The Suarez Myth: Chapter 6

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

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

+

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The twins were sleeping when the phone rang.

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

Nina.

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

“Hi, stranger.”

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

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

“Neither. Just… quiet morning.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Fine, how?”

“The usual way.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Twins will do that.”

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

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

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

Nina stilled. “Months since…?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“You know exactly what I mean.”

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

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

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

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

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

“About what?” Nina asked softly.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“I already have someone who brings me coffee.”

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

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

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

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

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

A soft knock interrupted her thoughts.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Saoirse nodded. “I know.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

+

She tried to write.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

+

It was 3:11 a.m.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Marco saw it too.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Suarez Myth: Chapter 3

Year one.

The Madrid house knew, the rooms knew, and so did the people paid to keep the silence tidy. People like their housekeepers, drivers, executive assistants, nannies, chefs, who had worked with the Suarez family for years and were never invited to speak. They watched everything and formed quiet theories, truths no one else was positioned to see.

They all knew that it looked like a fairytale between the latest Suarez Mr and Mrs, but the walls were too clean, the air too still, the silence too heavy. Her eyes always said, Help me, but don’t speak.

Isabella was the head housekeeper of their Madrid home, the woman who kept the household running while teaching Saoirse how to be the madame of it. 

Isabella thought Roman loved Saoirse like a trophy, a glass one that needed careful, constant polishing.

Isabella saw Saoirse as quiet and very sweet. But, like someone trying not to be caught off guard, she always looked… prepared. Even at breakfast, always in silk, always listening more than speaking.

Roman, she’d known for a decade. He was uncharacteristically gentle with Saoirse, yes, but it was… rehearsed. 

Once, Isabella went into their rooms to check the linens and found a used lipstick tissue with a shaky handprint on it. Every time she thought about that tissue, it was to remember how soft the smudge looked.

Saoirse’s lipstick was something she’d started wearing carefully, always in soft shades, after the honeymoon. Something for show, for control.

The shaky handprint pressed over the tissue wasn’t on purpose. She was grabbing for the sink, the edge of the counter, the edge of reality. A physical echo of something slipping just… holding herself up, wiping something off, leaving a trace of the moment she almost didn’t hold it together.

The dinner was small, just 12 people at the Madrid estate, art world types and minor royals. Roman told the story again about how he met her “scribbling in a bar with a notebook and no lipstick, like someone who’d escaped a convent.”

They all laughed. He kissed her hand and said, “She’s mine now, but softer and shinier.” She smiled. Of course, she did. But she didn’t know exactly why the smile shook inside her.

Later that night in the bathroom, she locked the door, stood in front of the mirror. The lighting was too golden, too forgiving. She reached for the lipstick, a soft rose shade, and applied it with practiced grace, then stopped. The night was over. The dinner was done. Everyone, gone.

Her lips trembled. Her hands, too. She grabbed a tissue and pressed it hard to her mouth to erase. But the color didn’t come off neatly. It smeared a muted smudge across the tissue like something unfinished. Her hand slipped. She gripped the marble counter to steady herself, and the tissue crumpled in her palm.

She opened it, and there it was, her lipstick, her print. She stared at it, at how it looked like a note she never meant to write. She left it on the edge of the sink, maybe out of wanting someone to know, to see her, without her having to speak.

She walked out of the bathroom. The hallway outside their bedrooms was silent, but Roman’s voice drifted faintly from the wine room. She smiled at nothing, fixed her dress, and returned to him like a ghost in a silk sheath.

+

Soon, they were living out of multiple Suarez homes, seven of them, in multiple countries. 

Seven homes, seven versions of the same story told in marble, glass, and curated silence. Saoirse could list them chronologically, geographically, by mood or memory. But they were always ordered the same way in her heart, from the one that felt most like hers, to the one that never was.

He had taken her straight to the Lake Como house for the first time after he proposed. A 19th-century restored villa on the water with terraced gardens, private dock, silk-upholstered rooms that smelled of lemon oil and afternoon light. 

On the dock, barefoot, a glass of Franciacorta in her hand, his arms wrapped around her from behind, the sun had just folded into the lake like it belonged there, when he whispered into her ear if she liked it here. She said yes because, for a moment, she belonged there too, she had felt the belonging.

The villa was older than either of them, but restored with reverence. She always wrote her thoughts there in longhand before the children came, before the quiet turned to ache. There were days she wandered out barefoot with wet hair and no phone, and no one asked her where she’d gone.

It was the only house that never tried to perform. It just was, and so was she. For a while, it felt like love lived there without needing permission. It was softness and isolation, a place of beauty, the type she never believed could become a cage, a gilded cage.

London, the house in Belgravia he had let her decorate herself when they were only married for three months. It was his way of allowing her back into her own world. 

She’d given it cream walls, velvet sofas, art books that didn’t match but she’d stacked anyway, plush fabrics, some warmth. People came through it often, for foundation board meetings, quiet dinners, interviews, and more and more rarely, Nina and Sinead for social calls. When she sat at the head of the dining table there, she did not feel ornamental.

She hosted a poetry showcase once. Roman came late, watched from the hallway, arms folded, amused. He let her keep it for herself. The house, the circle, the sense of self. There were cameras, and Emilio, his junior secretary who was becoming hers, was always nearby. But the townhouse was hers enough to pretend she wasn’t watched here more than anywhere else. 

This was her soft power base because even when she felt watched, she felt seen the way Roman had made her feel when they first met.

New York City. Just once, early in their marriage, she read from Blue Milk in a bookstore in Tribeca. The apartment was high up, glass-edged, masculine in its sparseness. But she stood at that window afterward with a glass of something cold and felt taller than she was.

Roman flew them back the next day. He said there was an emergency at the Madrid office, but she always wondered if it was the applause or the man who asked her to sign his copy of her book with a personal note. It was a glimpse of freedom, brief and then gone. Still, she kept the memory, one of the few she hoarded selfishly, like what could’ve been. It reminded her of a version of herself she once believed she could protect. 

He maintained the apartment as an investment or to stay during brief public appearances in the States.

The palatial family villa in the hills of Sarrià-Sant Gervasi, Barcelona, was still the Suarez fortress, their official home, the place that placed her firmly under Amancio and Allegra’s gaze even long after they passed.

It was in the Barcelona villa that she gave birth to their children because that was where all Suarez children have always been born. The place with the nursery wing, the wine cellar stocked enough to gift a small country, the underground panic room no one spoke about. The limestone floors chilled her bones, even in summer.

It was beautiful, of course. Of course. Art hand-selected by private curators of a century ago, everything scented and soundproofed. She could walk the halls for twenty minutes and not see a single person. Roman called it peace. She sometimes called it drift. She lived in its wings. She was presented in its dining room, but she never stood at the center.

The old duplex penthouse in the 8th arrondissement near Avenue Montaigne, Paris, was always empty, even though every member of the distant Suarez household technically had access to it. It held mirrored corridors, all-black kitchens, floor-to-ceiling windows, the kind of place you photographed but didn’t live in. 

Roman hosted investors there when he wanted a place more cultured, more neutral, than his Madrid penthouse. Saoirse walked the Champs-Élysées alone, took long baths, bought perfume. She once tried to write in the black-and-glass study but stopped when she caught her reflection in the window. She looked like someone else.

