The Suarez Myth: Chapter 10

When the twins turned six months old, Roman was in Barcelona with them again.

He’d been away for exactly one month. In that time, Saoirse and the babies still hadn’t returned to Madrid, the city where Roman lived most of the time now, even though he said they would months ago. The city waited for them in silence while this one, his family’s cradle, remained their cage.

In that time, Bibiana also visited more often, always with old Fr. Pedro in his beeswax cassock, sometimes with her younger daughter who was Saoirse’s age and polite enough, but always always with those yellow-brown prescription parcels of diazepam. And they taught Saoirse how to balance devotion with simply longing for Roman less.

A fountain murmured nearby as Saoirse walked into the central courtyard where Roman sat on the evening of his arrival. She held two glasses of wine in each hand, one faded gold, one dark. Roman preferred red during spring.

He was seated beneath the olive tree, the faintest breeze rustling his light shirt collar. A small tablet rested on the low stone table beside him, its light reflecting faintly against the glass, as he casually scrolled through it. She handed him his wine, and he took it without looking up at her.

“I thought we’d sit together tonight, before Lisa brings them down,” she said.

A pause, and then, he nodded once. He didn’t need words to fill the silence, something Saoirse had once admired.

She watched him as she lowered herself onto the cushion across from him, folding one leg under the other. She’d dressed deliberately in a soft beige silk wrap dress, no makeup, hair pulled back and loosely pinned, simple, exactly how he liked it. She felt completely healed now, whole, and she was trying, she always tried, to be the version of herself that calmed him, that warmed him. 

Her eyes remaining on his bent head, she counted the pearls of the rosary around her left fingers, letting the prayers keep her mind from straying too far. When she prayed, it steadied enough to not ask for more. Fr. Pedro, his lush silver curls rustling, had suggested this on his last visit days ago. Pray incessantly, he’d said as they sat in this very courtyard as Bibiana stood nearby eating cucumber slices, pretending not to monitor them. Saoirse felt used to praying once again, like she was back in that old house in Newcastle, begging God to keep her grandmother alive.

“You seemed distracted earlier with Marco,” Roman said at last.

Her eyes lifted, and she responded immediately, “We were talking about the gate sensors. They’re still glitching.”

He finally met her eyes and smiled faintly. “I know. He filed it in the report.” His gaze remained mild as he took a sip of the wine. “It’s not what you said. It’s the way you touched his arm.”

For a moment, she didn’t breathe. What? “What do you mean?”

“You touched his arm. Why?” He held her gaze, and Saoirse realized with a start that he expected a serious response. 

“I was half-asleep,” she said. “I was trying to soften my ‘no.’”

He hummed lightly like he agreed with her. But he didn’t agree. It was just noise. “Marco isn’t paid to be softened,” he said finally. She leaned back, slowly, into the cushioned outdoor seat, the evening breeze sending a light shiver through her. It took her a moment to realize what he meant. “I’ll speak to him,” he continued, almost absently. “He’s become too familiar.”

Something in her chest cracked at that, small and invisible. “I’ve barely been outside this house,” she said softly. “There’s nowhere to be familiar.”

He looked at her longer now, studying the shift in her tone. “You’ve been restless.”

The word ‘restless’ felt like a diagnosis, and it broke her composure before she could stop it. “Because I haven’t been touched.” It came out barely audible. “You stopped touching me months ago. Even before the twins were born.” As if trying to remind him, in case he’d forgotten. She remembered Nina’s voice when she’d mentioned this casually over the phone, how her husband hadn’t touched her since she’d become too big and swollen with pregnancy, right before Nina’d suggested that he might be getting what he wanted… elsewhere. 

Saoirse felt foolish thinking about that old conversation now, like all conversations felt when she thought of them through Roman’s mind, through his logical words. She hadn’t called Nina since then, or taken any of her fewer and fewer calls.

He smiled the kind of smile that dismissed storms. “You’re still fragile. You need space.”

“No,” she whispered. “You need space. From me.” The words surprised her as much as him. “I bled, Roman. I was torn open and sewn shut… and you won’t even look at me.” Her voice shook as she thought, despite all of Bibiana and Fr. Pedro’s counselling, about his longer, more frequent trips without her. “You’re punishing me for not being—” she faltered, “for not being beautiful anymore.”

The breeze moved through the olive branches. Roman’s expression didn’t change. Instead, he let the silence drag as he gazed at her. She wanted to look away, feeling ashamed of herself and her words, but she couldn’t with his eyes on her.

