The Suarez Myth: Chapter 3

Year one.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

+

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Seven homes. Seven selves.

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

+

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

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

Or

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

But then, time began to stretch.

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

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

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

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

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

“I’ve learned to pick my battles.”

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

“I miss London sometimes,” she said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Not really.”

His eyebrows lifted slightly. “No?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

“You make everything heavy,” he said quietly.

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

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

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

“I haven’t hosted anything in weeks.”

He frowned slightly. “Why?”

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

“I never said that.”

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

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

“Do you remember New York?” she whispered.

Roman’s voice was low. “Of course.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Sleep, Saoirse.” 

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

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

+

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

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

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

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

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

“Of course,” she said, too quickly.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

+

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“He says you can come in, señora.”

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

“No,” he lied.

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

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

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

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

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

“Roman imports the rarest things.”

“Only the ones worth keeping.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

+

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Fine,” Saoirse said.

“You rested?”

“A little.”

He nodded and cut into his fish.

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

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

It was always like this, presence not dialogue.

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

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

“Then tomorrow.”

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

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

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

“You’re quiet tonight,” he said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

He smiled faintly. “It makes you untouchable.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

+

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“You remembered,” she whispered, throat tight.

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

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

“Where did you find these?”

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

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

Her throat tightened. “Who took this?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“I kept you.” 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

+

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

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

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

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

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

“Where are you going?” she asked instead.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Stay. Stay like you were last night.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Suarez Myth: Chapter 2

They were five months in.

It was time to host a formal party, something intimate for a few of his associates and their wives, her first serious task as “Roman Suarez’s girlfriend”. Roman wanted it at his home in Barcelona. Saoirse had heard about this villa many times by now. It was his “family seat”, where his parents, whom she hadn’t met yet, still lived. 

The Suarez villa had been raised stone by stone by merchants who became bankers, bankers who became something more than kings in their own city. It was where tapestries aged more slowly than people, where the furniture had been commissioned when Napoleon still frightened Europe, and where (Roman once mentioned with a faint smile) the clocks were wound just because his mother liked the sound.

He wanted formal, candlelight, linen napkins and imported champagne. Of course, he had staff to handle all that. All Saoirse could think of was how it would be the first time she would meet his parents Amancio and Allegra Suarez, the first time she would see his primary home, the first time she would see Barcelona. It would be the first time she played his hostess, and she started to crumble under the pressure from his very first, very casual mention of it.

She suggested something else. What about the Madrid rooftop mezze bar she loved, plates to share, warm air, and laughter that didn’t echo against glass.

“I just think… maybe something less perfect? A little messy could be nice.”

He stared at her. “Messy?”

She laughed, backtracking, “I mean… warm.”

She didn’t expect him to bristle, but the silence that followed was just a breath too long. He stood by the window, his glass of wine untouched on the dresser. Then he turned, slowly, and crossed to where she sat on the tufted ottoman.

“Saoirse,” his voice was unexpectedly soft. “I know you think I do things to impress people. I don’t. I do things to protect our legacy.”

She blinked. Her stomach flipped. He took her hand.

“You once told me you hated chaos, that noise made you feel like you were disappearing. I listened to that. All of this? It’s not for them. It’s for you. So you don’t have to flinch or shout just to be seen.”

She looked down. Her hand was warm in his.

“I wasn’t criticizing,” she whispered. She wanted to say that she was scared to death about meeting his family, but felt too ashamed to confess that.

He smiled. “I know. But if you ever feel the urge to disrupt what keeps you safe, ask yourself why first? Or ask me.”

Their next night was in Barcelona. 

The villa was not what she expected. Saoirse had imagined grandeur, but grandeur here was hushed and old. It crouched like something carved into the hillside, its shutters green with age, its stone pale from centuries of salt air. Yet inside, every object had the weight of centuries. Frescoed ceilings dimmed with candle smoke, rugs so fine the patterns seemed whispered rather than woven, glassware so thin it was a miracle they survived generations of Suarez hands.

It was ostentation, but more than that, it was permanence, and it made her shiver as they walked across one grand hall into his wing, accompanied by house staff.

At dinner with his family, she wore the dress he had laid out for her, a bone-colored silk that whispered when she walked. She sat at the long walnut table the staff set, candles burning in silver sticks that looked older than her country, crystal bowls of blood-red roses that were theatrical in the half-light. Her job, as she understood it, was simple. Say the right things, laugh at the right pauses, be beautiful and still.

