The Suarez Myth: Chapter 5

The maids entered at ten.

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

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

“Señora, should we—”

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

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

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

“I know.”

“Should I have the gardeners take them out?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

+

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

+

Saoirse had always loved roses.

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

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

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

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

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

She didn’t see another rose for years.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Her hand paused. “Yes.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“The Irish one?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

She found herself smiling faintly, almost gratefully.

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

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

+

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“And they’re investing?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“You keep him civil.”

“You soften the room.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“What happened to your skin?”

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

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

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

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

She didn't answer. He stepped back.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Suarez Myth: Chapter 4

Amancio passed away three months later. He was 83.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“She did?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

+

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Are we fighting? 

Or is this just what marriage looks like?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

+

The Tuscany house was unbearable by her third trimester.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Whims.

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

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

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

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

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

+

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

+

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

That was when Nina came.

Her simple text came first: 

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

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

“You sound half-asleep,” Nina teased.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“I mean, created small, perfect miracles.”

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

Nina turned. “Mariana?”

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

Nina smiled faintly. “And David?”

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

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

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

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

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

Even the air-conditioning seemed to hum with judgment.

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

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

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

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

“And you?”

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

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

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

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

Saoirse froze. “Oh.”

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

“What does that mean?”

Nina sighed. “I didn’t ask.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“I know,” Nina whispered now.

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

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

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

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

“Remind me what she does again?”

“She’s a journalist.”

He paused. “A journalist.”

Saoirse’s chest tightened. “Yes.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

No signature. None was needed.

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

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

The perfume grew heavier. The silence deepened.

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

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

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

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

white roses, thousands, master suite filled before she wakes

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

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

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

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

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.