her, Lisa and two young maids waited as though on pause, not daring to breathe because the room was too quiet, its owner too listless to risk disrupting anything.

Saoirse bent down and touched one of the flowers. The stem pricked her finger. She drew back sharply to see a pinprick of red bloom on her skin. It was so small, she almost laughed. One drop of colour in all that white. She pressed her thumb over it… to feel something, even if it was a little pain.

“Just open the windows,” she said at last. “Let them breathe.”

Lisa nodded, signalling the maids to pull back the curtains fully. The sea light flooded in, sharp and clean, spilling over the white chaos on the floor. The petals shone almost gold for a moment before settling back into pallor.

Saoirse stood slowly, stepped barefoot into the blooms, and began to walk. Each movement crushed petals and their bouquet wraps underfoot with a muted sigh. The maids froze, unsure whether to intervene. She stopped near the far window, looking out at the horizon where the morning haze softened the line between sea and sky.

“After lunch,” she said, without turning. “Take half to the chapel. The rest… dry them. He likes it when things are preserved.”

Her tone was even, but something in it made Lisa’s throat tighten, as if the instruction had been given by someone not entirely there.

When the staff began clearing the flowers later, the villa was filled with a faint rustle, like paper burning in slow motion. Trays of petals were carried out into the courtyard to dry in the sun, pale hands sorting the ones not yet browned. From the balcony above, Saoirse watched silently. The wind toyed with the corners of her robe, and she thought of how love, too, could be cleaned away, efficiently, reverently, without a sound.

By evening, the marble floors shone again, but the scent lingered still, faint and persistent, caught in the seams of silk, in her hair, in the soft corners of the room. When she went to bed that night, a single dried rose had been placed on her pillow. No note this time. Saoirse looked at it for a long moment, then turned it upside down, stem over petals, and left it on the nightstand.

By the third day, the scent had settled into everything. The silk curtains, the cotton of the twins’ blankets, even the water in the vases, wherever she walked, the air still held that sweetness gone faintly stale, like perfume on old paper.

Lisa said the petals drying in the courtyard looked beautiful, so Saoirse went to see them once, late in the afternoon. The trays were lined in neat rows beneath gauze, sunlight seeping through like honey. The flowers had lost their shape, curling inward, pale and whisper-thin. They looked peaceful, emptied of color but somehow intact, neither alive nor gone.

When she reached out to touch one, it crumbled instantly, a breath of white pieces against her palm. That night, she thought of it again, how easily something soft could be preserved if it surrendered soon enough. All it took was control of the temperature, the light, the air. The body stayed perfect if you kept the world away from it.

Maybe that was love, too. Maybe that was what he meant.

When Roman returned three days later, she was in bed reading beside the lamp. The room still smelled faintly of roses and cool linen. He kissed her temple, told her she looked rested, and for once, she believed him.

The maids had cleared every trace of decay. The roses had been pressed and stored in white boxes marked ‘Conservado, Agosto’. In the archive room beneath the villa, they joined the silver frames, old letters, family relics too fragile for air. Above, Saoirse slept beneath the same hum of controlled air, precision, and preservation.

And in the silence that followed, she began to forget that love was ever meant to move.

+

Order was the only tenderness he ever received.

Roman Suarez grew up in a house that looked serene but vibrated with tension, the immaculate Barcelona villa Saoirse now inhabited. Allegra, his mother, was Amancio’s second wife. Much like Saoirse, she was younger, foreign, brought into an empire she would never truly own. But unlike Saoirse, Allegra was exquisitely groomed for it. She was adored publicly and undone privately.

Amancio was charismatic, brilliant, erratic, a man whose moods could change the temperature of a room. To the world, he was a builder of fortunes. To his household, he was a storm system. Allegra learned early that her survival depended on composure. She ran the household like a palace, every gesture choreographed, every silence meaningful.

Roman grew up watching his mother hold that storm in her smile. He learned to read her face like scripture, the faint tightening at her jaw before a fight, the way she’d smooth her napkin when she was afraid.

When she said, “Everything’s fine,” what she really meant was, “Be still. Don’t provoke him.” That lesson became his religion.

He was raised in glass rooms, the kind where adults laughed too loudly and staff pretended not to hear things. 

The first time he saw his father throw a glass at the wall, he was six. The first time he saw his mother bleed, he was seven. The first time he saw her compose herself afterward, applying lipstick before anyone else entered the room, he understood something essential: Love wasn’t what saved you. Control was.

From then on, Roman stopped playing with other children. He preferred to sit silently beside his mother during dinners, correcting the placement of the cutlery when it was off-center. She called him mi ordenado pequeño (my orderly one), half affection, half relief.

When Amancio raged, Roman tidied to keep from crying. He shut doors. He ignored his nannies. He arranged the chessboard in his playroom again and again.

By adolescence, he’d become his mother’s confidant. She’d whisper things like, “You’ll understand when you’re older how men can build empires and destroy them over a look.” He thought she was warning him not to be like Amancio. What she was really doing was teaching him how to survive Amancio’s world.

And she died still believing that order could hold back chaos. Her last words to him, according to what he murmured to Saoirse on a balcony before the funeral, were, “Keep everything beautiful, even the pain. Especially the pain.”

+

Saoirse had always loved roses.

Not the long-stemmed kind that came in shipments, but the kind that fought to live, the small, stubborn ones that grew along wire fences. Her grandmother kept a narrow garden behind their house in Newcastle, two stone steps, a low fence, a patch of earth stubborn enough to bloom even in the cold. 

They bloomed unevenly, bruised by rain and salt air, petals the color of watered milk and diluted wine. Saoirse used to crouch by them after school, brushing off the slugs, snipping the dead heads the way her grandmother showed her. She’d snip above the second leaf, always at an angle, never too close to the root. The smell stayed on her hands all day, sweet and a little sour.

“They thrive on neglect, you know,” her grandmother would murmur, trimming another stem with her arthritic fingers, before she stopped moving altogether. “Too much love and they rot. Too much tending makes them delicate.”

Saoirse had laughed then, not understanding, but somehow, she believed her. Roses were proof that beauty could survive rough weather if left alone.

After her funeral years later, the garden was the only part of the house Saoirse couldn’t bear to look at. By the time she went to live with Sinead in Redhill, the bushes had withered, stripped bare by frost. The scent she remembered, that faint mixture of earth, iron, and sweetness, stayed with her like a ghost.

She didn’t see another rose for years.

The Suarez houses smelled of lilies, always lilies or tulips, Allegra’s preference preserved like law. Every villa, every city, every suite Roman inherited kept the same perfume of purity and control. Saoirse had grown used to the sameness of every floral arrangement, the way nothing ever changed without permission. The flowers came pre-cut, air-freighted, and arranged in silent abundance. They were replaced before they could fade, their scent carefully measured so it wouldn’t offend the guests. She never saw soil anymore, only marble, water filtered through silver taps, and bouquets that outlived their meaning.

Then, that morning, after he’d told her in that quiet, reasonable way that her oldest friend might not be safe to trust, she woke to find the room filled with roses. 

It was the first time he’d ever given her any. She still wondered whether it was a kindness or a correction. He’d written about the beauty of her peace. The roses looked like peace, but they smelled like grief. Her grandmother’s words came back to her, soft and uninvited. They thrive on neglect. Was that what he believed, too?

Sometimes, in the quiet hours when the twins were asleep and the staff whispered in Spanish down the hall, she would walk through the house and think of that small back garden, how the wind had made the roses bend instead of break. She thought of that now whenever she saw the florists unloading boxes through the servant’s entrance. 

