The Suarez Myth: Chapter 11

Saoirse was fifteen.

Her grandmother had just died. She met Sinead for the first time at the long, dreary funeral that followed, a fuzzy-haired ginger in dark jeans and a black oversized t-shirt who refused to enter the actual church building and didn’t look that much older than her. 

She said to her just outside the church doors, “You can stay with us until school ends.” Us was Sinead, her husband Dermot, and a brother whose name Saoirse never spoke aloud again.

She was sixteen the winter she moved into Sinead’s house, but calling it a house felt generous. Newcastle had been manageable with its grey skies, school corridors, her grandmother's gentle fussing, but Saoirse couldn’t live in her house alone, and Sinead, as her only living legal guardian, refused to move in. 

That year in Sinead’s flat felt like a shift into something colder. It was more like a narrow hallway pretending to be a home. It was old, its carpets smelled of damp twilight and old curry, its windows were always closed because they got stuck when you tried to open them. The radiators clanked at odd hours like something was trapped inside. 

The first week passed quietly. Saoirse went to school a bus ride away during the day. Sinead worked nights at Tesco. Dermot slept odd hours. The brother, whom she hated to remember his name, was twenty-six. Too old to be leeching off his younger sister, yet still too confident to be unthreatening. 

He liked to “help” Saoirse carry things and to stand too close when she washed dishes. He drifted around the house like a draft, appearing and disappearing without sound. He had a way of standing too close behind you without touching, just close enough that you could feel your skin pull upward in warning.

Saoirse learned the rules quickly, the way quiet girls do.

Rule one: Don’t close the bedroom door.

Rule two: Don’t shower after dark.

Rule three: Don’t wake Dermot.

Rule four: Don’t cry where anyone can hear it.

She kept her head down, went to school, handed over her lunch card quietly when Sinead asked for it, folded Sinead’s work uniforms before leaving for class. She kept away from her schoolmates, who all thought her name and accent were weird, and her face was too pale. They called her “Angel Face” or “Ghost Face”, mostly the latter. She stayed small, polite, grateful, the shape of a girl living on borrowed hospitality.

But the brother kept watching her.

He often lingered in doorways, leaning against the frame like he owned the air around her. Sometimes, he’d speak soft, strange comments that made her stomach tighten.

“You’re growing fast.”

“You look older with your hair down.”

“You’re quiet. Quiet girls know things.”

Sinead ignored it. Dermot didn’t see it. Saoirse tried not to breathe when he was in the same room.

One evening, Sinead left her in the house alone with him.

Saoirse was putting away laundry when he appeared at the doorframe, leaning against it casually, his smile too slow.

“You’re a quiet little thing, aren’t you?” he said. “Quiet things don’t make trouble.”

She stepped back. He stepped forward, took a T-shirt from the basket, lifted it, inhaled it… and smiled again. Her blood froze. She tried to leave, but he caught her wrist.

“Don’t run,” he murmured. “You don’t want to seem afraid.”

She remembered her grandmother’s advice. Don’t scream unless someone can hear you. Don’t fight unless you can win. So she went still, stone-still.

He tucked a strand of her hair behind her ear, fingers lingering.

“You’ll grow up beautiful,” he whispered. “Dangerously so. Men will want to ruin you.”

She prayed he would let go. He did, eventually, but the message was clear. 

The night it happened again wasn’t any more special. Sinead was at work. Dermot was drunk. The brother knocked on her open door. She was sitting cross-legged on the cold carpet, doing a composition worksheet under the yellow light of a dying lamp. Her pencil shook a little. She always shook a little back then.

He stepped inside and sat on the bed, close enough that she felt the mattress dip and his breath warm the back of her neck.

“You shouldn’t be alone in here, you know,” he murmured. “Dangerous neighborhood. People don’t lock their doors around here.”

She pressed her nails into her thigh, hard, but said nothing. Predictable girls are easy, he told her once. Quiet girls.

When she didn’t respond, he leaned forward, his hand brushing the crook of her elbow like a test, a question. Her whole body went rigid. A kind of cold rose through her bones, and he smiled as if he could tell.

She stood abruptly after a while, like someone yanked her upright by invisible strings.

“I have to shower,” she said, voice flat. “I have school.” She didn’t wait for permission. She walked out, her legs numb, her heart pounding so loudly she thought it might wake Dermot through the walls.

She locked herself in the bathroom — breaking rule two — and turned on the tap. Hot water roared into the tub. Steam filled the room. She sat on the closed toilet seat fully clothed, covering her ears with both hands, shaking so hard her fingers hurt. She stayed until the water turned cold, until her skin prickled, until her breathing slowed.

He didn’t follow, but the unnamed fear lived in her body now, permanent as bone.

When Sinead came home at dawn and found the bathroom light still on, she snapped, “Are you trying to drown the house, girl? Why’s it always something with you?”

Saoirse apologized. She always apologized. She learned that if you stayed very quiet, very still, very small, sometimes danger moved through you, past you. She carried that rule for years, into adulthood and university, into Roman’s world and their marriage. Silence meant safety. Stillness meant survival. Submission meant escape. She learned to become a ghost in that house, and she never told Sinead what happened, or Nina, not fully. She never even really told herself.

And when she finally told Roman one trembling night in Madrid in their early months together, she said it quickly, lightly, as if describing a dream, eyes turned away, hands trembling again. Roman had held her hand, jaw tense.

“I won’t let anything like that happen to you again,” he said. He swore to protect her. He gathered her into his arms and vowed, “No one will ever touch you again.”