He once told her the apartment was hers, no longer free for his extended family to access, but only when he was overseas. When he was there, she knew better than to ask to come. It was his satellite, often left empty.

Tuscany was Allegra’s house, her dowry inheritance. A rustic countryside villa with vineyards. It was her house even after death. The linens smelled of her. The kitchen spoke a dialect of life Saoirse never quite picked up. She walked through it like a ghost, nodding at staff who smiled with loyalty that did not include her.

She didn’t dislike it. She just never arrived there.

They stayed two nights at a time, sometimes three. Roman seemed younger there, or maybe just quieter. He showed her his mother’s piano once, then never mentioned it again.

They lived primarily in Madrid. “The mausoleum,” she called it once, and he didn’t laugh. 

It had cold floors, dark wood, no windows that opened. It had been in the Suarez family for centuries, built for family gatherings but not the warm type, the type that felt more like board meetings, overnight deals, people who landed and left.

Before the wedding, she visited once. He showed her the cold stone kitchen like he was giving a tour. She told him it felt like a hotel lobby. He didn’t respond. They slept there that night. It was the only place where she never once unpacked a suitcase. Yet it was the place he chose for them to live primarily after the wedding.

Seven homes. Seven selves.

She wondered sometimes what the maids thought of her, watching her drift through rooms she didn’t own, folding herself into the design. She hoped they saw her as graceful. She feared they saw her as dull.

+

His increasing absences felt romantic. There was a rhythm to them, the hush of a departing car before dawn, the soft shh of his suit jacket sleeve against her arm as he leaned down to kiss her forehead, the scent of his cologne lingering in the sheets like the aftertaste of a shared dream. 

He always left notes tucked into her books, slipped under her coffee cup. 

Or

When he returned, it was with gifts and gravitas, new rubies wrapped in velvet, stories from boardrooms in Singapore or dinners in São Paulo. She’d laugh and pour them wine and sit on the floor between his legs while he recounted market shifts like fables.

But then, time began to stretch.

It was a slow, sun-smeared afternoon at the villa in Como. The lake glistened just beyond the terrace, its surface undisturbed except by the occasional boat passing far enough away to seem like a painting. 

Roman sat beneath the awning in loose linen, flipping through a financial journal with the deliberate slowness of a man who had nowhere urgent to be, a serious rarity Saoirse was learning to be grateful for. She came out of the kitchen barefoot, holding two glasses of wine.

“It’s not cold enough,” she said as she passed him his. “Sorry.”

Roman accepted the glass without looking up. “It’s fine.”

“You’ll say that even if it tastes like tea.”

“I’ve learned to pick my battles.”

She smiled a little and curled up on the cushioned lounger opposite him. The old Bose speaker was playing something quiet and orchestral, one of her playlists, she thought, though she barely remembered adding it. Roman preferred live music.

“I miss London sometimes,” she said.

He didn’t lift his head. “Because it gives you people to impress?”

Her brows pulled in slightly. Not hurt, just… surprised.

“Because I feel like I exist there,” she said carefully. “I chose the wallpaper in every room. Even the horrid one in the guest bathroom. It was the first time I made something mine.”

He folded his journal and finally looked at her. “You speak of it like it’s an empire.”

She gave a small shrug, eyes still on the lake. “Sometimes, it feels like my only one.”

Roman stood and walked toward the balustrade, glass in hand. The sunlight touched the collar of his shirt, casting golden light against his neck.

“You have everything here,” he said. “Peace, privacy, your own dock, no press, no interruptions.”

“And silence that grows teeth when you’re gone,” she said, trying hard not to sound accusatory.

He tilted his head like he was considering it. “In Madrid,” he said after a moment, “You don’t complain about silence.”

Saoirse leaned back into the cushions, stretching her legs out in front of her. “In Madrid,” she said, “You don’t stay long enough to notice it.”

Roman gave a soft huff of amusement and looked over his shoulder. “You think architecture owes you emotion.”

“No,” she said, more gently now. “But I think people do.”

He came back to her, glass nearly empty, and sat beside her. They were close now, shoulder to shoulder, legs brushing.

“Paris, then?” he asked, tilting his head toward her. “You want Paris next?”

“Not really.”

His eyebrows lifted slightly. “No?”

“I haven’t figured out who I’m supposed to be there,” she said. “I walk through those mirrored corridors and I catch my reflection too many times in one evening. And every time, it feels like I’m rehearsing someone I forgot I was meant to play.”

He laughed softly. “You’ve always looked good in that reflection.”

“That’s the problem,” she murmured. “It’s the one you prefer.”

He turned his face toward hers. “You’re very dramatic today. Are we speaking in poetry?”

“I’m not. I just...” She stopped, searching for the right words. “Sometimes, I wonder if you’d rather have a reflection than a person.”

Roman didn’t respond right away. Instead, he reached for her hand and laced his fingers through hers. His thumb ran slow circles against the back of her wrist. It was affectionate, thoughtful, almost apologetic.

“You make everything heavy,” he said quietly.

They sat like that for a while, watching the water shift and glimmer. A bird passed low across the lake. Somewhere in the nearby kitchen, a timer went off.

Later, over dinner on the terrace, they shared grilled fish and vegetables. The white wine had finally chilled. They spoke of an art exhibit in Milan, his thoughts on a new visionary joining the board, a poem she’d been turning over in her head. He told her he liked her hair pulled back like that.

“You should wear it like this in London,” he said. “When you host things.”

“I haven’t hosted anything in weeks.”

He frowned slightly. “Why?”

She shrugged. “I didn’t think you liked it.”

“I never said that.”

“You never need to,” she said, but smiled as she said it, turning it into something less dangerous. He reached across the table and ran a finger down the inside of her wrist. She let it linger.

That night in bed, she lay on his chest, her hand curled into the space beneath his ribs. The villa was silent, the lake barely audible beyond the walls.

“Do you remember New York?” she whispered.

Roman’s voice was low. “Of course.”

“That reading I did... the one where the man asked me to sign his book?” He gave a tired sound, half breath, half memory. “You went quiet in the car,” she said. “I never asked why.”

He didn’t answer for a while. “You’re still nursing that?”

“I’m not nursing,” she said. “I’m remembering.” He was silent again. “It was the last time I felt... unobserved.”

Roman shifted slightly beneath her, then exhaled. “You want invisibility now?”

“No,” she said. “I want to be seen without being studied.”

He sighed, kissed the crown of her head absentmindedly, gently. Then turned toward the bedside lamp and switched it off.

“Sleep, Saoirse.” 

She didn’t sleep, not immediately. He only called her Saoirse when he was irritated. Instead, she stared at the dark outline of the ceiling and thought about all the rooms they’d lived in. All the versions of herself she’d tried on. All the mirrors she’d smiled into, hoping he was behind them.

There was love, but some nights, it felt like loving him was singing into a canyon and hearing nothing back but your own voice, beautiful and echoing, but utterly alone.

+

In Barcelona, the walls held Roman’s silence like temperature made more stifling by his parents’ heavy presence. 