“I’m not punishing you,” he said evenly. “That’s a childish thing to say. You honestly think all I’m thinking about is sex and attention and how to keep it from you?” He leaned back, the movement measured, civil, casually dangling his wine glass in one hand, watching her intently. She felt stupid. Of course he had a whole world of concerns more important than she could even fathom. “It’s about trust. I thought you understood that by now.”

She blinked, unsure what he meant. “Trust?”

“You’ve changed again,” he said, and there was something weary in his tone, like a teacher correcting a student who’d once promised to do better.

Her eyes watered and burned. “I grew two lives inside me. Of course, I’ve changed.”

“I know. So we’re recalibrating,” he said. He always said that word when something about her displeased him, when she reached for air. Recalibrating sounded like a meeting note, a clinical way to tidy what had gone wrong.

She exhaled. “You’ve drafted a thesis around your distance, but it’s still distance.”

He looked genuinely confused. “Why are you speaking to me like that?” Her throat tightened. She already regretted it, but the words wouldn’t leave her head. 

“I’m sorry,” she whispered, finally looking away.

He finished his wine slowly. “We’ll figure it out,” he said finally, like closing a file.

She nodded, but she couldn’t look at him. 

She wanted to believe him. She thought of the man from before they married, who went with her to her residency sessions and was always there to pick her up when it was over, who curated special scents, special sounds for her just to make her happy, who always brought her coffee even before she woke, who once traced Whitman on her belly in the early months of her pregnancy, who wept when they first heard the twins’ hearts, who swore they’d protect each other from the world after his parents died. 

But it seemed now like those very deaths had calcified something in him. 

Bibiana’s visits were almost regular now. But her assessments disguised as care ironically kept her sane because performing functionality to her sister-in-law at least gave Saoirse something to occupy her mind, and the pills let her sleep off the remaining time, helped her forget that Roman hadn't looked at her naked in almost a year, helped her forget to fully unpack Nina’s words. 

And now, because she touched a man’s arm at the wrong moment, he was talking about trust.

She took his empty glass, left hers untouched, and rose. 

“I’ll check on them,” she said, and he nodded, eyes back on the tablet, the soft glow painting his wrist in light. But before she could step away, she hesitated. “You never ask how I feel,” she said quietly. “Or how lonely it gets.”

That made him look up again, the light catching the edges of his face. The faintest trace of surprise, or maybe annoyance, crossed his face before he hid it behind tired composure. “You’re not lonely,” he said. “You’re surrounded by everything you need.”

She shook her head, something tired flickering through her voice. “Everything but you.”

Something else shifted in his expression, the smallest awareness of her body in his space, and it was enough to make her step closer.

“Roman,” she whispered. “When will you touch me again? When will I be—” her voice broke, “—enough for that?” He held her gaze, steady and unreadable. She was trembling now, although she stood only a breath away. “You said once, you preferred when I let you lead,” she said. “So I did. I’ve been waiting. I’m still waiting.”

He set the tablet aside, slowly, as if considering her words. 

She asked again, her voice thin with disbelief, almost embarrassment, “When will you… want me again?”

“You think I don’t?” He stood tall, immaculate, almost painfully calm. When he reached her, she lifted her chin instinctively, as if bracing for impact. His hand came up to rest against her face, his thumb tracing the faintest line along her jaw. It wasn’t tender so much as reverent. “I always want you,” he said, and she felt her body go still, her breath hitch. He spoke so evenly that it almost sounded like truth. “But wanting and having are different things.”

Her eyes stung. “You decide when I’m allowed to be wanted?”

He smiled faintly, the kind of smile that made her feel childish for asking. “I decide when I should want you. I decide when it’s safe to. You’re still fragile, and I won’t break what’s mine.”

That word, ‘mine’, lodged in her like a hook. She wanted to hate it, but it steadied her, too.

“I’m not fragile,” she whispered.

“But are you mine?” he asked, his voice lower now, close to her ear. She couldn’t speak. He leaned in, brushed his lips against her temple like an anointing. When he pulled back, she was trembling. “Go and rest,” he said softly. “You’ve lost too much sleep.”

She nodded, because it was easier than answering.

As she walked toward the villa, she pressed her hand to the spot his mouth had touched and felt both soothed and suffocated. He’d given her almost nothing, and yet it would carry her for weeks.