+

Saoirse’s memory of Sinead’s house was little more than a vague outline now, but Roman carried the full, sharp truth she’d whispered to him years ago, in the beginning, before she learned to be quieter even in her confessions. He was in Singapore again, this time on an extended stay that had somehow turned into two months in and out between the country, Madrid, and Geneva, when the memory returned to him.

It hit him like a blade, and suddenly he wasn’t in his Tanglin temporary office complex anymore. He was back in his Madrid penthouse, early winter, three years ago.

Saoirse was still twenty-one, barefoot on his hardwood floor, her hair still wet from the shower because she was too shy to use his blow dryer without being shown how it worked. She wore one of his shirts, sleeves rolled twice over her wrists. The hem nearly brushed her knees. She sat curled on the sofa, knees to her chest, eyes too bright. They had been talking about nothing — books, London, her sister’s cruelty — when her voice suddenly thinned, went quiet, like something inside her slipped.

“There’s something I didn’t tell you,” she whispered.

He’d turned toward her, expecting something small like an unpaid bill, an old boyfriend, perhaps the shame of having grown up without a family. She always apologized for things she never should.

But she wasn’t looking at him. She was looking at her hands.

“There was a man in her house,” she said softly. “Her brother.” She swallowed. Her throat moved delicately, like a bruise blooming. “He… he used to come into my room.”

Roman’s back went rigid.

She kept going, as if she had rehearsed the words and they were now falling out of her faster than she could catch them.

“He touched me. Not once. Not just once. I never told her. Or anyone. I thought… I thought it was my fault because I was quiet. Because I didn’t push him away. Because I froze.”

Roman felt something crack open inside him. At the time, he didn’t know what it was, but now, he understood that it was the end of innocence, of his own capacity to love her lightly.

She kept talking, voice faltering but unbroken, “I didn’t know how to scream. I didn’t know how to stop it. I just— felt my body leave me. And afterward… I couldn’t remember parts of it. I still can’t. That’s why I hate dark hallways, and touching people’s arms, and closed doors.”

She wiped her face with the heel of her hand. “I don’t want you to think I’m damaged. I don’t want you to think I’m… weak.”

Weak. The word detonated something ancient in him that smelled like Allegra's quiet terror and the way she held her wineglass steady while the world crashed around her. He closed the space between them in two steps. He knelt in front of her and took her face in both hands, his thumbs brushing the wetness beneath her eyes.

“Look at me,” he said. She did, her eyes were enormous, terrified, trying to be brave. “You were a child,” he said. His voice was low, so low she had to lean forward to hear it. “You hear me? A child. There is no fault, no blame, only me now.” Her breath shuddered. 

“And if he were alive,” Roman added, “I would kill him myself.”

She whispered something like a protest, but he silenced it gently, pressing his forehead to hers.

“You survived,” he said. “You survived something no one should survive. And you are here with me now.”

She had cried then, quietly, almost apologetically, into his chest. And he had held her so tightly she could barely breathe. That was the night she gave him everything. She gave him trust, and the rawest, truest version of herself. And that was the night Roman made a silent, irrevocable vow that no one would ever touch her again.

He decided, without noticing he had decided, that she belonged inside an unshakeable circle of protection. His protection. His walls. His rules. His silence. His house.

It was the nine-year-old boy watching Allegra bleed into lace and thinking, I will keep my woman safe. From that night onward, everything in him reorganized itself around her safety. The “stay here.” The “don’t worry about outside.” The “let me handle it.” The “you don’t need to go.” The “rest.” The “be calm.” He was saving her.

In Singapore now, staring at the elevator wall while that faint jasmine clung to the air, Roman felt something cold crawl up his spine. He remembered every detail she’d told him, the shape of her shoulders when she spoke, the tremor in her voice.

He remembered pressing her hands to his chest and promising, “You never have to be afraid again.”

So now, he had discreet, AI-assisted surveillance on all their homes. Barcelona was like Fort Knox. Every season, he had Marco and the other security guys make private security enhancements based on advancing technology. Smart-watch access for facial recognition triggers, movement mapping, and biometric logs, things Saoirse knew existed, but not to what extent. 

Marco oversaw the physical reinforcements. The house secretary, Fernando, coordinated the digital summaries so Roman received weekly anomaly reports, compressed and filtered. That night, between virtual meetings in the hotel suite, he opened the security digest once more out of habit. He’d been doing it a lot more in the last couple of months. 

There had been a delivery truck misrouted near the western gate. A gardener triggering a false perimeter alert after hours. A brief software recalibration. He scrolled.

A thumbnail caught his eye only because of its timestamp: 18:42. Sunset. The lemon grove path. He expanded it. At first, it meant nothing. Two figures at the far edge of the property. One in a pale shape that resolved into Saoirse’s dressing gown. He leaned slightly closer to the screen.

Marco stood in front of her, bent at the waist. His hand near her ankle, adjusting something, the strap of her sandal, perhaps. Her hand rested on his shoulder. The frame held for two seconds before the AI auto-paused to mark proximity. There was no audio, escalation, or further contact, but still, Roman did not blink.

The angle was imperfect, picked up only because the perimeter AI had widened its sweep after a recent firmware update. The main house cameras did not extend that far into the grove. She was outside the usual visual grid.

He replayed it. The physicality was minor, innocent even. But the expression…

Her face tilted slightly upward. It was open, and she was laughing, or nearly laughing. There was something unguarded in the line of her mouth. He tried to remember when he had last seen that expression directed toward him, but could not place it. He hadn’t even been back in Barcelona for the last two months. The days had just flown by.

Marco straightened, stepped back, and the moment dissolved. The clip ended.