Amancio and Allegra were never in the same room or even wing as Saoirse, but always, she could hear their voices from somewhere just beyond, could feel every domestic decision they presided over as it trickled down through the army of staff to her designated space in the house.

On days he was away, she wandered through it with nowhere urgent to be. She never ran into anyone who wasn’t the most polite, taciturn staff member. There were no children to occupy her time. She would take breakfast on the terrace alone, run her fingers along the edge of the baby grand piano in the east room, read half a chapter in the drawing room, then forget what she’d read.

She sometimes opened his closets just to smell his shirts. Once, she called him at midnight just to hear his voice.

“You're okay?” he asked like it didn’t make sense that she’d call her husband like this.

“Of course,” she said, too quickly.

“I'm in meetings from morning until late. Let’s talk properly when I’m back.” But when he returned four days later, they never circled back. She didn’t remind him. He didn’t ask. It had just been to hear his voice anyway, and she had heard it.

Back on Lake Como again, the loneliness was more elegant.

She bathed in silence and tried to romanticize it. The way the light fell on the stone floor. The quiet lapping of water against the dock. She wrote useless sentences in notebooks she never finished, made up recipes and forgot them, practiced Spanish in the mirror.

Roman left her voice notes sometimes. He preferred them to texts.

“The Tokyo board liked the pitch. I mentioned you. They asked if you'd come next time.”

She saved them and played them on loop some days when the house was too still. She told herself it was love, that distance was love, absence was fond, work was love.

As they neared the end of their first year, Paris was the first place she stopped bothering to unpack. She’d arrive with a carry-on, wear the same three dresses, and spend hours watching the sky change colors through the floor-to-ceiling windows. Roman had art shipped there constantly, pieces she'd never seen before, or chosen.

“It’s an investment,” he once said when she asked who the artist was.

“So was I,” she replied, smiling. He hadn’t laughed.

By the time they stayed in London again, she was pregnant, softening in places he had once praised as angular, her ankles swelled, her belly refusing to hide. 

Roman didn’t say much about it. He kissed her forehead when she told him, and once, absentmindedly, the flat of his hand had rested against her mid-section before drifting away, like touching her too long there unsettled him, like he wanted the idea of fatherhood more than the sight of it.

The townhouse that was once her performance stage now felt like an echo chamber. She canceled two events that month. Roman called once.

“You need to be seen, Saoirse. We don’t vanish just because you’re growing round.”

That night, she stood in front of the mirror in the en-suite and held her tummy with both hands. 

“You’re not round,” she whispered to herself. “You’re real.”

Still, he traced poetry on her growing belly two months in, wept when he first heard two heartbeats at the private infirmary in the Barcelona family villa. It struck her, shook her, that it was the first time she’d ever seen him cry, ever.

+

As she found herself more and more in a different home, a different city, than Roman, Javier, his chief executive assistant, became a more visible fixture in their lives. He was the go-between, the connector who kept their lives united through logistics, arrangements, and precise matching of schedules.

To Javier, Roman referred to Saoirse as ‘perfect’ so often it stopped meaning anything. What he did know was that Roman loved to use her to sweeten meetings with difficult investors. He once told Javier soon after they were married, “Just have Saoirse drop in and say hello. She makes the room forget I’m the most dangerous man here.”

Late one afternoon in the main shareholders' boardroom at Suarez Group HQ, eight middle-aged men in suits, one elderly woman in a cotton kaftan, all major potential investors, a collective $200bn in net worth, and their translators, sat together at the table.

As they spoke three languages in low, tense tones, Roman at the head of the table stayed silent. Javier stood to the side, reading the energy shift.

The negotiation wasn’t going badly, but it wasn’t going easily, either. The Qatari prince pushed hard, a Catalan lawyer kept interrupting, Roman hadn’t blinked in 15 seconds. He nodded once at Javier.

Saoirse sat by the window of his vast office at the top of the building, feeling weighed down by the growing fetuses inside her, waiting for him to finish. They were in the same city for the first time in about a month, so she dropped by for a visit because she missed him, or maybe she just wanted to feel relevant to him beyond the house. Or maybe being newly pregnant for their first children and not being able to write a thing was making her extra needy.

Long ivory dress, no jewelry except her wedding ring, hair tucked behind her ears, she looked precisely how he liked. She was just waiting when Javier walked in. 

“He says you can come in, señora.”

She responded softly, “Into the board meeting?” She frowned. He nodded. “Am I interrupting?”

“No,” he lied.

The doors opened into the boardroom, and Saoirse walked in.

Roman stood and crossed to her. “Everyone, my wife. The better half of everything I try to be.” He chuckled. They murmured greetings. 

She smiled exactly enough and said extra softly, “Thank you for keeping him occupied. He tends to forget to eat on days like this.” Everyone laughed. The room warmed up like she’d let the sun in. 

Javier noticed one of the investors visibly relax as Saoirse placed a hand on Roman’s arm. Her solid gold and diamond ring caught the light. She didn’t speak again. She didn’t need to. 

When the Italian asked where she was from, “Ireland,” Roman answered for her, like he was a circus showman, and she, his latest human curiosity.

“Roman imports the rarest things.”

“Only the ones worth keeping.”

She stayed for exactly four minutes, said nothing of substance, and left the scent of lavender in the room. The men returned to their negotiations with softened jaws. She passed Javier as she left. He didn’t say anything at first, but then, so only she could hear, “You know, he calls you his secret weapon.”

She smiled but didn’t turn, didn’t stop walking away.

Roman closed the deal barely an hour later. As they rose, someone patted his shoulder and said, “She’s something special.” It was the 80-year-old banking mogul, a woman who’d just pledged the most investment in the room.

“She is,” Roman said. Javier glanced out the window, adding up the investor figures in his head.

Saoirse never spoke out of turn. She smiled, nodded, asked about people’s children. But once, after a meeting, this time with Sotheby patrons ahead of an art auction where Roman planned to acquire a rare painting connected to the British royal family’s founding fortune, Javier passed her in the hallway. She was staring at a different painting on the wall like it wasn’t even there at all, like she was staring through it. He asked if she was okay. 

She said, “I think I’ve been standing beside him for so long that people stopped seeing me.” 

Suddenly, she laughed, a gentle demure sound, and said it was a joke. Javier knew she wasn’t joking. They’d only been married about a year by then.

Roman never brought her in to contribute. He brought her to neutralize, to soften the room, to complement his power with beauty, to be the illusion of calm beside the storm he controlled. And Saoirse, still in the early fog of loving him, was only just realizing she was being used as atmosphere.

+

The jet landed in Milan at dusk weeks later. Saoirse had barely slept the night before, her nausea a steady tide, but Javier’s voice on the phone had been smooth and unwavering: “The señor requests your company at Como. I’ll arrange the car. We’ll keep it gentle.”

She knew better than to ask why now, after weeks without him. Roman never explained his summons. He simply made them happen.

As the chauffeur eased the car into the villa’s gravel drive, the house glowed with lamplight. Terraced gardens slipped down toward the lake, its surface reflecting a bruised purple sky. Staff waited in a quiet row at the door, heads bowed, uniforms precise. Lucia took Saoirse’s shawl without a word. Bianca offered her a glass of water on a silver tray she accepted with trembling hands.