Roman had started sending them. Roses upon roses, always new, always dying too soon. She wondered sometimes if he knew what it meant that he had made the flower she’d once loved for its resilience the one most used to adorn her captivity. The irony almost comforted her.

The morning light reached her dressing table, catching on the wedding ring, the one that still felt too heavy for her finger. The twins were in the old family nursery with their nurses and nannies. Somewhere in the house, she could hear the distant rhythm of the sea, the faint hum of a life designed not to change, the same perfect silence that filled every Suarez room.

And that was how the day of their second anniversary began.

It was quiet. Roman remembered, of course. He always remembered. A Cartier box appeared on her breakfast tray, red and gold, slim and heavy, inside it a diamond-and-sapphire bracelet. The stones caught the morning light like frozen tears, delicate enough to whisper but not sing. As she slid it over her wrist, she read his handwritten note:

She smiled, because what else could she do? It was meant as intimacy, a gesture of trust and inheritance. The bracelet was beautiful, but it bound her to a history that didn’t feel like hers. It felt like nothing was ever really hers. The bracelet marked her, but not as herself, not as Saoirse, as another in a long line of Mrs Suarezes.

He arrived home early just for her, and they ate a late lunch alone in the Barcelona dining room. No candles filling the house this time, no rare books waiting in stacks, no thousands of flames, just wine, cold lamb, and his glass raised in a toast: “To two years of peace, and to the family we’re building.”

Saoirse smiled, but it caught in her throat. After the children, after the endless weeks without him… she thought of the first anniversary, of the journals he had bound and preserved, of him reading her words aloud like scripture, of the fierce, lingering sex that had felt like worship. She wondered if he remembered that night, too, or if memory for him was just another ledger.

As she reached for her glass, he said it casually, like an afterthought, “You went out last week. To Passeig de Gràcia.”

Her hand paused. “Yes.”

He shrugged lightly. “Emilio mentioned it in his report. I’m glad you took some air.” His tone was kind, almost indulgent, but there was a precision to it like a scalpel that had drawn blood before you noticed the cut.

“I didn’t want to worry you,” she said quickly.

“I’m not worried.” His smile deepened, reassuring and final. “I like knowing where you are, that’s all. It helps me focus.” He reached across the table, brushed his thumb along the edge of her wrist where the new bracelet caught the light. “Next time, tell me first. I’ll make sure the streets are quieter for you.”

She laughed softly, unsure if it was meant to be a joke. “Quieter?”

His eyes flickered with warmth that felt almost like pity. “You don’t like crowds, remember?” he said, voice lowering, fond, as if reciting something he’d memorized long ago.

He lifted his glass again, as if to seal the moment, and she lifted hers in response, her pulse fluttering under the weight of his touch.

She had tried to plan something for him this time. Two weeks earlier, she’d asked Emilio to drive her somewhere ordinary. He’d looked puzzled but obeyed, arranging a discreet afternoon away from the villa.

They took the car through the upper district, Barcelona’s winter light slipping between the narrow façades. 

A second car followed behind, and when they stopped, the security detail stepped out first, scanning doorways that no one had ever thought to guard. Saoirse had to wait until they gave a nod before emerging, her linen coat belted too neatly for anonymity.

She had Emilio stop them at the quieter end of Passeig de Gràcia, where the luxury stores gave way to smaller ateliers, the kind that still smelled faintly of leather and dust. She kept her head down, walked a few paces behind him, scanning window displays as if something might reveal itself, like a rare first edition, a set of cufflinks shaped like anchors. Emilio, ever patient, matched her pace by half a step, and the security car idled slowly half a block behind. 

Every object seemed already his. They were either too ordinary, too expensive, too curated, too much like what she’d seen in his drawers or on his desk. Nothing felt right. 

It also felt like trespassing. She tried to linger, to ask questions, to pretend she might pick something up with her own hands, but the air around her kept tightening. The shop clerks were too eager, Emilio too close, her shadow always in view. She wanted to touch a box edge, to lift a jar, but everything came pre-wrapped in someone else’s deference. 

Some young women paused by the curb, whispering, “Is that her? Roman Suarez’s wife?”

“The Irish one?”

Their words followed her like perfume, gentle, speculative, almost kind. She didn’t turn. The glass reflected her back to herself. Her hair was too red for this city, face too pale, eyes that seemed to look too deeply into herself. The reflection blurred as Emilio’s shadow crossed hers again.

“I’ve seen her picture once at some gala. My God, she’s prettier in the flesh!” 

To the strangers, she looked like a myth sighted by accident, a beautiful ghost wandering among the living. Her coat was pale linen, her hair pinned too neatly, her smile polite but cautious, like a creature still remembering how to breathe air. 

Saoirse heard none of it directly. It was all whispered and in Spanish. She only caught the hush that followed her as she moved, the kind that comes when people try not to stare. A few people lifted their phones discreetly, but she looked away before she saw the flash.

In one of the windows hung a row of old pens, brass-tipped and delicate. For a moment, she almost stepped inside, imagining something to remind him of the letters he’d once written her. But the thought dissolved as quickly as it came. It was too selfish. And the clerk inside had already recognized her, posture straightening, face brightening with professional anticipation. Saoirse looked away.

She thought of writing him a poem instead, but the words stuck in her throat as too childish, too whimsical. She thought of a watch, but that, too, felt naïve, provincial, like playacting a kind of woman she’d never learned how to be. She had no experience in choosing things for men who already owned the world.

Emilio, sensing her uncertainty, offered quietly, “We could have something commissioned, Señora.” 

She smiled at him, polite, defeated. “He’d see through that.”

When they returned to the car, she sat in silence, watching the boutiques recede through the tinted glass, wondering why love for a man like Roman always required translation. She rested her forehead against the tinted glass. Outside, the streets were still loud with the lives of other people. Inside the car, her world was soundproof.

“You’re the best thing that’s ever happened to me, mi amor,” he said now as they sat at the table, and she smiled. She thought of herself once more as someone that only existed for him, something created simply to be his peace.

She kissed his lips a little too tenderly when he stood to embrace her, as if the kiss could count as a gift. She thought of the babies sleeping upstairs and told herself they too were gifts enough.

Later, after he’d gone to take a call with Javier in the library, she remained at the table, fingers resting where his hand had brushed her wrist. The bracelet felt heavier now, its cold curve pressing against her pulse. 

The air smelled faintly of lilies. The staff must have replaced the centerpiece again. She looked at the wine glass he had used, the print of his mouth still visible at the rim, and thought of his words: I like knowing where you are.

She found herself smiling faintly, almost gratefully.

Outside, the late sun flared against the sea, turning the windows into mirrors. The house, immaculate as ever, breathed around her. It was quiet, climate-controlled, waiting. Somewhere inside her, the phrase, “Peace looks beautiful on you,” uncurled again, slow and tender, like the echo of a prayer she no longer questioned.

But lying beside him in bed for the first time in days, she felt awful that she had no idea what gift would make him smile, not the way he made her smile. And in that realization was a small, sharp terror that she truly had no material value of her own to offer.

+

Roman invited her to the Suarez Global HQ in Madrid again. 

It was the first time he’d done so since the twins were born, so she was relieved. The 21-floor building was still made of glass and white marble after some months away, and the walls still gleamed, but everything else was different.

In his office, a low hum of air circulated through vents invisible to the eye. Two Monets hung beneath a long line of security-grade windows overlooking the city. He must’ve moved them from the Barcelona villa recently. The new carpet was thick, soft grey, the kind you wouldn’t notice until your heels sank into it.