Roman closed the window without flagging it. He did not call Fernando. He did not message Marco. There was, technically, nothing to reprimand. Security protocol did not forbid the staff from assisting his wife on uneven ground. Physical proximity was sometimes unavoidable. Still.

Marco should have called for Marta or one of the female staff members. Saoirse should not have been that far from the house alone. She was in some flimsy robe, unacceptable in his mind. The perimeter AI had only caught it because the system was functioning correctly, because he had improved it.

He reopened the clip and watched her hand again, watching the warmth in her face. The contact was brief, but the warmth lingered. Roman sat back in the crushed mohair armchair slowly as business associates chattered somewhere in the background.

He told himself the discomfort was procedural and about boundaries, not about the fact that she looked alive in a way that did not involve him. He minimized the footage and opened the Aberdeen refinery audit instead, giving himself five minutes to end the unnecessary meeting.

He did not sleep for another hour, not until after he’d restructured the staff schedule, quietly transferring Marco to Madrid. He had Javier review recent house staff reports before morning.

“And please have Emilio schedule me to be in Barcelona tomorrow evening,” Roman said to his chief of staff, who was still in Geneva. Tianglin had grown too comfortable, but it was time to return home to his family. “...and at least once a week next month.”

+

A warm dusk settled over the Barcelona estate. 

The lemon grove smelled like sun-sweetened citrus and watered soil as Saoirse walked slowly along the stone path, the soft silk belt of her dressing robe fluttering at her waist. The matching nightdress within clung to her skin thanks to the sun and how it made her pores cry. The twins were finally asleep. Lisa was on a call inside. It was the first time all day Saoirse had been alone.

One of her sandals slipped off, the leather catching at the buckle. She muttered something under her breath and crouched to fix it, but her balance wavered.

“Señora, careful.” The voice came up from behind her. “Let me help you.”

She was startled a little but smiled. “It’s just the strap. It got caught.” Marco was reliable, kind, and always just out of the way… except when Roman was catching her on camera, touching his arm. She sighed.

He bent quickly, adjusting the buckle while she steadied herself with a hand on his shoulder for a second. She laughed at herself, at the absurdity of losing a sandal in her own garden, at her paranoia about accepting his help.

He nodded politely and stepped back. “All set. I’ll leave you to it.”

She thanked him softly, and he walked on. She exhaled and continued down the path, the moment already forgotten.

The next night, Roman returned without ceremony. She thought she’d be upset with him, but that part of her took a backseat and watched as her body leapt into his arms as he crossed the inner threshold of their home. It had been two months, and she missed him like he was a soldier returned from war. He embraced her, kissed her cheek, and lingered there for some moments before releasing her and taking her in with unusual scrutiny.

Dinner was quiet. The twins were fed, swaddled, and asleep in their cribs. A candle flickered between her and Roman at their smaller dining table. He was unhurried, slicing through grilled squid, a glass of crisp wine at his elbow. He hadn’t said much since he returned.

Saoirse had made an effort as usual. Her hair washed, a white organic cotton dress on, a soft touch of mascara. She wanted to feel like herself again, the self before milk stains and night feeds. 

“I was thinking of taking the twins to the coast this week just for a few hours,” she finally broke the ice. “Lisa says sea air’s good for their lungs,” she murmured. He nodded but didn't look up from his cutting. “Would you come?”

A pause. “Maybe.” He set down his cutlery and took a slow sip of wine. “Do you usually walk the lemon grove in a robe?” He met her gaze, his steady and unreadable.

Her spine stiffened as her brain sorted through the last couple of days for a clue as to what he was referring to. “I wanted air.”

He nodded, as if that satisfied something. “And Marco? He was helping with your shoe?”

She was quiet for a while before saying, “I didn’t ask him to. He saw me wobble and offered. It took ten seconds.”

“I’ve seen the footage.” 

She swallowed. Suddenly, she felt absurd in her dress, in this house, in the game she didn’t know she was still playing. Her voice was a slow thread now, “I wasn’t flirting. I wasn’t doing anything wrong,” her eyes on her half-eaten food. 

“I didn’t say you were,” he replied flatly and leaned back, folding his hands together. “But I noticed something.”

She asked even though she didn’t want to, “What?”

“The way you looked at him. That softness, that instinct to smile, you used to give that to me.”

She exhaled. “You think I’m cheating on you, months after childbirth, when I barely leave this property, and the only thing I want more than sleep is you.”

He stood and walked away from the table, leaving his food and her too shaken to react.

Eventually, she retired to bed, but she didn’t take her sleeping pills. Instead, she grabbed the rosary from her vanity and tried to pray, but it wasn’t working, her brain refused to remember all the words she should know like the alphabet by now. It was her heartbeat. All her brainpower was going into speeding it up.

The lights were dim, and at least five hours had passed since dinner when he joined her. Saoirse sat on the tufted bench at the foot of their bed, brushing out her hair as she counted every hour. Her robe was pale blue, loose, and comfortable.

Roman walked straight into the walk-in, and Saoirse listened distractedly to his shuffling within as she brushed on and on, long after her hair achieved neatness. He stepped back into the room and placed his watch on the vanity. When she looked up at him, he had only his briefs on. 

“You’ve been sleeping earlier lately,” he said. She knew he knew because all the staff sent him reports of her every move. She knew he knew Bibiana brought her sedatives. Was their annoying Marco argument over?

“It’s the twins,” she murmured, still brushing. “I try to lie down when they do.”

He nodded and sat on the edge of the bed close to her. “I moved Marco to Madrid.” Her brushing hand froze, the brush still against her hair, and she turned slowly to him. “They need someone familiar with perimeter systems.”

Her body tensed, but she stayed still. “Did you tell him why?”