Roman appeared at the threshold in loose linen, tan deeper than she remembered, and she wondered if his business trips had come with sun. He kissed her cheek, not her lips, not her belly. His cologne lingered as he turned smoothly toward the house, expecting her to follow.

Dinner was already laid on the terrace: grilled fish, fennel, salads dressed with lemon oil. He loved fish. A pianist, invisible somewhere in the house, was playing Chopin so softly it might have been a trick of the air. Javier stood at a discreet distance, tablet in hand, glancing between Roman and his buzzing phone.

Roman sat, poured her wine before remembering. He paused, exchanged it for sparkling water, and said, “How was the flight?”

“Fine,” Saoirse said.

“You rested?”

“A little.”

He nodded and cut into his fish.

She wanted to tell him about the nausea, about the way her ankles swelled now when she stood too long, about the frightening little thud she sometimes felt at night, but his phone lit up, and he answered without hesitation. A board member in Singapore, numbers, percentages, asset transfers. His tone sharpened, smoothed, sharpened again.

Saoirse ate silently, listening to the language of money that rolled so easily from his tongue. Javier came forward once, murmured an update, then retreated again. Roman’s hand lifted mid-call, almost absentmindedly, to rest on Saoirse’s wrist. His eyes flicked to her, soft for a breath, then back to the conversation.

It was always like this, presence not dialogue.

When he hung up, he asked, “Did you walk in the gardens today?”

“I only just arrived,” she reminded him gently.

“Then tomorrow.”

She smiled faintly. “If it isn’t raining.”

“It won’t rain,” he said like he could decide the weather himself.

The pianist shifted into Debussy. The villa’s lamps glowed golden against the lake. Roman leaned back, watching her with that composed stillness she was now used to.

“You’re quiet tonight,” he said.

She set down her fork. “I’ve been quiet a lot.” Her chest tightened. After a long pause, “Do you like the baby names we chose?”

His gaze lingered on her belly, then lifted. “Names are just costumes. We’ll see what fits when the time comes.”

She nodded, and the staff appeared to clear plates, moving like ghosts, efficient and noiseless. One asked a question in Italian, something to do with her, presumably whether she wanted anything more, and Roman responded fluently on her behalf. She didn’t mind it. She couldn’t speak Italian after all.

Later, they walked through the gardens. Fireflies flickered near the cypresses, the lake lapping faintly below. Saoirse touched his arm, testing a confession. “Sometimes, I feel… I don’t know… Like I’ve disappeared into all these houses.” Roman stopped, looked down at her. “It feels lonely sometimes,” she continued.

His hand lifted, brushed her cheek. “Loneliness is only dangerous if you fight it.”

She bit her lip. “So I should… accept it?”

He smiled faintly. “It makes you untouchable.”

She wanted to argue that she didn’t want to be untouchable. She wanted to be touched, seen, spoken to, but his phone buzzed again, and Javier materialized like an extension of it, murmuring about Tokyo’s follow-up. Roman kissed her forehead and turned away, already answering.

Saoirse stood by the balustrade, watching the dark lake glimmer, clutching the rail as if it could anchor her.

When he returned, he slipped an arm around her waist, pulled her against him, kissed her hair. “You look tired. Come inside.”

They made love that night. It was skilled, consuming, but she cried afterward, silently, while his breathing steadied into sleep beside her. She didn’t know exactly when she started crying as a reaction to sex, but suddenly, it was a routine part of the process for her.

The next morning, she found Javier in the hall. He bowed his head politely. “The señor will leave after breakfast. He has meetings in Geneva, but he asked me to tell you he’ll return Friday.” But will he return here to Como or to Madrid or Barcelona or Tuscany? And where will I be when he does return?

She smiled, small and perfect, and thanked him. When she went back into their room, the bed was already stripped, the sheets gone, the linen folded away by the staff. The warmth of him had been erased, like the night itself had been another performance, reset before the next act.

+

Her first birthday as his wife was a small, manicured dinner party in Madrid. Staff poured wine. No one from her side of life attended. The guests were his family and friends and business associates, her stylists, and a few socialites who tagged her in the birthday posts, but she’d never had a private conversation with them ever.

Roman clinked his glass. “To the woman who made me believe in softness again.”

The table applauded. Saoirse smiled, but inside, she remembered Nina’s voice, her college mentor, her sister Sinead, her few London friends. All voices she no longer heard.

The Madrid house was too still the morning of their first wedding anniversary, a month later. Saoirse woke expecting nothing. Roman had been gone all week, shuttling between Paris and Geneva, and although Javier had hinted he’d return, she didn’t trust the hints anymore.

She moved through the rooms in silk, her hand unconsciously holding her belly. The swell was visible now, still delicate, but impossible to ignore. By dusk, she had resigned herself to solitude in their bedroom. Then she heard it, the soft creak of the great front doors opening downstairs, a voice she knew brushing repeatedly through the silence.

Her heart started. She descended barefoot, silk robe trailing, and found the main parlor transformed. Every lamp was extinguished, only candles glowed, lined on mantels, stairwells, the grand piano, flickering everywhere in slow constellations. The air smelled faintly of ink and paper.

On the center table, where normally sat polished silver and untouched decanters, were stacks of books, her books, rare first editions of poets she’d once whispered about to him in half-sentences, volumes in worn leather, volumes bound in cloth so exquisite they looked like miracles rescued from time, translations she thought no one remembered.

A small pile of notebooks, too, their spines untouched, Italian linen paper bound with twine, waiting for her to fill them, though she knew he wouldn’t want anyone else to see whatever she filled them with. He’d want them to be exclusively his, theirs.

Roman stood beside it all in dark, loose t-shirt and slacks, his gaze fixed on her as if waiting to see if she would cry, watching her with that intent stillness that made her feel like nothing else existed.

“You remembered,” she whispered, throat tight.

“You thought I’d forget today?” He smiled more softly than usual. “...that I forget anything you say?”

She crossed to the table, her hands hovering over the books, afraid to touch. The titles shimmered with proof that someone had been listening when she thought she was alone. She lifted a volume of Yeats in soft green binding, the exact edition she had once told Nina they’d never afford. Beside it was a slim Plath journal she had never been able to find in London.

“Where did you find these?”

“I had them gathered,” he said. No mention of cost or effort, as if the world simply bent to his request.

On the piano, she saw one more thing. A slim, silver-framed photograph of her at the bar in Madrid where they first met, scribbling in her notebook, unaware of him. She had never seen the photo before. She didn’t remember looking quite so interesting.

Her throat tightened. “Who took this?”

“I did,” he said simply, crossing to her. “The night I knew you’d change my life.” She couldn’t shift her eyes from the picture. This was her through his eyes.

It was beautiful. It was suffocating. It was both. Tears pricked. She felt seen, the girl who had once written at a bar, raw and unguarded, not the polished version of herself he so often curated and presented. For a moment, she believed he loved that first girl still. 

Roman cupped her jaw, kissed her with unusual softness like she was something both precious and fragile, then pulled back to glance down at her belly. His smile faltered for half a beat before he recovered. His eyes softened in a way that made her forgive the retreat. 

“You’re still the girl in that picture. Just… more.”

She nodded, but she wasn’t sure she believed him.