Saoirse sat alone on the Italian leather couch by the far window, knees crossed at the ankle, like she’d done countless times before. She’d dressed simply, a black silk dress, small pearl studs, nothing extravagant. The office was silent but brimming with presence, with money, with his world. She glanced at the antique gold clock on his desk. Roman was 30 minutes into a closed-door meeting downstairs.

They told her he was entertaining a $400 million capital injection from an Eastern investment group. Strategic growth. Industrial diversification. Big words that hadn’t meant much to her until today, when she saw how the entire building had changed.

The staff stood straighter when they passed her. The floral arrangements were swapped for stark minimalist vases. The espresso machine near the reception hummed like it had something to prove. Even Emilio, normally charming, barely smiled. Javier was probably with Roman in the meeting.

"If you need anything, let us know. The meeting shouldn’t run over an hour," Emilio had said when she arrived.

From her seat, she heard footsteps, laughter, then hush. The outer office door opened, and Saoirse turned a little. A man entered, surrounded by aides in dark suits. He was tall, elegant, with the calm of someone who’d turned money into presence. He didn’t look at her, not yet.

He spoke to Emilio in French. Saoirse caught fragments. The man’s eyes eventually flicked toward the inner glass wall where he could see her, waiting, composed, wife. He smiled, polite, faintly amused, then turned away. Saoirse’s chest tightened, suddenly aware of how this world worked.

The money wasn’t just numbers. It entered rooms first, rearranged tone, swallowed air. Saoirse sat still, but her thoughts weren't. She watched the city below, a thousand tiny lives moving through late afternoon light, and felt foolish for coming. What had she expected? Maybe he'd meet her at the door, smile like he used to. Maybe he’d say something in that low voice of his, “You came for me?” like it mattered, like she mattered.

Instead, she was part of the backdrop. Even the investor’s gaze made her feel like art. Beautiful, expensive, yes. But also hung on the wall, framed, motionless.

The murmur of voices and doors just outside the office brought her back. She smoothed her dress, sat straighter, wondered what her posture said. Does it say I belong? Or does it say I’m still trying to? She didn’t know anymore.

The morning he’d flown to Madrid, leaving her in Barcelona, she’d placed one hand on Roman’s chest just for a second, just to feel the weight of him. He’d kissed her forehead so softly it barely registered as affection.

She caught her reflection in the glass beside her, the sleek lines of the postpartum body she’d worked very hard to get back, the practiced grace of her expression. But her eyes looked nervous, too alert.

I shouldn’t feel like this just sitting here. Like she was about to get caught doing something wrong, like being in his space without being was… trespassing. She shifted, crossed, and uncrossed her legs as the silence grew teeth.

Then the outer door opened again. Another corporate figure glanced in. A flicker of recognition, then respectful dismissal. It hit her that she had no role here, not really, not in these meetings, not on the spreadsheets, not in the slow chess game of power played by people who shake hands in four currencies.

She was adored in the abstract, but not consulted, cherished privately, but not considered publicly.

Yet, when Roman finally arrived, looking radiant and commanding, her heart still flipped like she was 19, like this was still some kind of love story, not the second act of her erasure.

The moment he walked in, the energy shifted. He stepped into the marble-floor office like he owned the hour, which in many ways, he did. She stood. He kissed her cheek, a perfect show of grace from a husband who kept his wife nearby. But when he spoke to the investor, his tone was different, lower, clipped.

“I appreciate your flexibility on timeline. We’ll review the tranche in two phases.”

$400 million. Saoirse watched him speak to the investor, smiling, smiling, and quietly wondering what happens to people like her when that much money moves through the room.

Finally, Roman smiled and took her hand, warm, assured, like a man proud of the woman waiting for him. He introduced her to all of them, and as they exited, he slowed for a beat at the elevator with the investors and associates close by. He said in a low voice, “You looked beautiful just now. Very... composed.”

She felt his approval like a lightning bolt through her body and smiled. He brushed a lock of hair from her cheek and pressed the elevator button himself. For a second, she believed in the version of him that still wanted her close.

But as their car glided past the lit façades of Passeig de Gràcia ten minutes later, inside was silent.

Saoirse turned to him gently. “You seemed... relieved after the meeting.”

He didn’t look up from his phone, “We’ve been dancing with their advisors for eight months. This was just the final round.”

“And they’re investing?”

“They’re interested.” He scrolled, typed something. The screen lit his face in cool blue.

She watched him. What was it like to carry so much, and still find her so... weightless? “Was it hard, choosing to take their money?”

He still didn’t look up, didn’t look at her. “Money isn’t chosen. It’s accepted or outpaced.”

That silenced her. She didn’t know how to stay in the conversation without slipping.

Later that night, after she’d called Barcelona and confirmed the twins had fallen asleep and Lisa had retired, Saoirse stepped out of the bathroom, hair damp, skin clean, suddenly asking herself why he’d called her to Madrid, to his office, at all. 

She was wearing the slip nightdress he once said reminded him of moonlight, as she climbed into bed beside him, slowly. He was reading something on a tablet. Stock reports, legal briefs, something. She kissed his bare shoulder, but he didn’t react. 

“I missed you today,” she said very quietly. A long pause.

“I’ve been thinking for everyone lately. It’s exhausting,” he murmured, still reading from his tablet.

Quieter still, she said, “I wasn’t trying to add pressure. I just... I wanted to be near you.”

“Being near me doesn’t mean constantly pulling me.”

That’s when she knew he wasn’t angry, just already somewhere else, on the next business target perhaps. She lay beside him, facing the ceiling, but she couldn't fall asleep.

It could’ve been minutes or hours later when he put his tablet away and turned the lights off. She felt him face her, but he didn't touch her. She still couldn’t sleep, not with everything that confused her about today still scrambled in her head.

“That investor from today. The $400 million group. What does it mean for the company?”

He shifted and cleared his throat. When he finally spoke, he was gentle but still distant. “It means I’ve done what I always do. I’ve protected us.”

She nodded in the dark, even though he couldn't see it, and decided that today, she’d been fine china. He’d made sure she was beautifully placed, rarely touched, and always out of reach. That’s why he’d called for her.

Saoirse flew back to Barcelona the next morning just so she could watch the babies wake. They cooed in their white bassinets beside the wide windows as she stood there beside them. She’d come to the nursery straight from the car in her cinched cream blouse, soft grey trousers, no lipstick, just foundation and quiet. Too neatly dressed for so early in the morning. Light spilled in through sheer curtains as she stood. 

Lisa entered with a younger nanny, holding a sterilized bottle. She paused when she saw the young Señora. Something about the room felt… stiller than usual, so she waved for her assistant to wait outside. Finally, she spoke, “They’re early birds today. They barely let me boil water.”

Saoirse smiled, but it was too quick, too polite. “They’re getting smarter. I think they’ve worked out how to tag-team you.”

Lisa chuckled. She placed the bottle down on the changing table, then turned to watch Saoirse for a beat. “Did you sleep, Señora?”

Softly, Saoirse replied, “He didn’t come to bed until late.” A pause. Lisa nodded. “He’s working on a major deal. He’s… thinking for everyone.”

Lisa adjusted the twins’ blanket, and without turning, “You used to hum to them in the mornings.”

Saoirse blinked and looked down at her own hands. “I didn’t notice I’d stopped.”

Lisa faced her and made her voice as gentle as possible, “That’s why I said it, Señora.”

Saoirse looked like she might cry. Instead, she nodded once, turned to the babies, and touched the top of their heads one by one with a kind of practiced grace. She started to hum something softly, as if unsure of the tune.

Lisa moved to the side, nudged for her assistant to come in and work out the feeding schedules, and let the silence stretch around them, warmer now but still marked.