He looked at her like she said something ridiculous. “I didn’t need to.”

She set the brush down, finally. “You really think something happened.”

He stood and moved to his nightstand, setting his phone down. “I don’t think. I observe. You know that.”

“You have cameras on me.”

“On the property, not on you,” he corrected calmly.

She exhaled, long and slow, suddenly hyperventilating for reasons she couldn’t immediately discern. “I was outside for air. Lisa had just gone in. My sandal slipped. He helped me. That was all.”

He nodded. “You laughed.”

“At myself.”

“You touched him.”

“I touched him for balance. Roman, I had just breastfed twins. I hadn’t eaten. I was lightheaded.”

He chuckled as he walked to her side of the room to pick up one of the baby monitors, and for a split second, she was unsure if she was still telling the truth, if she’d done anything more with Marco that she didn’t remember. 

“You don’t need to breastfeed them. We have nurses specifically for that, Saoirse! And they’re eight months already!” She hated it most when he was able to acquire a frightening sharpness without ever raising his voice. He walked to the glass double doors that led to their bedroom terrace, parted the thick curtains, opened the doors wide, letting cold waves of air in, walked out, then walked back in, in quick succession. “In two years, I never once saw you look at a staff member like that. It wasn’t the act. It was the tone of it… just like last time,” he said that last part more softly than the rest.

“You’ve stopped touching me for almost a year,” she cried out, but the tears in her eyes refused to fall. “I give a sliver of warmth to someone who adjusts my shoe, and suddenly... what?”

He stared at her for a moment, flung their white eiderdown down, and climbed into bed. “Come to bed.”

She froze at the edge of the bed, her breath shallow and uneven, facing him like time itself had frozen. His gaze trailed from her eyes to her mouth to the pulse fluttering at her throat.

“Come here,” he said again, softly this time.

She hesitated before inching toward the bed and lifting herself onto it. When she was close enough to feel his breath, he reached toward her, grazing his fingers across her collarbone, tracing upward until they cradled the side of her face. Her skin was cold, or maybe his hand was too warm. She closed her eyes against it, remembering him asking all those months ago, But are you mine?

“Do you know what it does to me?” he said, his voice low and hoarse. “You don’t understand yet that you don’t have to waste so many words on the perimeter guy?” She flinched at his condescending tone long before she caught on to what he meant. “You didn’t have to say a word. I’d always take your side.” She opened her eyes and frowned at his chest, trying to compute what he was saying.

“I was scared,” she whispered after a long pause. “I thought you really believed something happened.”

He leaned in and touched his forehead against hers. “What if he… tried something? How could I have forgiven myself?” He whispered with his eyes closed. A strong shiver emerged from the depths of her veins to the very top of her skin as his words sank in. She’d never even considered that. What if Marco was another… brother?

Then… then he kissed her. A real kiss, and not gentle either. She froze first, but soon, her fingers bunched into the fabric of the sheets beneath them because it’d been too long. And she cried again, silently, as her lips opened under his and her body pressed into him with months of suppressed confusion, longing, and love, and newfound fear.

He kissed her jaw, her neck, untying her robe. His palm flattened at her lower back, pulling her flush against him. 

“Look at me,” he murmured against her lips. And when she did, “Don’t give that to anyone else.” She nodded, barely.

“Even if I lose everything tomorrow, there’s no version of this world where you walk away from me.” He pulled back to look at her fully. “Do you understand that?”

“Yes.”

“I’ll take care of you.” The fire in his eyes dimmed slightly. His mouth returned to hers. His hands moved, and hers followed, pulling each other apart just enough to fall into one another. He barely undressed her before the first thrust, his grip iron, his rhythm unrelenting, his eyes never leaving hers.

Afterward, they lay tangled together, both panting, her cheek pressed against his chest, his hand spread wide across the dip of her back.

“Sleep,” he said into the silence as his thumb rubbed slow circles over her spine. Her eyes stayed fixed on the shadows above their heads, trying to understand what just happened, but the force of release after months of waiting lulled her too quickly.

The first strange thing about when she finally woke up late the next morning was the weight of his hand, resting against the dip of her waist. Her back was to him, her body warm but motionless. Light poured in through gauzy curtains, but she couldn't reach for it. Instead, she listened to the sound of his breath, strange but welcome behind her, the quiet ticking of the brass wall clock, and to her own racing thoughts.

The world had cracked open and reset itself. She felt disarmed and devoured yet protected at the same turn. She shifted, and Roman stirred behind her. Had she ever woken up before him before? The bed creaked with his slight movement, and his hand tightened instinctively around her. He’s awake.

In a low voice still thick with sleep, he said, “Mi amor.” The words went through her like heat, and her heart lurched. She rolled over slowly to face him, their eyes meeting on the pillows. He looked exhausted, like something had been ripped from him. His eyes scanned her face, and she wondered what they were looking for.

Silence stretched, and something almost tender stirred between them. The night had been… intense. Something had shifted. She felt it in her ribs, the tender ache between her thighs, and the strange stillness of the room. But why did he withhold himself from her for so long? And was it over?

He sat up and stretched his arms overhead. His phone buzzed on the nightstand, and he reached for it instinctively. She watched his face as he read. Nothing changed at first. Then his jaw shifted, a tightening so subtle she would have missed it months ago. He slowly flipped his legs off the side of the bed to stand.

"I’m firing Marco," he said and faced her. She sat up too quickly. The sheet slipped from her naked chest as he watched her. "You care if he lives."

She blinked, startled. "What?"

"You care," he repeated, advancing toward her. "You’re scared of what I might do to him. You flinched just now."