He took her hand and guided her to a low couch, where she’d only just noticed dinner had been laid out on trays instead of at the formal dining table. It was made up of simple, elegant things like figs drizzled with honey, roasted pink salmon, small porcelain bowls of clam paella, pears poached in wine. For once, no audience, no toast, just them, and they sat close together.

“You hate eating like this.” She laughed softly. “It’s too casual for you.”

“This isn’t casual,” he said. “It’s ours. It’s the first time in a long time I’m lucky enough to have you to myself.” This confused her for a second because she wasn't aware anything kept him from spending more alone time with her.

Later in their private sitting room, he read to her by candlelight from one of the notebooks he had filled for her with her words. Fragments of poems she’d abandoned, letters she’d written and never sent, passages copied from journals she’d left lying open. She rested her head on his shoulder as he read, and felt more peace than she'd ever felt... ever. His voice gave her words weight she never imagined they could have. 

She never knew he noticed her random writings. Her heart squeezed. She pressed a hand to her mouth, trembling with a mixture of awe and unease. “You kept these?”

“I kept you.” 

He kissed her again when he was done, deepening it fast this time, urgent, the way he kissed her in their first married months. 

In their bedroom, he undressed her irreverently, pulling silk from her shoulders, scattering her hairpins on the floor. Candles glowed faintly in the next room as he pressed her against the sheets.

Their lovemaking was almost desperate, his mouth at her throat, his voice low and raw when he whispered her name. She clung to him, nails sharp at his back, surrendering to the weight of him and the way he seemed determined to pull her back into his orbit entirely. When she broke, he didn’t let her fall, he chased her, caught her, pulled her under again.

Afterwards, they lay tangled in sweat and silk, his hand heavy at the base of her spine, her face pressed against his chest. He kissed her temple like he had just remade her. 

When she lay beside him in their vast bed, belly curved between them, he brushed her hair back with the gentlest hand and murmured unhurriedly, “You see? I give you everything you ever wanted. I’ll put it all at your feet. You’ll never have to search. It’s all here.”

And she smiled with a swell of love so sharp it hurt, even as she thought of the bookshelves in the little Oxford library she once adored, shelves she used to wander without anyone watching. 

It was the sweetest night of their marriage, but it was also the clearest reminder that her wants would always come curated by him. Only much later, as sleep tugged at her, did she wonder why every version of her life, even the one she used to write for herself, had to be kept in his hands to exist. Still, she fell asleep believing she had never been more wanted.

+

The next morning, she woke to the sound of him dressing. The morning light spilled over the Madrid bedroom, pale and forgiving.

Roman stood by the window in a slate suit, cufflinks already fastened with economical grace, his watch glinting in the new light. The books and notebooks had been cleared away, the candles extinguished. For a moment, their anniversary night felt like a dream staged only for her.

Saoirse lay propped against the pillows, long ginger hair undone, the sheet drawn loosely over her. He bent and kissed her temple, and his hand brushed her thigh beneath the sheet, the heat of last night still clinging there, pulsed between them.

She thought he would pause, come back to her, touch her, say something about the night they’d shared, about the curve of her body under his hands, about the child, children, growing inside her. But his voice was already elsewhere, absently murmuring, “I’ll be late tonight.”

Half-asleep, she shifted toward him, her fingers catching the edge of his jacket, almost tugging, almost asking him to stay. The words hovered, Don’t go yet, but she swallowed them before they could leave her lips.

“Where are you going?” she asked instead.

“Office, meetings.” He adjusted his tie and added almost as an afterthought, “My parents are coming to Madrid for the week. We’ll host them here.”

Saoirse blinked, her heart stuttering. “This week?”

“Yes, probably today.” He smoothed his jacket, glanced in the mirror. “Isabella will help you prepare.” 

Saoirse shifted, her hand resting lightly on her small swell. His gaze slid right past it like a polite subject to be avoided. He crossed to the dresser, collected his phone. “The Tokyo call is late evening, don’t wait for me at dinner.” His voice was even, brisk.

And just like that, he was gone, the door clicking softly shut. The house was quiet again. Saoirse lay in bed, the sweetness of the night before dissolving like sugar in water, but the heat of it still glowing faintly inside her. 

With her other hand, she reached across the sheets to where he had been, fingers curled into the hollow he left behind, clutching at linen still warm with his weight, imagining she could hold the night itself before it dissolved into daylight. 

Stay. Stay like you were last night.

Roman’s parents came that afternoon to break the illusion fully.

Amancio and Allegra arrived at the Madrid house with the ceremony of sovereigns. Staff lined the marble foyer in two silent rows, drivers unloaded cases of luggage so heavy it seemed they had come to move in rather than stay a week. Allegra wore widow’s black though her husband was very much alive. Amancio walked with a silver-tipped cane, his gaze a cold ledger tallying the house, the staff, Saoirse herself.

They embraced their son with dry kisses. When Roman turned to her, expectant, Saoirse leaned forward. Allegra’s cheek barely brushed hers, cool and perfumed like old violets.

With his parents installed like reigning ghosts, the house felt smaller, although it was cavernous. Saoirse moved through the rooms silently, obeying their unspoken codes of formality. 

Amancio, who could speak English but never did, dominated all the conversation in traditional Spanish, a relentless cascade, sharp and aristocratic, the kind where every rolled ‘r’ was like a gate slamming shut. Saoirse, whose lessons had faltered amid the chaos of travel and pregnancy, tried to answer. Her words stumbled. Her accent wavered. Allegra’s eyes always drifted away before she finished her sentences.

That night, Roman came to bed late as promised, after hours of hushed conversations in the library.

Saoirse slept in their bed alone through the next night. She slipped beneath the covers, her hand instinctively finding his side of the mattress already cool. She clutched the sheets there, bunching the silk in her fist, pretending to summon the warmth of him, the tender passion of their anniversary night. But the linen was cold and empty. The gesture felt foolish, almost childish, but she held on anyway.

The night after that, Roman told her gently, smiling over their evening wine, “You don’t have to keep embarrassing yourself in front of my family.” His voice was pitched almost ironically to soothe her. “I’ll handle all public conversation until you’re more confident.” It landed like a soft slap, the type that injected a pin-prick of poison she would feel for days.

Her brain started cataloguing the many times Allegra looked away from her mid-sentence, the way his father never slowed the pace or tone of his Spanish for her benefit, how Roman, too, always gently dismissed her mid-speech, as if anything spoken aloud was beyond her to attempt, sliding his hand lightly over hers at dinners to hush her without saying it.

One evening months ago, she’d tried to read Lorca to him in Spanish. Bright-eyed and nervous, she’d stumbled on a few lines. He smiled, corrected her pronunciation, then said, “You’re not ready to perform this. Maybe in a few years.”

The dismissal had tasted like mercy at the time. Now, the aftertaste was something different. She nodded, smiled, and sipped her wine. “Thank you,” she whispered.

The Suarez Myth: Chapter 1

Five years ago.

They met in Madrid, on his turf, when she was there for a writers' residency in January. She’d just turned 21 and was getting a kick out of graduating and leaving the country for the first time. She lived in a shared flat that smelled like citrus peel and burnt toast.