Behind her, the fountain murmured, the olive leaves stirred, and Roman’s gaze followed her through the dark glass for a long while. She’s trembling again. He watched the slight unsteadiness in her shoulders as she moved through the doorway, the hem of her dress brushing the tile like a whisper. The softness of her, the way she folded into his words even when she tried to resist them, calmed him. It restored the order he had felt slipping since he arrived to find her distracted from him.

She’s tired, overwrought, too conscious of herself tonight. And that was dangerous, for her and for the stillness he depended on. He watched her press her fingers to her temple where he had kissed her, and he felt something complicated stir in him. A kind of possession that had its own gravity and logic. He watched her until she disappeared inside, then sat back down and picked up his screen again.

He let the air settle again.When will you touch me again? Her question had pierced him in a way he didn’t like. It made her sound needy, too aware of absence. Neediness in a woman always preceded instability. He’d seen it in Allegra. He’d seen it break her. She didn’t understand that he was protecting her from the very chaos she begged for. He watched the shadows swallow her as she disappeared down the hall and felt neither guilt nor anger.

He had given her exactly what she could hold. He had pulled her back from the verge of hysteria without raising his voice, without breaking the fragile peace he’d built around her. She’ll sleep now, and the tremor will pass.

He looked down at his screen finally because numbers were a good place to store the parts of himself that still throbbed when she became emotional. She’s still mine, he thought, with the calm certainty of a man stating the laws of physics. And she still knows it. He scanned another page but didn’t absorb a line. Tomorrow, I’ll adjust her schedule. She needs less distraction, less stimulus, less of herself. She’ll be fine, he concluded, leaning back against the cushion. Once she remembers her place in the balance of things, once she quiets again, she’d see that this is the most disciplined form of love. 

His jaw tightened almost imperceptibly. He thought of the months before the birth, then her body splitting open to produce the twins, her breath shallow and erratic, her pain so loud it drowned out the room. He remembered the blood, the pale sweat, the tremor in her legs.

His mother’s silhouette rose unbidden. Allegra at the dining table, too still, too composed, covering wounds with lace.

Sex had broken Allegra. Desire had destroyed her quiet. His father’s appetites had made her into marble. Women don’t survive men’s wanting, something in Roman’s bones said. Which meant that if he wanted Saoirse too much, if he touched her too soon, if he let desire dictate anything… he would ruin her.

His hand tightened subtly around the tablet. There was another thought, darker, quieter, the one he buried immediately, that her postpartum body frightened him, the expansion of it, the fragility after such strain. If I touch her now, I might lose control of myself… and become my father. This thought, though unspoken and irrational, was the axis of everything. Allegra’s quiet suffering. Amancio’s violent appetites. The way Roman had watched his mother shrink around the force of a man’s desire. In his father’s household, desire was cruelty, and restraint was virtue.

Touching Saoirse now, when she was already his, felt like a trespass, even if she begged for it. Especially when she begged. His chest tightened faintly, and he closed the tablet. Saoirse’s voice still clung to the air: When will you touch me again? When will I be enough?

Somewhere in him, something answered: When I can trust myself not to want too much. But even that wasn’t fully true. He could never touch her again without seeing her body stretch and expand up until the moment she almost died to give him babies. He could not reconcile desire with death, so he let desire starve, and he told himself it was care.

+

Roman was nine the night the crystal shattered.

Dinner had stretched close to midnight, the air thick with cigar smoke and the low hum of his father’s voice, precise and measured like a weapon. Allegra sat opposite Amancio, her posture perfect, her wine untouched. Her lipstick was the only color in the room.

Roman sat at the far end of the table, a small prince at a banquet he didn’t understand, his feet not even touching the floor. His half-sisters were in school and married, respectively. They weren’t there to provide buffer against whatever stray bullet might let loose. He knew not to speak unless spoken to, knew the exact moment servants would appear with another course, and knew the rhythm of his father’s temper before it ever arrived.

It began, as it always did, with something small, like a misplaced remark, an unfinished deal, a half-smile mistaken for defiance. Amancio set down his glass too sharply, the sound cracking the air. Allegra turned her head slightly, just enough that the light struck her tiny ruby earrings.

“Why do you always look away when I speak?” Amancio asked, voice bellowing enough to make the servants freeze mid-step then leave as quickly yet inconspicuously as they could.

“I was listening,” she said.

“You were hiding.” He reached across the table and tipped her untouched glass down hard toward her. The "Hofburg" glassware with the imperial crest etched into the sides fell over the table. Red wine bled across the white tablecloth, spreading like a slow bruise.