"Roman—"

"You gave him our money. You let him close."

She squeezed her eyes shut, remembering the anonymous payment she’d arranged to keep Marco’s daughter in school just before she’d gone into labour, a discreet scholarship through the foundation. 

She never told Roman because she knew he’d consider it inappropriate to get so involved in a staff member’s private life. But Marco didn’t even know either, she thought. It all happened so quickly, after she’d found his wife crying alone just inside their gates one day. They'd spoken woman-to-woman and arranged everything.

She made her voice as little as possible. "You say you love me, but you don’t trust me…"

He laughed once, low and humorless. "I don’t trust anyone!" He growled for perhaps the first time since she knew him. "That’s how I survived this long."

Survived what? she almost asked. The tears streamed down her eyes finally, and she wasn’t sure if it was sadness, fear, or utter confusion from the disorienting tenderness of the night compared to this.

Had she really put herself in danger by getting close to Marco? She thought hard about her last few interactions with him. Was that what she was doing, getting close to him without realizing? Her brows creased.

"What are you going to do to him?"

"Why do you care?" He walked to her and gripped her chin gently but firmly. "I already did it."

His eyes held hers. For a moment, something darker moved there, and the silence that followed was seismic, but she didn’t dare let her eyes leave his.

“Let me be clear. If you lie to me again…” He stopped. She saw the thought travel through him, change shape, retreat, and instead of finishing the sentence, he pulled her forward into his chest. The shift was so sudden her body forgot which emotion to hold. His arms wrapped around her tightly, his breath pressing into her hair.

“Just think,” he said into her crown, as though the rest had never formed. “Think before you act next time.”

He began rocking her gently, the movement rhythmic, almost paternal.

“Stay right here,” he murmured. “This is where you make sense.” Her heart pounded against his ribs.

“You feel that?” he continued softly. “How everything settles when you’re with me.”

And disturbingly, shamefully, it did. The fear that had spiked through for the last several minutes began to dissolve under the steadiness of his hold. The certainty in his voice felt like scaffolding. The adrenaline drained from her limbs, leaving her exhausted and pliable. She did not know whether she had just been threatened or forgiven. Perhaps both. Her body chose for her. She sagged against him and, still cradled there, slipped back into sleep.

“We’re leaving Barcelona this weekend,” he said, as if continuing a conversation they had never started.

Disoriented mid-sleep, she replied with what little strength she could muster, “Where?”

“You need a reset, mi amor,” he murmured into her ear, then his lips brushed her temple. “Capri. I want you where I can see you,” he said quietly. The location sounded like sunlight and something clean, like a gift. “No one asking anything from you but me.”

She nodded before she understood what she was agreeing to. And somewhere beneath the warmth of his arm and the promise of blue water and marble terraces, something in her folded itself smaller, grateful to be held.

The Suarez Myth: Chapter 9

At dawn, Saoirse’s feet were numb. 

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

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

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

Her head ached, and when she entered the nursery again, the air was still at 22°. The twins were already fed, their tiny forms wrapped in matching linen. Lisa looked up from arranging bottles. “You were awake again last night, Señora?”

Saoirse paused. “Yes.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

+

The staff always knew everything before she did. 

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

Saoirse blinked, surprised. “Bibiana?”

“Sí, señora. She is alone.”

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

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

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

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

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

“You’re alone,” Bibiana asked.

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

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

Saoirse smiled faintly. “Yes.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Bibiana didn’t rush to fill the pause. “That’s how large houses are meant to feel. Stillness is very valuable.”

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

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

Saoirse flushed. “I didn’t mean—”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Okay,” was all Saoirse could manage.

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

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

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

Saoirse swallowed. “You make it sound easy.”

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

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

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

“I’ll try,” Saoirse said.

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

“Of course,” Saoirse mumbled.

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

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

Saoirse stood frozen.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sleep didn’t come.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The house moved around her with its usual precision.

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

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

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

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

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

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

They called it wellness, but it was calibration, ensuring she still fit the mold Roman preferred. Later, a chauffeured drive through the estate with Emilio in the front passenger seat, cypress shadows flickering across her reflection in the glass.

The nurse, the priest, the air itself, all of it was disciplined and curated.

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

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

Sleep didn’t come.

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

+

She couldn’t remember how many days had passed.

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

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

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

He turned toward the main house and stopped.

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

The Señora.

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

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

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

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

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

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

When he turned back, the house was perfect again.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Her chest tightened, a tear rolled down one eye.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“She’s sleeping.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

+

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Lucia groaned. “Ay Dios mío.”

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

Every head lifted.

“That far?”

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

They all fell silent in a way that carried meaning.

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

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

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

“This is different,” Lisa whispered.

Marta, who sat at one corner of the large kitchen island silently reviewing household paperwork, always hesitant to talk about their employers, chipped in for the first time that night, “Since the twins arrived.” Her voice grew soft. “…and since Señor been going on these longer trips, she drifts.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Suarez Myth: Chapter 8

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

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

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

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

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

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

“I’ll call when I land.”

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

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

“Then miss it.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Saoirse shook her head. “Not yet.”

Marta nodded and left.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Source: Pinterest

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

The words hung there.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

+

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

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

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

“Yes, sir.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

At 8 am, he was in the tower that bore his family’s crest, thirty floors of mirrored restraint. He felt that quiet satisfaction Allegra used to call providence. She’d walked these halls once, her voice low, her smile precise, speaking to his father’s secretaries as though bestowing grace. He’d inherited her calm, people said. They never mentioned or simply didn’t know that calm could also be quiet cruelty practiced to perfection.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

He liked watching people perform their usefulness.