She’d just presented a poem at a small gallery. Five people clapped, and one of them had actually coughed first. She left before the wine got warm, to duck into a nice dim bar across the street, head low, journal tucked under her arm, her grey London Metropolitan University sweater too big.

She wasn’t dressed for seduction, she wasn’t trying to be seen, and that’s exactly when or why he noticed her.

Roman Suarez, 36, already mythic in elite circles as a coldly private heir you never want sitting across the table unless he’s on your side. In a snug black t-shirt and pressed dress slacks, he sat with two executives in office wear, barely listening. He’d built three companies outside of the Suarez family business by then, owned property in his own right in four countries. He wasn’t supposed to be in that part of the city. It was too bohemian, too… messy.

But he saw her.

The way she swirled her wine like it was a task. The way she perked up when the music changed, like she kept forgetting where she was. The way she scribbled something and smiled just a little at it. That soft ginger hair that moved as she moved, that glowed even in the dimness.

He stood in the middle of one of the executives’ sentences and walked over.

“Do you write, or are you just hiding something?” He said gently as he reached her.

Startled, Saoirse (pronounced similarly to "Sasha") said, “Excuse me?”

He motioned to the journal. “People who write in bars are usually running from a conversation or creating one. Which are you?”

She chuckled, covering her lips with the hand that held her green pen, because it was the first time someone had made her feel observed without being judged.

“Both, maybe,” she said finally.

“Good answer.” He didn’t sit. He didn’t ask to. He just watched her like she was already part of his design.

And when she asked what he did, he said: “I build things.”

She thought that meant buildings, art, cities, something noble. She had no idea it meant her.

They had dinner two nights later. She wore a black dress with loose seams. He never rushed her, didn’t touch her too soon. He just studied her, and when he kissed her lips for the first time, at the door of her building that night, he whispered, “You move like you don’t realize you’ve already been chosen.”

That was the hook, the feeling she’d waited years for. To be recognized before she even recognized herself. His lips were soft too; it felt good.

The first email came the next morning. No subject line. Just his name in the sender field and a timestamp that made it clear he’d written it in the ungodly hours of the morning, Madrid time. She opened it in bed, still half-asleep, still replaying the way he had looked at her like a riddle only he could solve, how he’d spoken to her in poetry.

The message was short but dense, measured, like he’d crafted it with the same precision he used to hold his glass, or fold a napkin perfectly into his lap.

Saoirse,

I’ve spent enough time in rooms full of people performing significance to know what it looks like when someone doesn’t have to try. You weren’t trying. And that’s what made you... memorable.

If I overstepped, forgive me. But if I’m right and you are, in fact, someone who writes not just to escape but to remember, then I hope you’ll let me buy you another glass of wine and ask you one hundred questions I didn’t get to ask last night.

I’m free tomorrow evening. Or the evening after that. I suspect I’ll be free the evening after that, too, should you say no twice.

Warmly,

RS

She read it three times before replying. And even then, her reply was shorter than she meant it to be.

I’m not in the habit of saying yes to people who watch me more closely than I watch myself. But… maybe I’d like to be.

This would be her last unedited sentence for a very long time.

They met again at a restaurant she couldn’t pronounce. The kind of place without menus. Just a wine list, a seasonal theory, and waitstaff who seemed to read your mood instead of taking orders.

Roman was already there when she arrived, at a corner table, back to the wall, the city lights falling over his shoulders like a painting.

He stood when she walked in, kissed her hand, and held it long enough for her pulse to notice, transporting her into a world beyond the mundane, where peak romance existed just as casually as air. 

“You’re wearing green,” he said once they’d seated, the first of many assessments of her wardrobe choices.

“Should I not be?” Her laugh came out nervous.

“You don’t seem like someone who asks for permission,” he said, and she frowned a little, trying to understand what he meant.

He asked what she liked, but he still did the ordering for her without hesitation.

“She’ll have the veal… unless she’s vegetarian. You’re not, are you?”

She shook her head. He smiled like he already knew.

He didn’t flirt, not in the traditional way. He didn’t compliment her dress, her body, her face. He complimented her mind.

“You don’t speak quickly. That’s rare. Most women mistake speed for power.”

“You listen like someone who edits as she breathes.”

“You have no idea how perfect you are.”

She asked about his work. He spoke lightly of it. He was still a mystery to the world at the time. All she’d found of him online was that his family was old and powerful. His great-grandfather funded Spain’s neutral stance in both the First and Second World Wars, for example.

But he kept turning the conversation back to her.

“You write about women like they’re ghosts trying to be real again.”

“You read it?” She’d responded, startled. She could barely get ten people to read her work.

“I read all of it.” A pause as he stared at his food. “You write pain well. You make it almost… tasteful.”

She wasn’t sure if that was a compliment, but she blushed anyway because no one had ever said it like that.

By the time the second glass of wine arrived, she felt warm, curious, swept off her feet, invited into a version of herself she hadn’t met before. Through his golden dark eyes, she felt like a rare book.

And he read her slowly. He came to the date to study her, shape her, to convince her that being seen is the same thing as being understood. And because she was young, brilliant, and aching to be understood… she let him.

He leaned in over the empty plates. “What would you do if no one ever misunderstood you again?”

She didn’t have an answer at the time, but she thought about it all night.

When he walked her out of his sleek car, he didn’t ask to come inside. He just touched her face gently, thumb beneath her chin, and said, “You don’t yet believe you’re allowed to take up space.” Then, softly, he whispered, “Let me help with that.”

She nodded, and for the first time in her life, silence felt like agreement.

The first time they had sex was weeks later, and it was soft. It was her second sexual experience ever, and it was a thousand times better than the first. Roman was never rushed. He took her in like scripture, slow, reverent, memorized in pieces. It felt choreographed, like he had already imagined it a hundred different ways as he waited until he’d decided she was fully ready.

“You don’t have to do anything here,” he whispered against her neck on his silk-sheeted bed in his sprawling Madrid penthouse bedroom. “You just have to be.”

He kissed her wrists like they were breakable. He asked before every shift of touch, and managed not to make it awkward.

“Is this okay?”

“Tell me what your body says, not your mouth.”

After, he didn’t fall asleep. He stroked her spine in silence and told her what he noticed:

“You don’t let go easily.”

“You hold your breath when I touch you.”

“You don’t believe you’re worthy of worship, but I do.”

It was on their fourth or fifth time together, not a date, not exactly, but an evening curated for intimacy still, jazz playing low, an Italian wine he said was “like an embrace with a secret,” soft light from a dimmed lamp, that he waved the first red-tinged flag.

Saoirse was sitting on the floor of his living room, her back against the edge of the couch, barefoot, laughing, really laughing, at something absurd he'd said about critics and "the aesthetic of scarcity." For the first time in a while, her laugh was real, breathless, and a little loud. She covered her face, flushed. And that’s when it happened.

He reached down, grabbed her wrist away from her face too suddenly, and pulled her up all the way to standing without warning.

Still smiling but with a low voice, he said, “Don’t do that.”

“Do what?” Saoirse said, very confused.

“Cover your face when you laugh. You ruin it.” He let go of her wrist and smoothed her soft ginger hair like nothing had happened.

She stood there, heart pounding from the pause, the feeling that she’d just been corrected. She tried to laugh again.