At the end of the day, Saoirse stepped out of her soft home slippers slowly. One, then the other. Her blouse slipped to the floor like fabric exhaling. She didn’t turn on the music, didn’t pour a bath. She walked into the shower naked but with her makeup still on.

Hot water on full blast, she stood there with her hands at her sides and eyes closed, letting the heat blister the skin between her shoulder blades. She was still trembling. She couldn’t stop the small, constant tremor that lived behind her ribs.

“You keep him civil.”

“You soften the room.”

The sentences echoed, one over the other, like oil slicks layered over glass. She leaned forward and pressed her hands to the marble wall. Her breath shallowed as she thought of Sinead… and Sinead’s brother… and that cramped house she lived in with them for a year between secondary school and university. Slowly, her forehead followed her hands. She rested it there, eyes open as the water poured, as she trembled still.

She whispered something, but the room didn't respond. Only the water did, hot and relentless on her chest, but she couldn’t really feel it. She wanted to feel it, like the silence that kept pouring and won’t let her speak.

The heat pressed harder. She stayed still, not knowing if it was water or memory crawling over her skin. Something flickered behind her eyes, white noise, an old voice, a hum that could’ve been the plane from that night, the low hum of engines.

“The same sister whose brother tried to touch you…” The words came back without sound, just the shape of them, the warmth of his breath on her ear as he’d said it so gently. Touch you. Tried to touch you.

He’d meant it like comfort, or maybe control. She couldn’t tell the difference now. She hadn’t been able to then. His tone had been soft, almost tender, the way someone might trace a scar to prove they remembered where it hurt. She’d let him. She’d let him turn the pain into intimacy. And now, years later, the same tenderness burned through her skin like an accusation.

The water kept running. She let it. She let it until she couldn’t tell what was burning, her skin or the part of her that still tried to forget. The water stung, the air thickened, and she felt her body speak in the only language it had left, heat, ache, silence. The marble tiles blurred, the air shimmered. She thought she smelled something, champagne, maybe, or her grandmother’s roses, or the inside of that flat she never talked about, or Roman’s roses.

She wasn’t remembering, not exactly. It was something quieter, like a pulse in the chest, a tightening of the throat, a small voice that said enough but never loud enough to hear.

She pressed her forehead harder against the wall. She pressed her palms there until her fingertips throbbed. She was just… hot, tired, maybe sick. It didn’t matter. The silence was the same. Somewhere deep inside, the sentence formed but never finished: You have me… You have me…

The water answered for her. Somewhere beneath the noise of the shower, she thought she heard his voice again, steady, gentle, impossible to fight: You have me. You’ll sleep better and smile more.

She hadn’t realized until now that she was still waiting to be rescued.

That night, Saoirse sat on the edge of the bed when she heard he’d returned to Barcelona too. How many nights had she sat at that precise spot waiting for him? How many more nights to come? She was clean, her hair damp, wrapped in one of his white silk robes instead of hers, loosely knotted.

Her skin was pink, angrily so, from the scalding shower. A blush of heat across her chest and collarbones, barely visible to her in dim light until Roman walked in. He tossed his cufflinks onto the dresser, shrugged off his jacket, and paused.

“What happened to your skin?”

She looked up, startled. Her voice was painfully quiet. “Nothing. I just— The water was hotter than I meant.”

He crossed to her. “That’s not nothing.” He pulled the robe open just enough to see the flushed red across her chest and the beginning of her shoulder. His mouth tightened. “Jesus, Saoirse. Were you trying to cook yourself?”

She pulled the robe closed again. “It wasn’t on purpose.”

He looked her in the eye now. “Are you sure? Because it looks like something else. Like you’re trying to tell me something.”

She didn't answer. He stepped back.

“You take off after a meeting I brought you into, that you helped me win, after I asked for you. I wanted you close, and your response is to burn yourself?”

Shocked still by his version of events, she stammered before managing to say, “I didn’t burn myself.”

“No? Because that certainly looks like a cry for help.” His calmness was sharp, which made it somehow worse than yelling.

She swallowed hard. “It was just a hot shower.” Her voice was too soft.

“You know what I don’t tolerate? Theatrics. Not from you. You don’t get to fall apart just because someone asked you to be useful.” His voice was still too calm.

He turned and left the room. She sat there, hands shaking like they were getting used to, the robe falling open slightly, the red on her skin blooming, proof that even her pain wasn’t hers to keep.

He didn’t come to bed that night, and Saoirse imagined that he’d already flown off to another country, another continent, another world. The sound in her head, the rush, the hiss, the heat, continued after the door closed. It settled somewhere deeper, steady as breath. The shower had long stopped running, but the water hadn’t. It was inside her now, coiling quiet, filling every hollow the silence left.

She sat there for a long time, robe clutched at her chest, steam still ghosting from her skin, the air cooling around her like punishment. For a fleeting second, she thought she heard him again, his calm voice, his practiced mercy, but it was only the house breathing, the walls expanding with night. Even when he wasn’t there, silence moved through her like a command.

Another morning, another pale light muted by gauzy curtains, Saoirse woke slowly, alone. His robe was still twisted around her, her skin still pink across her chest, not blistered, but tight, tender. She sat up, swung her legs over the side of the bed, and saw it on her vanity. A pale glass jar with no label. Next to it was yet another folded card, embossed with his initials. She opened and read the note.

That was it. He simply left her a gift that functioned as a command, another pointed reminder that Your body is ours, so preserve it accordingly.

She opened the jar. The cream was soft, almost iridescent. It smelled like crushed pearls and clean linen. She dipped a fingertip in and touched it to her collarbone, then stopped, wiped it off with the back of her hand.

She left the jar open on her vanity and headed to her bathroom to turn on the tap. She cupped water in her hands to rinse her face and looked at herself in the mirror. The redness was already fading, but what lingered was the knowing that even her healing was expected to perform.

The Suarez Myth: Chapter 4

Amancio passed away three months later. He was 83.

It was a cerebral aneurysm mid-stroke in the Barcelona villa pool, so sudden, so indecently ordinary, that the staff whispered about curses for days. European royals, old nobility, and the discreet titans of capital, people Saoirse had never imagined inhabited the same world as her, soon arrived in tailored black, their condolences perfumed and rehearsed. 

Amancio’s first wife arrived too, an aging woman herself who was treated with distant respect, the kind reserved for thousand-year-old art kept in museums. And it was only then that Saoirse was quietly informed for the first time that Allegra wasn't Bibiana or Marcela’s mother. She left the minute after her ex-husband was laid in the ground, in a flurry of dark-suited guards.

The funeral mass blurred into a single long flash of candlelight and murmured Latin. Saoirse, seated beside Roman, could remember almost nothing of it afterward but the press of silk, incense, and the sensation that she had attended the closing of an empire. She was silent through it all.

Amancio’s death left a vacancy no one dared name aloud but everyone rushed to fill with Roman. Within weeks, the weight of the Suarez name had settled squarely on his shoulders. Meetings that once required only his father’s presence now demanded Roman’s signature, his judgment, his silence that bent rooms into obedience. 

In Barcelona, the legal advisers arrived daily with documents thick as hymnals, inheritance codices tracing back a century, accounts, and land deeds that needed his name inked in black.

The business side was no less relentless. Roman now chaired every board gathering, fielded calls from New York to Hong Kong at dawn, smoothed quarrels between distant cousins who believed they were owed more than they were written into. He was executor of estates, custodian of centuries-old vineyards and shipping fleets, guarantor of banks that whispered ‘Suarez capital’ into their ledgers like scripture. Family allies who once circled Amancio now watched him instead, waiting for his nod before moving a single coin or signature.