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

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

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

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

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

At 22:00, he typed a message:

Everything all right?

Five minutes later, she replied: 

Yes. 

It’s quiet as always.

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

Later, dinner with the Swiss finance minister over cigars, brandy, and polite corruption. 

Four men in bland T-shirts and pants sat in the private room at the back of the hotel restaurant with walnut paneling. The faint burn of smoke had already sunk into the walls from decades of similar evenings. The minister laughed too loudly at his own jokes, and spoke in polished half-sentences, the sort that allowed retreat if necessary. Roman matched him. There was a rhythm to these evenings that sounded like pause, concede, retract, or chess played with soft gloves. 

They spoke of bond spreads, a refinery expansion that would “benefit both corridors,” but what about regulatory timing? The minister held his cigar between two careful fingers, smoke unspooling in disciplined ribbons. Numbers were discussed without ever being spoken plainly. Roman inclined his head at the right intervals. It was the slow choreography of men who understood exactly how much to concede without ever conceding anything. The brandy was warm and expensive and unnecessary.

Someone joked about Roman’s club victory, and Roman smiled, finally. He knew the exact revenue bump it had generated, down to the decimal. He could see the numbers as clearly as the crystal in his glass, the merchandise uplift, broadcast shares, post-match traffic, a sponsorship clause that would quietly adjust itself upward, the uptick in hospitality bookings, too. The stadium had been full. It always was when they won at home. 

He said nothing. It was vulgar to speak in commas or translate joy into figures at a dinner table. It was enough that he knew.

When the glasses rose for a toast, he thought briefly of Saoirse, her hair loose that morning, the way she’d said then miss it. The words had almost moved him, but she’d agreed to let him go too easily. She always did.

Something else flickered, another morning in Barcelona. Saoirse was barefoot in the courtyard, hair loose, unpinned, one hand resting against the stone balustrade, saying she would miss him. The way she’d said it lightly, almost apologetically, not accusingly or even theatrically, made him… soft. He had kissed her temple. The ease of it lingered longer than the taste of the brandy.

She was his safe space to return to when the world and all that he was building for himself got overwhelming. She was perfect. He thought of her in pale light, the thin strap of her dress slipping from one shoulder, saying she would miss him. The image, the sound of her voice, kept him strong through his more brutal business moves.

Just last month, in a glass tower overlooking the Rhône, he had listened while the Valcárcel brothers—third-generation shipping magnates from Bilbao who still spoke of Franco-era port concessions, invoking their grandfather’s glory—tried to salvage their shipping arm. They spoke of how they had workers whose fathers had unloaded the same docks.

Roman waited patiently until they finished. Then he said, “Sentiment is expensive. You can’t afford it.” After all, nostalgia did not refinance debt. 

Javier, efficient as ever, slid the revised term sheet that had three points shaved from the brothers’ leverage ratio, collateral restructured through Esteban’s holding vehicle, voting rights diluted under a technicality his legal arm had spotted in the old Aragón charter, across the table without looking up. 

The eldest Valcárcel’s hands trembled as he reached for the pages. “We built that port,” he said, voice cracking despite himself.

Roman did not raise his own. “No,” he replied. “Old Sonny (their grandfather) did. You just inherited it.” The room went still.

Marcela was there with them. She did not intervene, she rarely needed to, but her presence was enough. The Valcárcels had grown up hearing “Suarez” spoken alongside Ferrara steel and de Witt private banking, families who survived wars by bending first and consolidating after. The Suarez name had long ago learned how to remove control; Lindholm & Söner private equity had folded the same way after the sovereign crisis, and Kovačević Estates, when the numbers stopped flattering them. Pride dissolved quickly when liquidity tightened.

When the youngest Valcárcel brother bristled, Roman leaned forward and told him, almost gently, that pride was not a currency that markets recognized. 

By noon, their flagship port concession at Santander was his. Their name would remain engraved above the port authority doors and preserved in the press release, but they were removed from control. Everything else had changed hands. Javier handled the calls; Esteban routed the acquisition through a discreet Luxembourg conduit; other old families took the hint.

Hausmann Maritime recalibrated without public protest, as they had during the Baltic freeze. Cattaneo preferred acquisition to conflict; they learned that lesson in 1943. Lindholm simply moved their capital temporarily overnight. All the old families survived by bending early. And Suarez always consolidated.

They were not the loudest family in Europe.

They were simply the ones who financed things and owned the infrastructure after the loud family collapsed.

Roman left the building having broken no laws, but secured an empire’s throat with a signature, thinking fleetingly how the cool stone of Barcelona would feel under Saoirse’s bare feet. 

The particular clarity he felt when a system yielded cleanly under pressure, when resistance proved predictable, and he had been right about where to press, lingered with him. In the elevator’s mirrored walls, his reflection looked unchanged. He thought only of Saoirse in Barcelona light, her voice gentle as she told him she would miss him, and the contrast steadied him.

He often told himself that if she ever looked at him and truly insisted he stay longer, he might reconsider. If she pressed harder, if she demanded, he would respect it. He was not his father. He was not threatened by strength. He pictured her insisting.

But the image was strangely blank, and the thought settled uneasily.  

Now in Geneva, he remembered, instead, that other evening after he’d flown her into Madrid, invited her into the office, mere months after the twins were born. She had climbed into bed in that silk slip he once said looked like moonlight, kissed his shoulder, and said she missed him. He had been reading. He remembered the exact sentence he’d been on when she kept demanding his attention.

“I’ve been thinking for everyone lately. It’s exhausting,” he’d responded, not looking up.

She had grown very quiet after that. He had not meant to wound her, only to correct the pull. He disliked being tugged at when he was already stretched thin. But she stopped reaching as often after that.