“I’m not used to being told my laugh has rules.”

“Not rules, preferences.” He chuckled. “I just like to see you clearly.”

She sat back down, and her wine glass shook slightly as she picked it up. She smiled once more to smooth it over, but her wrist still felt warm where his fingers had been. It didn’t hurt, but it felt… marked.

Later that night, he touched her ankle in bed, gently, like reverence. Kissed her knee, held her neck like a sacred object. He whispered unprompted, “I would never hurt you. You’re too rare.”

She nodded.

The next morning, he brought her coffee just the way she liked it. Two sugars and a dash of milk, like someone who knew her best. And she tried to forget the feeling of being pulled into stillness.

+

The call was casual.

It was a late Sunday morning, a week later. Saoirse was wrapped in her linen robe, spinning a pen in her hand. Her oldest and bestest friend from university in London, Nina Calloway’s voice came through the phone, warm and familiar.

“Just checking in, babe. You fell off the grid a bit. How’s life with the golden god?”

Saoirse laughed lightly. “Golden and still godly.”

“And you? How are you?”

Saoirse paused. “Shiny, I guess. I’ve learned how to drink very old wine and sit very still while people talk about hedge funds.” She knew her voice was much too bright to sound sincere to Nina.

“That sounds like a hostage situation with good catering.”

“Stop. I’m serious. It’s… good. He’s attentive, intense, but in that ‘I read your soul in candlelight’ kind of way.” She saw Roman’s face in her head as she said this. “He really sees me, Nina.”

Nina went quiet for a moment.

“Okay, but does he let you see yourself?”

Saoirse blinked before too long a pause, then, with a smile, “What does that even mean?”

Nina responded softly, “It means, when you laugh, are you still funny? Or are you calculated?”

Saoirse laughed again, but thinner, this one. “God, you sound like my childhood therapist,” she said mid-scoff. “He’s not... dangerous. He’s just focused. He notices everything.”

“Okay. But just in case, remember that people who notice everything often do it so they can edit faster.”

Saoirse chuckled. She’d forgotten Nina had literary jokes for every occasion. 

Her chuckle stopped dead when she realized they’d spoken less and less in the last several weeks. When did that start? She didn’t bring it up, however, and they moved on to lighter topics like their near-future plans, cool new books, school gossip. 

After the call, Saoirse sat quietly on the couch in Roman’s home library. Her tea had gone cold, and for a moment, she lifted her sleeve and stared at her wrist.

+

She didn’t know exactly when it started, but he started making her coffee black, no sugar, a dash of cinnamon. One morning, he brought it to her bedside with a folded linen napkin and The Paris Review.

He’d already circled the poem he wanted her to read.

“It reminded me of you,” he said. “Quiet women who are really like lightning.” He smiled gently.

She smiled too, half-asleep. It sounded like worship.

He cooked for her. Or rather, he orchestrated meals.

Once, she mentioned a soup her dead grandmother, who had raised her after her mother died, used to make. The next week, he recreated it: hired a chef, sourced the ingredients from a specific farm in Northern Ireland, presented it with a linen card that said: “For the girl who remembers taste.”

She cried. He kissed her temple. “This is the kind of woman I love. One who’s not afraid to feel.”

He never told her not to see her friends, but every time she did, he said things like, “I’ll miss you, of course. But you’re your own person. That’s what I admire about you.”

She stayed home, in his penthouse, most weekends after that. How many people did she really know in Madrid anyway? 

He convinced the organizers of her residency program to let her continue from his estate instead of the general lodge. He just had someone from his office telephone in one evening, and a confirmation was in her inbox by morning. She told herself it made no difference since she’d been sleeping more and more nights in his penthouse anyway.

He bought her books, stacked them by her bedside before she even asked. Once, he handed her a novel and said, “You’re going to cry at page 74. I can feel it.”

And she did! He knew her that well.

When she got nervous about a speaking engagement, he ran his fingers down her spine and whispered, “The world listens when you speak slowly. That’s your gift.”

She began to pace herself, began to filter, because if he found it beautiful, wasn’t that the goal?

He didn’t correct her in front of others at first. He started by waiting until they were alone.

“You did wonderfully tonight. That story about your father was so honest. Maybe next time, just take a breath before you mention the loss. It landed a little… messy.” He sighed, his brow stern. “You’re more powerful when you’re clean.”

She nodded. She always nodded. Because he never said she was wrong. She was always almost right. And almost, in his world, simply meant a lack of refinement. 

These were the good days. The ones she’d later miss. They were so nearly perfect.

He used to wait for her at the door when her weekly creative workshops ended. He’d be there in a dark coat that managed to be both tailored and casual, holding her gloves, saying something like, “You look more fluent in yourself today.”

She would blush as he opened the car door for her. It felt like poetry.

He once told her she reminded him of a cello. “Low and difficult and elegant.” She laughed, unsure if it was a compliment, but he followed it up with, “It means you’re hard to play but worth the effort if you know how.”

She let him say it again at a dinner party. And every time someone asked how they met, he told the story like a parable. He never said where they met, just that he saw her “writing herself into the world and not realizing it”.

“She’s a rare book,” he’d say. “First edition with no reprints.” People loved that, so she smiled. Even when the words started feeling like branding.

He picked out her dresses before events. Always soft shades: ivory, blush, bone.

“Loud colors steal from your presence,” he said. “You speak best in quietness.” So she stopped wearing red or green. She told herself it was maturity, refinement.

He loved her writing until she wrote something sharp, a short poem she shared in bed about the ocean and grief and forgetting.

He read it, folded the paper neatly, then said, “I’d never let anyone forget you.”

She waited for more, but he just turned off the light.

Later, he made her tea and brought her a different poem, one by a male poet she’d once admired.

“This is more like you,” he said. “Still powerful, but less lonely.”

She started editing her writing more after that.

He asked for her passwords, gently. “Just in case. I’m not worried. But I worry.” Translation: I trust you. I just want to make sure you’re safe. He said it so casually, Saoirse was pressured to treat it likewise, to give up her privacy without making a fuss. He was worried enough to ask, so she gave them.

He never used them, at least not that she could tell, but once, when she liked a photo of a man from her BFA, he brought it up without explanation: “He looks like someone who wants to be noticed by women who already belong to someone.”

It was a note. Like her laugh, her dresses, her writing. But the love between them was too overwhelming to notice any of these things. 

When she asked what he saw in her, he said, “You change the temperature in a room, but you don’t even know it. That’s the part I love most. You’re so unaware of your power.”

She wrote that down as she swooned. Thank God she did because only later, years later, would she realize he didn’t love her power. He loved that she didn’t know she had any.

He’d brush her hair late at night, after she’d washed it and curled into his lap on the rug. He’d sit behind her, towel over her shoulders, and run a brush slowly through the length of her bouncy hair. Sometimes for seconds. Sometimes, much longer.

One evening, she mentioned offhandedly that she hated flying coach as a child because of the noise, the closeness, how she’d press her nails into her wrist just to feel a little control.

The next week, she got an email confirmation for a solo trip to Florence. It was first class, a window seat with noise-canceling headphones monogrammed with her initials. Then, he sent a text that said: “I remember things.”