At the villa, even silence multiplied. Staff deferred more sharply, speaking less, watching Roman for instruction as though Amancio himself lingered behind him. Bibiana and Marcela visited more often, their husbands trailing business questions in casual tones.

The Suarez name no longer had two keepers. It had one. And Roman moved through each house, each boardroom, each marble hall, with a precision so practiced it almost disguised the truth that the world had become heavier overnight.

For Saoirse, the weight fell differently. The hours she used to measure by his returns, the sound of the car, the key in the lock, his voice low on the phone in the next room, became even longer stretches of silence she could no longer mark. She lingered over breakfasts, half-wrote letters she never sent, drifted through rooms where his scent still clung. 

Sometimes, she followed Isabella through the Madrid house just to feel motion in the air. The new head of security was always nearby. He was a tall, quiet man in pressed dark linen, Spanish but not Catalan, who supervised the installation of biometric locks and courtyard cameras. He could speak English well, but spoke to her only when necessary, addressing her as Señora, his tone precise, unassuming.

Once, she paused in the hallway as two junior maids whispered about him.

“His little girl got into the convent school. Señora helped.”

“She did?”

“She told the bursar to take their letter seriously.”

Saoirse walked away before they noticed her. She didn’t want credit. She only remembered seeing Marco’s wife one afternoon in the servants’ corridor, tearful over an unpaid tuition slip. It had been the easiest kindness to give, a discreet transfer from her charity fund. But that was weeks ago, and Marco’s name faded into the soft machinery of the house, another invisible gear turning the estate’s perfection.

Once, she nearly called Nina, thumb hovering over the dial, but the thought of explaining this life, of describing gilded rooms that still felt borrowed, of confessing how little space there was for her inside Roman's world, made her throat close. She feared Nina would pity her, or worse, confirm the suspicion that she had built her entire sense of self around Roman, and now that he was gone more often than present, she had nothing left to offer, even to a friend. So she set the phone down, and waiting became her occupation, her devotion, her proof of loyalty.

If Roman’s absences had once meant days in Geneva or a week in New York, now they stretched into fortnights, entire cycles of the moon in which she lived as though married to his echo. 

She saw him mostly in movement as he stepped into a car before dawn one week, shrugged off a sweater late at night on another, disappearing again with a kiss too soft to anchor her. When he did ask for her presence, it was no longer for her sake, but to smooth a negotiation, to tilt a boardroom in his favor with her careful smile and quiet poise. She began to measure her usefulness in the number of signatures softened, the number of jaws unclenched.

And her body kept changing in ways he seemed determined not to name. The swell of her belly demanded notice but received none, the nausea that forced her to nibble bread instead of lamb at dinner was registered in his glance but not his words. He kissed her forehead instead of her lips more often now, touched her wrist instead of her waist. 

At times, she wondered if he resented the physical proof of something about her that could not be polished away. Or was it a kind of awe of it? She thought about his refusal to speak about it like it was his way of loving what they’d made together without diluting it with ordinary words.

Marcela and Bibiana began to appear more often at the Madrid house too, their husbands always in tow, their children trailing behind them, some scarcely older than Saoirse was. Roman’s nieces and nephews were grown men and women in polished clothes, lacquered nails, clipped Spanish far faster than Saoirse could manage. They kissed her on both cheeks as if greeting a younger cousin at a christening, and spoke of equestrian milestones or architectural commissions or hedge fund numbers Saoirse had no language for. She smiled, nodded, tried to arrange her face into composure, but each visit underlined her displacement. 

The sisters themselves, elegant in muted pearls and decades of habit, treated her with a kind of genteel dismissal she was used to.

Sitting apart from them one evening, Saoirse studied Roman’s profile as he poured wine for Marcela, the easy authority in the gesture, and wondered what it had meant for him to be born over a decade after his sisters, by a different mother, the only son, the belated heir, the golden child expected to carry the empire’s weight. 

Perhaps this was why he moved through the world with such entitlement, why his words were so devoid of uncertainty, why his silences were never empty but heavy with unspoken commands. He had been raised to inherit the family’s coldness, to perfect it, not to seek warmth.

Back in Barcelona a month later, she saw the way the housekeeper’s gaze dropped lower, the butler’s bow held longer, the cook no longer addressing Allegra first but Roman. It was the smallest tilt of reverence, but it made him more untouchable, already larger than the living. 

Across every house, the change repeated. The deference wrapped tighter around him, and with it, he receded further from Saoirse’s reach in some deeper, unnameable sense. It was as though Amancio’s death had carried Roman across a threshold she could no longer follow, leaving her stranded just outside the invisible room where real power sat breathing.

When Roman did pause long enough to sit with her, a glass of wine in hand, a hand brushing her hair back from her face, she felt the shock of it like sunlight through a shutter. 

Sometimes, he asked what she had read that week, or if she’d written anything down. Sometimes, he simply pressed his palm to her knee and said something like, “You’re too pale. You need rest.” She would nod like it was intimacy, and tell herself she was seen. And then, he would be gone again, phone pressed to his ear, responsibility pulling him elsewhere.

+

It wasn’t long before Allegra was dead, too, for reasons no one could identify, yet no one seemed particularly alarmed or even distressed. Her heart simply failed in her sleep at 76, her perfume still heavy in the hall.

Tuscany smelled of lilies and old stone the day of her wake. Bouquets arrived for days, stacked high in the drawing room, their cellophane still wrapped, their ribbons uncut. Messages of condolence lay unopened in neat piles on the escritoire. They looked less like offerings of grief than inventory waiting to be processed.

Saoirse sat alone on a low charcoal velvet sofa, hands folded over her black wool-shrouded lap. She tried to breathe through the cloying scent of the flowers, but it made her throat ache.

From the hall beyond, the murmur of voices drifted in, Bibiana’s calm tone, the staff’s rustling, even Javier and Marco’s clipped orders about guest access and security grids. Allegra’s siblings and their families were there too. No one cried or raised their voices. All that could be heard was the steady hum of logistics, arrangements, inheritances, timetables.

Through the open door, Saoirse watched Marcela adjust her pearls as she spoke, her expression unchanged, her hand smoothing her skirt as though she were waiting for a dinner reservation. She thought of Allegra’s perfume, of the faint sound of her bare feet on marble, of the way her eyes always slid past her. Cold as she had been, she had been alive. She had occupied a place in the world. Now, that place was empty, but no one seemed to care.

She thought of her own mother, whom she wished she remembered, of her grandmother…

It came to her like a breath caught wrong, the smell of boiled milk, antiseptic, and the lavender they used to cover it all up, the small Newcastle flat thick with the sound of her grandmother’s coughing. Saoirse had been 15, bent over O-level textbooks while measuring out morphine drops, whispering the rosary into a room that always felt too hot, too dark.

Her grandmother had been her everything, a voice, a roof, a hand to swat and then soothe. Losing her hadn’t been like this, this perfumed stillness, this bookkeeping silence. It had been long and brutal, grief layered on grief, nights crying into scratchy bedsheets, exams taken with her chest still burning from the smell of decay.

Her father had been absent. Her mother, gone too soon to leave even a memory. The state had placed her with Sinead, the older half-sister she barely knew, who was old enough to sign papers and open bank accounts, but not old enough to shield her. Saoirse remembered that one-year blur only in shards. The flat where she never felt safe, the shadow of Sinead’s own half-brother (through a different parent) at the door, the way she learned to keep her body small, her breath quiet. She never let herself decide what had or hadn’t happened that year. The memory lived like a closed door she never touched.