When she had reached toward him too openly, he had stepped back. When she faltered, he steadied her by narrowing the options. When she had burned beneath water that was too hot, he had called it theatrics. He did not connect these things. He only knew that when she moved easily within the boundaries he set, the air felt cleaner. If she ever pushed in a way that threatened anything, truly threatened it, he believed he would accommodate her, but he never tested that belief.

Amancio had ruled through fear and fists. Roman was proud of his own refinement. He never raised his voice or struck Saoirse. He couldn’t even imagine doing that.

The suite upstairs was arranged before he arrived. It always was. The sheets were ironed flat enough to erase any suggestion of prior use, drawn so tight they held the light differently. White lilies stood in a narrow glass vase on the console, his mother’s preference maintained by habit even abroad, the staff’s unspoken homage. He could not remember requesting them; he had never done so. They remembered these things without being told because they had long ago learned that memory was rewarded. They’d mostly replaced the tradition with the roses Saoirse preferred in Barcelona, but he still preferred his mother’s lilies around him everywhere else. They appeared wherever he stayed, in every country, exported faithfully across continents. His mother’s preference had become policy. Order as both inheritance and insulation.

He set his watch beside his phone, parallel to the edge of the desk, adjusting it once so the leather strap aligned precisely with the grain of the oak desk. 

His grandmother had not been orderly in the same way. She was already in her 90s in his earliest memory of her, yet he’d never known a fiercer woman. No one mistook her age for frailty. His daughter carried her name now, and he sometimes wondered whether that had been sentiment or self-instruction, hope that something of her fierceness might pass on.

Mariana Suarez had been fire barely contained. 

Her husband had died when Amancio himself was a boy, and to keep his fortune thriving for her boy, her only child, she never remarried. The estates under her supervision were immaculate. Roman had once watched her dismiss a housekeeper for moving a vase three inches off its line. She filled rooms without raising her voice. Staff trembled because nothing escaped her. Amancio had inherited her intensity but none of her control. Where she tightened, he struck. Where she assessed, he erupted.

Allegra had chosen something else entirely. Perfection with edges aligned, emotions flattened, and noise reduced to non-existence. Roman had grown up inside that stillness like a boy inside glass.

He did not often think of his grandmother at night. She belonged to afternoons, sun on stone, long corridors, the weight of air that did not dare stir.

He was eight the summer he understood the house did not belong to his father. Mariana sat at the head of the dining table. No one else would occupy it before she arrived. Her hands were small and veined, heavy with rings. When she lifted a glass, conversation stilled without instruction.

Amancio entered late that evening. Roman remembered the sound first, a door striking the wall harder than necessary. The laughter from his father’s throat was too loud and already edged. He had brought guests, men from families they always mingled with. Mariana looked at him once, slowly, the way she looked at accounts that did not balance.

“You were expected at seven,” she said with no anger or elevation in tone.

The guests shifted. Someone cleared their throat.

Amancio smiled in a way that did not reach his eyes. “Business does not answer to dinner bells.”

“Business answers to ownership,” she replied, and there was silence for long after.

Roman watched his father’s jaw tighten in reaction to the exposure. He turned to the nearest servant, a young man barely older than a boy, and corrected him sharply for an imagined misplacement of cutlery. The reprimand was precise, cutting, but entirely disproportionate. The servant’s hands trembled. Mariana simply adjusted her napkin and began eating. Roman learned that power was safest when it did not need to move. And men who could not dominate upward would find somewhere else to press.

Later that night, he heard glass break in his parents’ wing. Allegra did not come down the next morning. The lilies in the drawing room were replaced before noon.

The city beyond the glass walls of his suite moved in orderly veins of light, pulses of red and white, traffic threading through wet streets. He loosened his collar and stood there on the edge of the infinite living room suite, listening to the low mechanical hum pulsing below like a heart that underpinned everything from elevators and ventilation to distant engines. Systems inside systems.

He did not consider that memory of his grandmother an origin. It was simply a fact. His father had been large in public and restless in private. His grandmother had been small but immovable. Allegra had chosen perfection as if stillness itself could absorb force.

Tomorrow afternoon would see him back in Madrid, and by nightfall, Singapore for ten days of investor summits, refinery audits, bilateral meetings over an Eastern Corridor expansion, and quiet insistence. The work required his presence, and entire ventures hinged on it. He knew he’d promised to return to Barcelona soon, but he’d delayed this trip twice already. Some timelines did not bend simply because he had newborns. Schedules did not respond to sentiment.

The twins.

They were still so new, their presence unsettlingly fragile in a way he did not enjoy examining. Their expressions were still unfamiliar to him, so he pictured them as scale. The weight of one against his forearm, the way their heads seemed disproportionate and breakable at the neck. They were so small in the crook of an arm that he found himself holding them too carefully, as if the wrong angle might undo something irreversible. They would be asleep by now. 

Infants were disorder disguised as softness. They altered the air of a house, disrupting sleep, temperature, and the very rhythm of life. They wailed. Doors opened more often. Voices lowered, then rose. Schedules bent. He pictured them again, their small mouths opening in sleep, fists curled. He disliked how vulnerable they appeared. It required even more vigilance. Even with the staff in place, the nurses and nannies on rotation, Lisa making the expert pediatric decisions, he preferred Saoirse close to them. She steadied the rhythm of the house, the quiet order he’d built around them. She softened rooms without distorting them. Even when she faltered, she did not disturb the air. 

He remembered the same night with the shower, her skin flushed an angry pink that made his blood boil, her collarbones glowing in the low light. He could still hear his own even, measured voice, the words he meant as instruction. Afterward, she stopped taking long showers when he was home.