Roman watched the stain travel toward his mother’s wrist. It was the first time he ever wondered if his father even thought before acting out in anger or if he simply obeyed his every impulse. Allegra lifted her napkin, pressed it lightly to the spill, and smiled that impossible, delicate smile she wore only when things were breaking.

His father leaned back, assessing her with that cold, studious gaze Roman would inherit. “Our son has to learn something.”

“What’s that?” She said.

“How to hold a table steady when everything else acts out of line.” For a long time, no one breathed. Then Amancio rose, straightened his cuffs, and left.

Allegra sat very still. The stain had reached the edge of her lap, blooming through the white lace. Her hands were immaculate. When she finally looked at Roman, her expression was serene, so serene it terrified him.

“Fetch Isabella,” she said quietly. The staff knew to never hover or step into a room unprompted. “Tell her to change the tablecloth.”

He stood, but she stopped him with a glance. “Roman,” she added, “Next time, don’t look so frightened. We keep the room beautiful, always.”

He nodded.

That night, when the servants cleared the dining room, he stayed behind. He ran his fingers over the edge of the table where the wine had spilled and dried, tracing the faint residue on the Baroque hardwood until it disappeared.

The house was always quieter after midnight. Even the servants learned to move differently once Amancio retired to his study; quieter, smaller, as though sound itself might cost them.

Roman had been sent to bed hours earlier, but sleep wouldn’t come. The images from dinner still haunted him, the wine spreading like blood, his mother’s stillness as it reached her wrist.

He padded barefoot through the long corridor, the marble cold beneath his feet, drawn by the faint hum of his father’s gramophone. The door to his parents’ suite was half-closed. Light spilled through the crack, thin and golden.

He should have turned back, but a child’s curiosity is stronger than instinct.

Inside, Allegra stood near the dressing mirror, her nightgown the color of smoke. Amancio was behind her, shirt unbuttoned, his hand at the back of her neck. It wasn’t rough, not exactly. It was something worse, possessive. His touch moved with the same precision as his voice, claiming without question.

“You think I don’t see the way you correct me in front of him?” Amancio murmured.

“I wasn’t correcting,” she said. Her tone was calm, practiced.

“Don’t lie.” He pressed his fingers more firmly against her throat, measuring the circumference of it. Allegra’s reflection met him in the mirror, her spine straight, her face composed.

Roman held his breath.

Amancio bent lower, mouth near her ear. “You’ve turned silence into defiance. You think that’s clever?”

Her lips parted slightly, but she said nothing.

Then came the sound that would stay with Roman for years. The soft thud of crystal against marble as Amancio swept her perfume bottles from the table, one by one. They shattered like punctuation. The scent of jasmine and powder filled the air. Allegra didn’t move. When he turned her to face him, his hands on her arms were steady.

“I made you into this,” he said. “You forget who you belong to.”

She smiled faintly, almost tenderly, and whispered, “I made you presentable. Isn’t that what you wanted?”

For a moment, Amancio faltered. Then he kissed her, hard, almost reverent, a collision of power and worship that made Roman flinch. Allegra didn’t resist. She let him have the moment, the illusion of control, as he lifted her nightdress and fucked her clumsily against the vanity.

When it was over, Amancio straightened his cuffs again and walked out, leaving the air thick with perfume and humiliation. Roman shuffled into an alcove less than a foot away as his father staggered past, then crept back to the door.

Allegra stayed at the mirror. The glass trembled where the bottles had fallen, but one remained whole, its stopper crooked. She fixed it, turned it upright, then looked at her reflection.

“Roman,” she said softly, without turning. He froze. “Come out.”

He stepped inside, his heart pounding. The shards glittered around her bare feet.

She looked at him through the mirror. “You saw?” He nodded. Her expression didn’t change. “When men touch in anger, they destroy. When they touch in love, they surrender. Either way, they lose control,” she said, voice level.

Allegra turned then, cupped his face briefly in her cold, perfumed hand. “You must never lose control,” she whispered. He nodded again, because that was what sons did when their mothers made commandments. She kissed his forehead, her lipstick faint against his skin. “Go to bed, tesoro. Forget this.”

But he never did.

The next morning, he found the dining table reset, lilies centered, silver polished, imperial crystal drinking set replaced. The wine stain was gone, as if it had never happened.

Only Roman remembered.

+

The house was asleep now. Only the sea outside moved, its breath against the terrace glass in slow, indifferent pulses.

Roman had been in his study since he had dinner alone after the episode with Saoirse in the courtyard, the lamp casting a controlled circle of gold over stacked reports and the glow of three open screens. Zurich’s liquidity sheet lay layered over Milan’s acquisition redlines; a Geneva advisory memo waited half-signed in his drafts.