University had been her rebirth. London, poetry, Nina. For years, she had thought of herself only from then forward. That was the life she polished, the version she put into her notebooks, the one she held up when Roman said after he arrived in Barcelona the night after Allegra passed, “Now, we’re the same. We’re both orphans now.”

She had nodded, almost grateful, as if he’d named her loneliness and claimed it as theirs.

Now, sitting in Allegra’s Tuscany home that smelled of lilies and old stone, she almost laughed aloud at the absurdity. These people didn’t grieve. They didn’t feel. They moved their chess pieces forward while the board turned to dust.

For one sharp second, she let herself remember all the times she had grieved so deeply she thought it would split her body in two. Compared to that, the Suarezes’ silence was monstrous. Her chest hurt. 

Her grandmother’s voice rasped against her fresh-laundered pillows, “...you mind who you give your quiet to. Anyone can love your beautiful laughter, but the right one will love your silence too.”

Saoirse had never understood it then. Now, in a house where silence was a weapon, she clung to it as proof that Roman was the right one. He loved her quiet self. He didn’t ask her to fill rooms with chatter, didn’t demand noise to justify her presence. He let her sit beside him in stillness, and she told herself that meant he loved her truly, in the way her grandmother had promised. The thought steadied her for a moment.

She pressed her hand against her lap, smoothed her skirt, and forced the memories back down, folding them neatly into the drawer where she kept everything she refused to name. She lifted her chin, breathed in the lilies until her throat stung. The bouquets were beginning to wilt, unopened, the cellophane fogging with condensation. Saoirse sat among them like a guest at her own wake as her gaze dropped to her lit-up phone on her lap.

Are we fighting? 

Or is this just what marriage looks like?

Nina’s message pulsed on the screen. Saoirse’s thumb hovered. 

Finally, she typed: I miss you. I can’t breathe here. Please come. She stared at the words until they blurred, until she felt the air around her constrict like the room itself had ears. She deleted it and tried again: I think I’m the only one in this house who knows someone has actually died. I keep remembering my gran... She stopped. The words blurred even more, heat rising to her face. She backspaced furiously until only a blinking cursor remained. Everything’s fine. Don’t worry. But she deleted that too.

Nina, somewhere in a posh North London flat with paint-chipped skirting boards and a kettle whistling on the stove, stared at her own phone. She imagined Saoirse’s life now, marble floors, a husband with a private jet, dresses too expensive to wrinkle. What could she offer her anymore, except worry?

She typed and erased her own drafts. Do you even want me in your life anymore? Deleted. I’ll come to Madrid if you say the word. Deleted. She tossed the phone onto her sofa and told herself her friend was just busy, just unreachable, not lost.

Back in Tuscany, Roman’s shadow stretched long across the doorway. “Who’s Nina again?” he asked lightly after she told him about the message.

Saoirse’s pulse jumped, but she covered it with a small smile. “My oldest friend.”

“She doesn’t know you’re mourning my parents, does she?”

Saoirse knew full well that privacy, or rather, secrecy, meant everything in this family. “Of course not. I didn’t tell her,” she mumbled.

“The one who said I was controlling?” She looked up. He shrugged, walking to her. “You told me that night in Marbella.” 

“She was just worried. That’s what friends do.”

“They also project. Especially when they envy what they’ll never have.” He kissed her forehead and plucked the phone from her hand like she had only been keeping it safe for him. “Let’s not let other people complicate what’s already beautiful.”

Just like that, Nina was gone again, her name swallowed by the silence of the sprawling house, leaving Saoirse surrounded by flowers meant for the dead. Bibiana’s daughter walked by. Saoirse’s throat closed. Nina was still waiting out there in the world, where conversations could be real. But here, Saoirse pressed silence over herself like another layer of mourning.

The night Allegra’s body was flown back to Barcelona from Tuscany to be laid to rest as a Suarez, Roman and Saoirse sat together in the private cabin of a separate jet with only the moonlight and atmospheric glow refracting against the ceiling, ghosting across his hands. She was still in black, barefoot, her hair unpinned. He hadn’t spoken for hours. 

When he finally did, his voice was low, almost tender, “I can’t believe they’re gone.”

Something in her chest cracked open at the words. He looked at her then, reached for her hand, the one with her wedding ring, turned it palm up, and said, “When you lose the people who made you, you become your own shelter. It’s lonely, but no one can take anything more from you.” He’d just lost his parents, yet he spoke so immediately like an expert on loss.

His face creased a little between his brows as if struggling to hold things in. He turned her hand the other way, brushed the ring with his lips, and whispered, “So we’ll protect each other… from noise, from loss, from everything that tries to touch us.” He looked right into her pale eyes, and the words washed through her like a vow.

After that night, he never mentioned his parents again. After the funerals, everything about him went quieter. He began to move through rooms with the stillness of someone listening for footsteps that would never return, as if guarding something invisible. All the houses recalibrated themselves around his silence. Amancio was gone, Allegra gone soon after, and the family moved on, and life continued.

Saoirse soon felt how the weight of his parents’ absence, instead of making space for her, somehow closed the walls further. His own absences gained a new gravity that pulled everything in their orbit inward and smaller. But she kept his words close to her heart like a prayer. She told herself this was just grief, the soft forehead kisses still meant tenderness, his endless composure was his way of staying strong.

+

The Tuscany house was unbearable by her third trimester.

The country retreat sat low against the hills, its ochre walls washed pale by decades of sun. The vineyards around it rolled in careful rows, the air thick with the scent of herbs Saoirse couldn’t quite identify. And even in death, Allegra presided over it all.

The staff there still deferred to her memory. From the moment Saoirse arrived alone post-funeral, she felt it. They bowed politely, but their eyes did not linger. They still called the chapel ‘La Signora’s chapel’, still opened the shutters “the way she liked,” still placed white lilies in porcelain vases because Allegra had preferred their scent to roses.

At dinner, Saoirse lifted her fork to her lips then moved it away. The roasted lamb was crusted with rosemary. The smell alone made her stomach heave. She set the fork down quietly, pushing the food to one side of the plate.

The chef, standing discreetly by the door, noticed but did not change the next day’s menu.

After Roman arrived the next evening, she tried to explain to him in a voice she thought was gentle enough not to bruise, “I can’t eat rosemary anymore. It makes me sick.”

His reply was immediate, smooth, unthinking. “They mean well. It’s not their job to adapt to your whims.”

Whims.

The word echoed through her. Later, she found herself in the stoned guest bath, staring at her reflection. The tiles were cracked in places, but polished daily. Allegra’s memory clung here, too. Saoirse whispered the word to the mirror from the hot tub as if testing how it sounded in her own mouth. Whims. 

You make enemies out of ghosts, Saoirse. It’s exhausting, he’d said after. It echoed in her head over and over.

When she emerged, she found the staff lighting candles in the chapel. Allegra’s chapel. The flame caught on the brass sconces, painting the air with ritual. Saoirse stood in the doorway for a moment, her hands on her swollen belly. Allegra had been dead for months now, and yet it was still her house, her food, her chapel. Saoirse drifted through it like a polite guest, not a wife, not a mother-to-be.

That night, she had Javier pack a few things days earlier than scheduled. She didn’t tell Roman it was because of nausea or the invisibility. She simply asked, “Can I leave tomorrow morning instead?”

He agreed without comment. And so, she disappeared again, as if Tuscany had never been hers at all. No one told her it was to begin with.

+

Javier watched them even closer after the old Suarezes were gone. 

Roman needed space to focus, so he stayed away from Madrid more often as Saoirse’s pregnancy advanced. She stopped travelling around to meet him as she grew more exhausted, so she was always in Madrid. But every time he did return to Madrid, he would stay at the office taking calls across time zones till late, and she would always come to him in one of the cars. 