The twins were too new to travel. Barcelona was safer. Barcelona, too, did not disturb the air. The villa did not react to the disruption. Just like Saoirse, it contained expectation with its thick walls and measured light, its corridors long enough to swallow sound. It was the family seat, and it was walled against excess, designed to endure centuries.

Bibiana liked to remind them that Suarez heirs began there. Roman found himself agreeing more often lately. The other homes were porous. They attracted too much motion and too many interruptions; too many entrances, too much glass, and so, too many variables. Barcelona remained constant. The floors did not creak, and the temperature held. It did not shift when the winds changed. That was why heirs began there. Bibiana was right. 

And Saoirse belonged there. Barcelona was still, and he wanted Saoirse still, the twins at her side, the house orderly, the days measured. He wanted, needed, to return to that same peace every time, and peace required discipline.

He would tell her, perhaps when they spoke next, that she could start travelling again, gradually, once the twins were older. A year off was reasonable. She could have a luncheon after, an exhibition, something small, quiet, to ease her back into the world. There was no urgency. The world would wait. There was no need to hurry her back into noise. She could come to Madrid more often for something structured, an afternoon engagement. For now, it was better that she remained stable for the twins and to recover her strength. 

Again, he imagined her asking for more, for Como, perhaps, or her London. He imagined himself agreeing. The image held for a moment this time.

The last time she tried to leave a meeting early after he’d brought her in, asked her to sit beside him, to be visible, she had excused herself a few minutes in. Later, he found her in the bathroom, clinging to the porcelain sink, white as her skin. She was often a nervous wreck. He knew the answer in practice, even if he preferred not to name it.

He poured himself a measure of bourbon he wouldn’t finish. He let the cold lowball sit in his hand and checked the time. Barcelona was an hour behind. The twins would be asleep. Saoirse, perhaps, walking the halls again, the way Marta said she sometimes did. He’d never told her to stop. He liked knowing she still moved through his space while he was away. Like proof of gravity, it steadied him, everything about her did. Her footsteps in corridors built by better men long dead suggested a quiet continuity that felt like nothing essential could shift while he was gone. He found it necessary, her movement without departure.

When they first met, of course, he’d noticed her face immediately, that mild beauty. But what struck him most was her lack of friction, that absence of resistance. 

She did not compete for space in a room. She did not interrupt or rush to fill silence. She listened as though nothing in her required negotiation, and gave him a sense of being understood without being challenged. She listened as if the information itself mattered, not the advantage of hearing it first. It had been… restful. Her receptivity steadied him. Her simplicity soothed him.

She was so intelligent, yet she wasn’t grasping, argumentative, or ambitious in the way the women he grew up with were. The women of his childhood sharpened themselves against men. He had grown up around women who rearranged rooms. Saoirse was different. She was softness without demand. She did not rearrange a room simply by entering it. Saoirse did not move vases or confront those who moved them. If he left for three days, she adjusted. If he extended it to five, she adjusted again. When he told her Barcelona was better for the twins, she agreed before the explanation was complete. 

There were brief, almost imperceptible moments when the smoothness of her agreement pressed against him like thin ice, a surface too unbroken. He would find himself provoking small reactions, a delayed reply, a change of plan at the last minute, watching. She rarely protested. She trusted him.

He had not realized, at first, how quickly he began to calibrate himself against her equilibrium. If she was calm, the house felt aligned. If she was unsettled, something in him misfired, a low irritant he preferred to correct immediately. When she seemed distant, which happened rarely, but enough that he noticed, something in the structure of his thoughts shifted slightly out of place. So he would correct it with a suggestion framed as concern.

The invitations she declined were wise decisions. The trips postponed were sensible. The articles she stopped writing were unnecessary distractions. He was only streamlining her life, protecting her from scrutiny and exhaustion, from the world. There were friends who introduced noise, news cycles that agitated her, projects that pulled her attention outward. She was happier this way. She certainly looked it. She was less anxious, more serene and grateful. 

He lay down in the immaculate bed at nearly two in the morning. In the dark, the lilies gave off a faint, sterile sweetness that thinned as the room cooled. Roman lay on his back, eyes open, watching the faint line of light beneath the curtain where the city still moved. He remembered his mother’s Tuscany drawing room smelling the same way. Nothing decayed there without being replaced immediately. Allegra had believed that if everything remained in its place, nothing could explode. Amancio had proven otherwise.

Roman had chosen something else.

When Saoirse’s skin flushed red beneath the bedroom light from that hot shower, when she excused herself from a meeting he had positioned her in, he had felt the faintest echo of that dining room with his father and grandmother. A shift in structure, a misalignment he had to adjust and would keep adjusting when needed. 

The lilies held their shape. Nothing in his suite was out of place. The room breathed at a regulated temperature. In Barcelona, the vents would whisper at precisely 22°, the same calibrated air, the same invisible current, the twins breathing, Saoirse somewhere within the walls, moving from one quiet room to another. It was his job to preserve her innocence. 

He folded his hands over his chest for a moment before turning to his side. He closed his eyes, waiting for sleep to take him. Sleep came without dreams, held in place by the quiet satisfaction that everything, for now, remained exactly where he had left it.

+

Four years ago. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

He paused, considering. “Yes.”

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

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

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

“London. Originally Newcastle.”

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

“She doesn’t care about that.”

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

He said nothing.

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

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

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

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

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

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

He held her gaze. “Nothing.”

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

“She’s not like that.”

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

“You underestimate her.”

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

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

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

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

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

He didn’t answer. 

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

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

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