He was not building anything himself. There were CFOs and portfolio managers for that. He was simply checking the bones of it all. Things like margin exposure, voting structures, and a minor clause in a custodial trust for the twins that he had adjusted twice already this quarter.

Roman was always looking for patterns others missed. Amancio had taught him that the numbers were never about money but about obedience. He learned that lesson young, watching his father throw a ledger across a table because someone miscalculated a margin by half a percent. Amancio did not tolerate imprecision.

Roman never shouted but he also noticed things, and he acted surgically. He’d learned that that was more terrifying.

Work was clean. Work obeyed him, never looked at him with longing or bled or needed reassurance. It certainly never threatened to dissolve in the way it might for others.

Saoirse did.

After confronting her about Marco, he couldn’t go to bed immediately. He needed equilibrium. Numbers gave him that. Financial models did not tremble when he touched them. Numbers were honest. They did not misinterpret touch.

In the corner of one screen, however, minimized but not closed, that feed replayed from earlier that afternoon. A timestamp, sunlight, Saoirse’s soft blush sleeve, Marco leaning slightly closer than protocol required, and her hand resting too casually against his arm.

Why did she feel comfortable enough to touch him?

Roman watched it once more, lingering just long enough.

His father would have raged. Amancio believed in correction through spectacle. Roman believed in quiet removal of error.

He closed the feed and returned to the Geneva board minutes. The Foundation, La Fundación Suarez, secretary had forwarded a draft of Saoirse’s “re-engagement strategy” he’d been stalling for weeks. He skimmed the language yet again, deleting a reference to her “creative background.” He replaced it with “Mrs. Suarez continues the family’s legacy of cultural patronage” then moved to the philanthropic disbursement breakdown.

He leaned back, rubbing at his temple as the numbers began to blur from repetition. He could feel the empire humming in layers beneath him: Madrid portfolios, Tuscan land holdings, their bigger football club’s revenue projections after another win. Bibiana would want Easter seating revised. Marcela would call about Paris optics. They all relied on him. They all always had.

Allegra had once told him, when he was seventeen and already taller than his father, that a house survived by the discipline of its quietest room. She had meant the chapel.

He had applied it to everything including his marriage.

He did not forbid Saoirse anything. He simply structured the conditions in which certain things no longer felt necessary. The live-in nurses for the twins had been practical. She needed rest and stability. She was young, Irish, soft around the edges in a way that had first struck him as clean and almost devout. He had liked that about her, the inherited Catholic gravity beneath her gentleness, the subdued weight that sometimes settles on those who have endured just enough difficulty to be marked by it, but not hardened. It was a kind of restraint he recognized. Allegra called it character. She approved of her very quickly.

He had worried, briefly, about her position, her SES, the careful economy of a girl who lived within limits.

She had not come from nothing. When he met her, she was newly out of university, holding a merit-based residency, surviving on the remains of a modest but sensible inheritance her grandmother had left her, funds she had only accessed after fleeing her half-sister’s house and starting again on her own. The rest of which he left untouched, still in her old bank account today.

She had carried herself like someone accustomed to managing what she had, stretching it quietly, determined to build something real.

It had reassured him more than he admitted. She was not destitute. She was not desperate. She had chosen him. And that, to Roman, had mattered. She was simply unanchored. She was also independent enough to believe she chose him, but not so much that her world was fixed beyond alteration. Her life was still in draft form, flexible, untethered to legacy, property, a lineage that might compete with his own.

He had not sought to change her. He had only offered structure. And she had stepped into it willingly. He had never meant to make her unnecessary, but systems preferred redundancy.

He stood finally, shutting the screens down one by one. The house exhaled into deeper silence. Somewhere down one hallway, a night nurse shifted. Javier and Emilio had already retired.

Since Saoirse had begun staying longer and longer in Barcelona — and he, everywhere else — their bedroom wing felt less like theirs and more like hers. He moved toward it without thinking. Drawn down the corridor that already smelled too much of her, like roses and something soothing.

The hallway lights glowed dimly along the floor, motion-activated but gentle, so as not to wake anyone. The security grid pulsed invisibly behind the walls, Marco’s domain. Roman paused outside the main bedroom door for half a second longer than necessary.

He imagined her asleep, or pretending to be. He imagined her pulse under his thumb when he touched her wrist at their last breakfast together before he left and stayed longer than planned between Madrid and Paris. He imagined the way she had said, “Stay a little longer,” as if time were negotiable.