She’d cried on the plane.

Once, she joked that she hated mornings. Her voice sounded like gravel. Her thoughts were always so sluggish.

The next week, Roman bought her a new alarm clock: a soft-lit one that simulated sunrise and played the sound of distant waves. He set it for her himself and made her coffee, not the way she once liked it but in the new way, before she woke.

When she opened her eyes, he whispered, “Even your slowness is a kind of music,” and kissed her.

Once, she had to fly back to London for a brief in-person chat with a newspaper editor she wanted to convince to publish her BFA short story project as singular pieces. Still incandescent with idealism after the meeting, she rushed into her old, cramped London flat barefoot, cheeks flushed, holding a short letter in her hands because they’d accepted her work on the spot.

“Annie? I got it. The Night Orchard wants the piece!” But her flatmate wasn’t there. The lights were off, and the kettle was cold. Saoirse was confused until she found a note on the table.

She stared at it until her phone buzzed.

She didn’t respect your boundaries. This is what it looks like when someone protects your peace.

You’re welcome, mi amor.

She was a little shocked, but more than anything, she felt cared for, safe, like someone just built a wall around her softest parts. She called him to be sure.

“Thank you.” She thought about it for a few seconds. “I didn’t know how to ask her to leave.”

“You’ll never have to ask for what you need again,” he responded. She was back in Madrid with him by nightfall.

He curated a scent for her, a room scent. He brought in a fragrance specialist and asked what memories she wanted to feel in her body when she was writing.

She thought of her earliest childhood, her happiest moments in Belfast, and said, “Fresh rain and old wood.”

One day, she walked into his study and paused. The scent was hers. Every room, he let her write in it, smell it, carry it with her.

“Now, the air knows you too,” he said.

She once admitted that she had trouble sleeping in unfamiliar places, so anytime they traveled, he sent a member of his staff ahead with her pillowcase.

“So your body knows it’s still safe,” he told her, tucking her in. And she believed him.

These were the days when she felt completely known. She told herself often, No one has ever loved me like this. And it was true. 

Saoirse never knew her father, couldn’t remember her mother, wanted to forget her grandmother, who she’d had to take care of for a year as she died slowly of skin cancer while taking her O-levels. 

The few boys she’d been with only liked kissing her because she was pretty, but never really talked to her, and always fled one month in as soon as they realized she actually liked literature as an interest beyond academics. Wayne Adams had even called her dull.

At the end of the residency, it was clear she wouldn’t return to London. 

It wasn’t discussed, he never really asked, but it was ridiculous to even question it at that point. She was so firmly rooted in Madrid, or more accurately, his home, that she couldn’t even conceive what it was she’d be returning to. She went back to her flat in London three separate times in the next year, and that was it.

+

Nina came to celebrate her program completion and the little chapbook she’d managed to send out for publishing, a requirement of the residency, called Blue Milk. She’d firmly refused Roman’s help with this one thing, instead deciding to have it published and translated by the local French house she’d attracted on merit.

Saoirse and Nina met for brunch in Madrid. A sunlit café with wildflowers on the tables, the kind of place that served slow eggs and had waiters who knew your name after one visit.

Saoirse looked radiant, pale skin dewy, ginger hair long and wavy, white linen blouse, inconspicuous gold VCA chain around her wrist. She was glowing in that curated, fragile way Nina had started to recognize. Like light through expensive glass.

“He’s… impossible, Nina. He remembers everything. The way I like my water, which page I cried on in a book I read years ago.” She sighed. “Last week, I mentioned an author I missed reading during undergrad, and a first-edition copy just appeared on my desk.”

Nina smiled but was sarcastic when she spoke, “He does sound like a wizard.”

Saoirse grinned. “He’s a dream. Like… it’s stupid. I know it sounds stupid. But he’s always three steps ahead of me. It’s like he curates the world so I don’t have to bump into anything harsh.”

“That doesn’t sound stupid. Just… intense.”

Saoirse laughed. “It is. But in a good way. He makes me feel… finished. Like I’ve arrived somewhere.”

“And in all that finishing, when was the last time he let you be messy?”

Saoirse paused. She’d heard that word a couple of times lately, from Roman. She tilted her head. “What do you mean?

“Like… unbrushed-hair, no-perfect-answer, mid-spiral, saying-the-wrong-thing messy. Just you without the curation. Did he still call that beautiful?”

Saoirse blinked. Her smile faltered slightly as she reached for her tea.

“I don’t really get like that anymore. I don’t… need to.”

“Maybe not.”

Someone at the next table laughed loudly, and a spoon clinked. Saoirse stirred her tea twice but didn’t drink it.

“We’re planning a trip to the Dolomites next,” Saoirse’s voice brightened again. “He says I need to learn how to be still in the snow.” Nina smiled.

+

Saoirse was still 21 and full of dreams, curled up on a secondhand couch in her London flat one late evening. She’d insisted on returning for one last closure-stay before her lease was up. 

Her legs were tucked under her, speaking to Roman on video chat. He’s backlit in a hotel suite somewhere in Berlin, shirt unbuttoned at the collar.

“I hate when you’re there. You disappear into your friends. It’s like I only get pieces of you,” he said, even though she’d only been back here on two very short visits since she’d known him, smiling wide.

“You get the best pieces.” Saoirse laughed after saying it.

“I want all the pieces,” he said it like a joke, but her smile faltered for just a second.

By the end of the call, she’d somehow agreed to return to Madrid, to him, the next evening, even though she’d also promised to allow Nina plus-one her for multiple London art events over a week at least, to make up for their “lost time”. 

At their favourite cafe just one long walk from Nina’s grad school hall, Nina wasn’t having it.

“This is the millionth time you’ve rescheduled. You finally made it back to London, and you promised, PROMISED, you’d be here for up to a week. What’s going on?” Nina said, squeezing her palms against the sides of the short and stout teal mug, sniffing the creamy scent of her coffee. Saoirse stared longingly at the cream.

“Roman booked a last-minute flight. He said it was a surprise.”

“A surprise that costs you your life?”

Saoirse stirred her tea. “He just wants me close. That’s not a crime,” she murmured. 

She was also supposed to attend her older sister’s wedding this weekend. Sinead was curt and hurt on the phone, but they’d never been close, and no real family connected them, so she didn’t feel too bad about it.

+

Roman poured champagne into crystal flutes on the private plane that night. Saoirse sat beside him, freshly styled, nervous.

“It’s her wedding,” Saoirse whispered to him as he passed her the glass, and she accepted it.

“She’s your adoptive sister, not your real one.”

“Mmhmm.”

“The same sister whose blood brother tried to touch you…” She looked up at him sharply. “Several times.” His voice was gentle as he emphasized her trauma, brushing her ginger hair away from her face, behind her ear.

“And… you hate crowds. Why put yourself through that?”

She squeezed her eyes shut and forced the dark memories he’d sprung up so casually back into the recesses of her mind so they could, once more, cease to exist.

“Because she’s family.” She didn’t really believe herself even as she said it.

“You have me. We can go somewhere quiet. You’ll sleep better and smile more.”

She hesitated. He took her hand. “Say no and I’ll take you anyway.” She laughed, but she didn’t say no.