Javier began to notice how Roman’s distance served him, how her presence did, too. When they were together, Saoirse followed every conversation as if hungering for permission to exist within it.

On June 2, Roman walked her in mid-negotiation like a whisper with legs, all cream linen and softness. She said three sentences and managed to inadvertently puncture five men’s egos, the fog before Roman's calculated landslide. Javier had begun to understand what Roman must’ve known a long time ago, that when she said something, even the smallest thing, people believed her. She lent legitimacy to Roman’s will without even realizing she was doing it.

It was always the same choreography. Tension in the room, Roman losing the moral high ground, Saoirse entering, the atmosphere resetting. Sometimes, it seemed she believed it was love, that her stillness was valuable, her restraint, a gift, not a leash, not a tool weaponized without her knowledge.

On August 4, she gave birth to twins, a boy and a girl, and Javier coordinated the arrival of champagne crates, lawyers in dark suits, polite congratulations from family. Only one of Saoirse’s friends came, Nina. Javier knew she had a sister, but had heard nothing about her besides her name. 

He’d worked with Roman long enough to read subtleties, to know the difference between devotion and control, grief and retreat. He saw how Roman’s instructions to her became gentler but shorter, how the endearments turned into directives softened by tone, how ‘mi amor’ could precede both affection and dismissal. 

When Saoirse entered a room now, Javier could feel the dynamic changing, the air shifting around her, the silence between them stretching like something that might eventually snap. The Madrid house evolved with new cameras, new guards, new routines, heavier locks. Roman had Javier promote Marco quietly to head of perimeter systems.

On October 9, Saoirse paused outside the conference room, checked her lipstick, smoothed her hair, breathed like she was entering a performance. “Turn around. Go write something instead,” Javier wanted to tell her. She was supposed to be a poet, but she hadn’t published a thing since the wedding.

November 1st. She was speaking less, laughing less. Roman still praised her constantly in front of people, calling her “my compass,” but never let her hold the map.

On November 15, one of the junior execs called her “grace incarnate.” Roman smiled and said, “She keeps me civil.”

On November 28, someone asked her offhandedly what she thought of a pitch. She lit up and started giving real feedback. Roman walked in mid-sentence, smiled, and said, “Careful. She’s not allowed to outshine us.” He laughed. She laughed too, but her shoulders dropped like someone unplugging the light.

By December 10, she was trying to leave in her head. Javier saw it. The shine was gone. Even the way she walked had changed. He still brought her in to soften rooms, but she no longer melted the tension. She absorbed it.

+

The twins were born at dawn in the Barcelona villa, in the same suite where every Suarez heir had entered the world. Saoirse remembered the sound of their first cries more clearly than any face that morning. Roman stood beside her, still in his pressed shirt and pants from the night before, his hand hovering an inch above hers, like contact might disrupt the perfection of the moment.

He smiled a small, deliberate, camera-ready smile. To the staff, doctors, and the world, he looked like a man in awe, but Saoirse saw the restraint behind his eyes, the almost-curiosity of a man witnessing his lineage secured, not his children arriving. When the nurse asked if he wanted to hold them, he said, “Let her first.” His voice was warm, his hands stayed clean.

The days after blurred into luxury with linen sheets, round-the-clock nurses, bouquets of pale flowers from his sisters, from board members, from men whose names appeared in the Financial Times. Roman lingered, for once the travels paused as he moved through the family villa like a visiting dignitary, present, composed, untouched by the sleeplessness or the scent of milk in the air. 

He’d stop by her bedside, kiss her temple, and say things like, “You look beautiful and serene like this.” She wanted to tell him serenity wasn’t what she felt. She wanted to say she was afraid. But he would already be glancing away, murmuring that he needed to check on something downstairs.

One night during that first week, she stood between the twins’ bassinets, exhausted, staring at how perfect they looked in their white laces, the hum of their breathing filling the dark. When Roman entered, he stood in the doorway for a long while before coming close. He kissed her forehead then murmured, “You’ve done well,” stroking her hair down once, like she’d just completed a contract. Then he left.

The house was full of life now, but Saoirse had never felt it emptier.

Before long, he was gone for days at a time again, and she began to miss him in the strangest ways. The way he filled the rooms, the sudden gestures, the poetry folded into compliments, the heavy focus of his gaze when she spoke. She missed the electricity of being watched, even if she had once feared it. 

When he stopped touching her, she convinced herself it was mercy. When he stopped saying he loved her, she decided he was showing it differently, protecting her from more noise in a world already too loud with crying. She’d started writing in her journal again, a week after the twins were born:

She underlined it twice, as if belief could make it true.

Marco greeted her each morning with a brief bow. When Roman left for days at a time, he was often the last voice she heard before bed, a calm Everything secure, Señora. She’d nod, murmur Thank you, and close her door.

That was when Nina came.

Her simple text came first: 

Booked a cheap flight. Don’t you dare tell me not to.

Saoirse had wept reading it, then laughed, wiping her eyes before Lisa, the head nanny, noticed. She smiled at the screen for a long time before pressing ‘call’. When Nina’s voice came through, bright and breathless, the sound almost undid her.

“You sound half-asleep,” Nina teased.

“I’m exhausted,” Saoirse said, laughing softly. “The babies don’t know what time means.”

“I’m coming anyway. You need someone to remind you how to breathe.”

Saoirse’s throat tightened. “You really don’t have to—”

“Stop. I’ve already packed. I have to carry my godchildren, don’t I? I’ll bring biscuits. You can pay me back in gossip.”

When the line clicked off, Saoirse sat there a moment longer, phone still in hand, eyes wet. Then she laughed a short, startled laugh.

Nina arrived two weeks after the birth, blonde curls frizzed from the Barcelona humidity, suitcase scuffed from London trains. The guards at the gates took her name twice. A valet carried her bag as though it might stain the marble. Inside, she was met with that strange, rarefied hush that money creates, a silence too well-trained to breathe freely.

Saoirse met her at the door to her suite, barefoot, her dressing gown loosely tied, dark circles beneath her eyes. For a moment, neither spoke. Then Nina’s face broke open with joy. “Oh, look at you,” she whispered, pulling her in. “You look like a woman, all married and mothered up.”

Saoirse laughed quietly, the way she did now when laughter wasn’t allowed to echo. “You mean survived childbirth?”

“I mean, created small, perfect miracles.”

They went to the nursery together. The two bassinets stood beneath gauzy canopies. Inside, the twins slept side by side, one swaddled in cream, the other in pale blue. Saoirse hovered above them, proud, reverent. “David and Mariana.”

Nina turned. “Mariana?”

“Roman’s grandmother,” Saoirse said softly. “He adored her. He told me once she’d hum old Andalusian songs while brushing her dogs’ fur, and he’d sit by the door just to listen.” Her eyes softened. “He never speaks of her, but when he did, it was… different.”

Nina smiled faintly. “And David?”

Saoirse hesitated. “His middle name. It was his father’s, too. I suppose it made sense to him, for continuity.” She looked down at the sleeping boy, fingers tracing the curve of his cheek. “He said it was his first gift to his son, his name, so he’d never forget where he came from.”

Nina caught the phrasing, ‘his name,’ ‘his son,’ and something cold pressed against her chest. But Saoirse’s voice was warm, content.

“I keep thinking how lucky they are,” she went on, “to be born into a family that knows its own history.”

Nina reached out and brushed a finger along the baby girl’s sleeve. “They’re beautiful,” she whispered.

The Suarez villa treated Nina like a courier who’d accidentally wandered into a temple. The staff were polite but chilly. One maid corrected her when she offered to help carry tea upstairs, “We prefer guests not lift things here, señora.”

