The Suarez Myth: Chapter 8

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

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

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

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

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

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

“I’ll call when I land.”

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

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

“Then miss it.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Saoirse shook her head. “Not yet.”

Marta nodded and left.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Source: Pinterest

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

The words hung there.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

+

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

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

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

“Yes, sir.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

He liked watching people perform their usefulness.

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

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

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

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

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

At 22:00, he typed a message:

Everything all right?

Five minutes later, she replied: 

Yes. 

It’s quiet as always.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

+

Four years ago. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

He paused, considering. “Yes.”

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

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

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

“London. Originally Newcastle.”

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

“She doesn’t care about that.”

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

He said nothing.

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

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

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

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

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

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

He held her gaze. “Nothing.”

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

“She’s not like that.”

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

“You underestimate her.”

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

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

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

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

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

He didn’t answer. 

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

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

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

The Suarez Myth: Chapter 5

The maids entered at ten.

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

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

“Señora, should we—”

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

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

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

“I know.”

“Should I have the gardeners take them out?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

+

Order was the only tenderness he ever received.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

+

Saoirse had always loved roses.

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

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

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

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

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

She didn’t see another rose for years.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Her hand paused. “Yes.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“The Irish one?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

She found herself smiling faintly, almost gratefully.

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

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

+

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“And they’re investing?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“You keep him civil.”

“You soften the room.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“What happened to your skin?”

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

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

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

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

She didn't answer. He stepped back.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Suarez Myth: Chapter 3

Year one.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

+

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Seven homes. Seven selves.

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

+

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

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

Or

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

But then, time began to stretch.

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

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

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

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

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

“I’ve learned to pick my battles.”

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

“I miss London sometimes,” she said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Not really.”

His eyebrows lifted slightly. “No?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

“You make everything heavy,” he said quietly.

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

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

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

“I haven’t hosted anything in weeks.”

He frowned slightly. “Why?”

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

“I never said that.”

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

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

“Do you remember New York?” she whispered.

Roman’s voice was low. “Of course.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Sleep, Saoirse.” 

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

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

+

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

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

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

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

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

“Of course,” she said, too quickly.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

+

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“He says you can come in, señora.”

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

“No,” he lied.

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

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

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

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

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

“Roman imports the rarest things.”

“Only the ones worth keeping.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

+

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Fine,” Saoirse said.

“You rested?”

“A little.”

He nodded and cut into his fish.

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

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

It was always like this, presence not dialogue.

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

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

“Then tomorrow.”

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

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

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

“You’re quiet tonight,” he said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

He smiled faintly. “It makes you untouchable.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

+

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“You remembered,” she whispered, throat tight.

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

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

“Where did you find these?”

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

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

Her throat tightened. “Who took this?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“I kept you.” 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

+

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

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

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

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

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

“Where are you going?” she asked instead.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Stay. Stay like you were last night.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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