It wasn’t.

He opened the door quietly.

She was asleep this time, finally. One arm draped loosely over the sheet, light ginger hair spilled across the pillow like something unguarded. For a moment, he simply stood there.

He liked her best like this. She looked younger when she slept. Younger than the woman in the courtyard or the wife in the foundation briefings. Just the girl he had once watched read aloud in Madrid, earnest and luminous and unstructured.

The door to her dressing room was half-open. He walked to it and paused there.

Inside, everything gleamed: ivory drawers, mirrored surfaces, the faint shimmer of silk. The air smelled of powder and something floral, maybe jasmine, soft but insistent, like a ghost that knew its way around the walls.

Her vanity was immaculate. Custom bottles aligned by height, silver caps turned to catch the same angle of light. It was too perfect, but still he reached out and straightened one that was already straight.

He had commissioned all the scents, developed over time by a perfumer in Grasse he had retained exclusively after their first year of marriage. He remembered the brief he’d given: nothing sweet and nothing loud; notes of iris, roses, salt, faint smoke, something that felt like dusk in a chapel. Something that would never enter a room before she did.

Each bottle had been calibrated seasonally. Lighter in Barcelona summers. Warmer in Madrid. A touch of myrrh added after the twins were born, to switch her sensory identity to maternal.

He had watched her try on the earliest ones, wrists lifted obediently, asking softly which he preferred. It had felt deeply intimate. Knowing how she should smell and linger was a form of devotion. He remembered suddenly what she used to wear, how it had smelled sweet but cheap, citrusy, bought over the counter in London.

He adjusted one bottle again, though it had not moved, and for a fleeting second he imagined another man recognizing that fragrance somewhere, attaching it to her skin.

He disliked the thought.

The vanity remained symmetrical.

For a second, he couldn’t breathe. The scent, the symmetry, it pulled a thread through years. He saw candlelight trembling on broken glass, a woman’s still hands, a child hiding behind a door.

The image came and went before he could name it. He exhaled, rubbed his temples. Tired, that’s all.

Still, the scent lingered. He stepped back, closing the door quietly, careful not to disturb a single bottle. He left the dressing room exactly as he had found it, except for the molecule-thin correction only he would ever see. But as he walked back into the bedroom, his pulse stayed uneven, and he couldn’t have said why.

He stepped closer to the bed, adjusted the edge of the milky silk sheet over her lean pale shoulder, a small, almost imperceptible act, yet Saoirse stirred in her sleep, turning toward the empty space beside her. He moved away, back toward the main threshold, looked once more into the darkened room at her slight figure, then turned away again and closed the door softly behind him.

He would tell himself, later, that it was respect, letting her rest. But the faint jasmine followed him all the way back to his study where the screens had gone black.

The sea kept breathing. The empire remained intact. Upstairs, the twins slept, regulated and protected. And in the quietest room of the house, discipline held.

The Suarez Myth: Chapter 8

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

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

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

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

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

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

“I’ll call when I land.”

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

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

“Then miss it.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Saoirse shook her head. “Not yet.”

Marta nodded and left.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Source: Pinterest

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

The words hung there.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

+

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

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

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

“Yes, sir.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

He liked watching people perform their usefulness.

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

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

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

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

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

At 22:00, he typed a message:

Everything all right?

Five minutes later, she replied: 

Yes. 

It’s quiet as always.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

They were not the loudest family in Europe.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mariana Suarez had been fire barely contained. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

The guests shifted. Someone cleared their throat.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The twins.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Roman had chosen something else.

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

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

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

+

Four years ago. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

He paused, considering. “Yes.”

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

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

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

“London. Originally Newcastle.”

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

“She doesn’t care about that.”

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

He said nothing.

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

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

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

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

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

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

He held her gaze. “Nothing.”

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

“She’s not like that.”

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

“You underestimate her.”

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

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

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

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

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

He didn’t answer. 

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

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

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

The Suarez Myth: Chapter 5

The maids entered at ten.

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

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

“Señora, should we—”

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

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

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

“I know.”

“Should I have the gardeners take them out?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

+

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

+

Saoirse had always loved roses.

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

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

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

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

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

She didn’t see another rose for years.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Her hand paused. “Yes.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“The Irish one?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

She found herself smiling faintly, almost gratefully.

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

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

+

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“And they’re investing?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“You keep him civil.”

“You soften the room.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“What happened to your skin?”

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

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

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

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

She didn't answer. He stepped back.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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