Even the air-conditioning seemed to hum with judgment.

Saoirse tried, of course. She had the cook prepare an afternoon tea spread that looked torn from a glossy magazine with macarons, miniature sandwiches, silver trays polished until they glowed. But she seemed apologetic as she poured the tea herself, hands shaking slightly. “They don’t know how to make it the way we used to in London,” she whispered with a conspiratorial smile.

Nina smiled back, but she felt suddenly out of place in her linen dress, her work-worn hands. She thought of her nice but small flat in Camden Town, of coffee stains on her desk, the comfort of city noise. Here, even breathing felt curated.

At night, they sat by the balcony, overlooking the quiet vineyards. When it got really late, Nina asked about Roman, half in curiosity, half in concern.

“He’s been away,” Saoirse said. “There’s so much to manage since his parents passed. He’ll be back soon.”

“And you?”

Saoirse hesitated. “I think I’m still learning to be fine.”

Nina tilted her head. “That sounds like something he’d say.”

Saoirse smiled, faintly. “It’s something he taught me.”

They were silent for a moment. Then Nina said, “I ran into Sinead the other week.”

Saoirse froze. “Oh.”

“She asked about you, said she never expected you’d marry someone like that.”

“What does that mean?”

Nina sighed. “I didn’t ask.”

“She’s never understood me,” Saoirse said quickly. “She still lives in the same flat, doesn’t she?”

“I think so. She still chain-smokes, still blames the world for everything.” Saoirse smiled softly, as though that explained everything.

They were silent for a while, the air between them warm with the scent of wine and lemongrass. Nina leaned back in her chair.

“Have you written anything lately?” she asked gently.

Saoirse smiled, almost wistfully. “Not for a while. I jot things down sometimes, but…” She hesitated. “Roman says I shouldn’t pressure myself.”

Nina tilted her head. “Do you miss it?”

Saoirse shrugged, twisting the edge of her sleeve. “I think about it. But when I try, it’s like my mind’s gone quiet in a way I can’t undo.”

The silence that followed felt heavier than it should have. Nina looked at her, at the faint shadow under her eyes, and wanted to reach for her hand. Instead, she smiled, keeping it light. “Then just rest. You deserve to be boring for once.”

That earned her a laugh, small but real. “And you? Are you still working yourself to death?” She remembered their last brief phone call months ago, when Nina sounded truly exhausted.

“Always,” Nina said. “But my editor’s finally stopped calling me ‘kid’.”

“Good.” Saoirse’s tone warmed. “Are you seeing anyone new?”

Nina grinned. “Not me. My brother’s seeing someone, though. We all adore her. He keeps pretending he’s not smitten, but he’s hopeless.”

Saoirse laughed again, a little freer this time. “You sound like your mother.”

“That’s what my father says,” Nina replied, rolling her eyes. “Which, coming from him, is the highest praise.”

Saoirse smiled in a different way, a wistful way. “You’re lucky.”

“I know,” Nina whispered now.

Something unreadable flickered in Saoirse’s eyes, something like envy softened by admiration. She remembered the holidays spent seeking refuge in Nina’s upbeat family house, how Nina’s parents embraced her. They both fell quiet again, and Saoirse imagined a world where her twins had happy parents who teased each other loudly all the time.

When Nina left two days later, the villa returned to silence. Saoirse watched from the terrace as one of their cars rolled down the drive with her friend in it, and her heart pinched. Nina would go back to deadlines and night buses and small freedoms and warm hugs Saoirse could no longer imagine.

That evening, Roman called from Milan. His tone was affectionate, measured. “How was your guest?”

“Good,” she said. “It was… nice to have her here.”

“Remind me what she does again?”

“She’s a journalist.”

He paused. “A journalist.”

Saoirse’s chest tightened. “Yes.”

“They’re usually all opportunists,” he said lightly. “You should be careful. People like that see stories where there aren’t any. And when they’re done, they sell them.”

Saoirse said nothing for a while, her mind just… blank. Then so softly, she could barely hear herself, “She’s my best friend.”

“Once, maybe, but people change. How close are you really these days? You don’t know her anymore.”

Saoirse stared at the painting on the wall before her, La Custodia. She had asked once who it was, and one of the older housekeepers simply said it had always been there. A 17th-century Spanish work, dark oils cracked like riverbeds, depicting a woman in a pale dress standing on a cliff, holding a gold monstrance out toward a storm.

Behind her, the sea boiled. Before her, a faint halo of light rimmed the sacred vessel. Her face was solemn, beautiful, unreadable, the face of someone performing duty with no promise of rescue. Saoirse felt, for the first time, the faint chill of the evening breeze from the open windows against her skin, but she didn't shiver.

That night, she lay awake listening to the twins breathing through the monitor, the house humming with its perfect temperature, and thought maybe he was right. Maybe it’s safer not to be known. Maybe it wasn’t belief she felt, just the slow unclenching that came with doing what was expected. Maybe safety was only ever about being unseen, untouched, untroubled. Maybe that was simply the price to pay for it.

In the morning, at first she thought it was a dream, the scent, faint and clean, like rainwater and sugar. Then she turned her head and saw them.

Bouquets of countless roses on the bedroom floor all around her that smelled of both heaven and a funeral. They reached the edge of the bed like snowdrifts, all white on white, glowing faintly in the pale light. On the nightstand, beside a carafe of water, lay a plain white card:

No signature. None was needed.

She sat for a long time without moving, the note balanced in her palm, the room breathing around her. Light shifted across the curtains. Somewhere in the house, a door closed softly, one of the staff, or maybe the sea wind pressing against the walls.

For a moment, she thought she might cry from the gentleness of it, the way his words made her feel tended to, cherished, seen. It was the kind of love that pressed down softly, like a hand smoothing wrinkles from silk. Instead, she smiled.

The perfume grew heavier. The silence deepened.

She set the card beside the baby monitor that hummed, and lay back, the paper still whispering against her fingertips.

By the time the sun reached the window, the roses had begun to wilt. Their scent lingered, sweet and overripe. She hadn’t moved. Only the air did, careful, temperature-controlled, the kind that makes you forget you’re still alive. When the maids entered to draw the curtains, Saoirse’s hand was still resting lightly on her chest, rising and falling with her breath, as if she were keeping the promise Roman had made for her.

Hours ago in Milan, as his team finalized absorbing a rival investment consortium that once threatened the Suarez portfolio, Roman’s notes app notified him of a line item he’d written for himself: flowers for S.

Jacket off, shirtsleeves rolled neatly to his forearms, EBITDA numbers glowing on the wall monitor, Javier sitting to his right, flipping through notes, while an assistant poured another round of espresso no one would finish, Roman typed a message to his Madrid florist...

white roses, thousands, master suite filled before she wakes

...and sent it without rereading, already back in the meeting before the confirmation tone sounded. But he imagined her in Barcelona, alone in his bed, sleeping lightly. He could almost see the faint curve of her cheek in that dim light, could almost hear her breathing.

The boardroom was glass on all sides, the city glittering below like circuitry. Javier slid a file across the table. Roman signed it without reading, his handwriting sharp and immaculate. When the Zurich partner said something about ‘strategic legacy,’ he almost smiled.

Legacy, yes. That was the old house in Barcelona, the twins, the roses arriving at dawn, the small, invisible ways he kept everything in its right place. He thought of her waking to that ocean of flowers, thought of how her breath would catch, how her silence would mean gratitude.

He didn’t want her words. He wanted the proof of stillness, the reassurance that everything he loved could remain exactly where he left it.