Amancio and Allegra presided at the heads of the table as though they had not moved in forty years. Their faces bore the smooth, waxen look of people who had lived without weather or worry, their conversation clipped and correct. His sisters, Bibiana and Marcela, who flew in from their respective homes, sat opposite them. They were much older than Roman, much sharper than their parents. Their jewels caught the candlelight but not their eyes.

Everyone was polite, certainly, courteous, but cold in the way of people who considered emotion provincial. Their questions, when they came, were less about curiosity than verification, like they were simply testing details Roman had already provided, confirming that Saoirse was indeed studying literature, that her parents were lost and dead respectively, that her family was from Northern Ireland and her only living sibling was really just a half-sibling, that she had indeed been in Madrid for a residency. 

Each fact was treated like a line item on a ledger already balanced. They smiled without warmth, listened without listening. Each nod felt rehearsed. Saoirse felt herself shrinking into silence, every story she might have told suffocated before it could form.

At one point, a silver serving dish slipped in a footman’s hand and clattered faintly against the table. The sound was sharp enough to make Saoirse flinch, but the Suarez family did not so much as blink. She realized then that one could die in this house, and they would still finish dessert before calling a doctor.

The food itself was nice, though she could hardly taste it. There was velvet consommé in porcelain cups, sole in a sauce so delicate it seemed transparent, lamb roasted to impossible tenderness. Each dish appeared, was praised with a single syllable, “Correcto, bien,” from Allegra, who was actually Italian, and was cleared in silence. Not a crumb misplaced, not a drop spilled.

Marcela, the younger of the two sisters, at last turned her pale gaze on Saoirse. “You write poems,” she said in clear English, as though observing a child’s hobby. “Roman tells us you are very… earnest.”

Saoirse smiled too quickly. “I suppose I am.”

Marcela gave a single nod, then lowered her eyes to her plate, her interest extinguished as abruptly as it had been lit.

Bibiana spoke only once, to correct the date of a festival Saoirse mentioned in Madrid. “It is in April,” she said coolly, cutting into her lamb. “Not March.” Then silence, the knife glinting like a definite full stop.

Roman, beside her, rested his hand lightly over hers on the tablecloth, an anchor in the icy drift. His thumb moved once, just enough to remind her of his presence. She felt it as protection, his warmth against the chill of the room, a quiet signal that even here, under his parents’ roof, she was his to manage, to reassure, to hold still. He smiled at his family with the same quiet command he used with his staff, unruffled, unreadable.

By the time dessert arrived, an almond torte so fine it melted at the fork, Saoirse’s cheeks hurt from smiling, and she had learned something essential. In this family, perfection was a requirement. Humanity was optional.

Yet, as she looked around the table, she told herself it was a kind of discipline she could learn from. More importantly, she saw room for her own tenderness to mean something, to thaw what had probably been frozen for generations. Wasn’t it beautiful, in its way, to be tested by marble and found worthy?

Perhaps she was meant to bring light into this house. Why else would Roman have walked up to her at the bar that random evening in Madrid? He had the whole world at his table, and yet he stopped for her. He clearly needed some warmth in his cold world, and she could give him that, she would give him that.

His hand lingered on hers, and she believed it was a sign that, although his family may never understand her, he did. That in a world as polished and airless as this, her warmth was precious.

And the mezze bar never came up again.

+

The night of the party for his associates, the villa glowed. Everyone was dressed like influence, wealth, and control. Saoirse wore bone silk. Her hair was tucked, her lipstick barely there. She was beautiful and quiet. She had practiced both.

The men and women came in twos. They were polished, air-kissing, wearing their status in scent and silence. Roman proudly introduced her to them all as his girlfriend.

Then Clair walked in. Clair Neumann, one of the expected guests. She was the only one not “partnered”. But Roman’s family knew her, everyone knew her, it seemed. Someone would later whisper that her mother was Amancio Suarez’s oldest counsel. 

She was very late, and she was laughing loudly about it. She wore a striking red dress, and her hair was unpinned, her bracelet clinking against her wine glass like punctuation. She kissed Saoirse on both cheeks, looked her up and down with a warm smirk.

“You’re the one Roman’s been hiding.” Saoirse blinked and smiled reflexively. “Don’t worry. I’m just nosy,” Clair said and laughed.

She poured her own wine, loudly. Mid-conversation with one of the men, she said, completely unprompted, “God, I miss being terrible at things. Remember when we were all mediocre at something and still felt okay about it?”

The room chuckled. Roman’s jaw flexed. Saoirse felt it in her spine, that shift in the room’s tone, and then, her own flinch. Clair hadn’t said anything wrong, but Saoirse had forgotten it was possible to be that unfiltered, to take up space without wrapping it in apology.

Clair sat beside her at dinner, drank too much wine, interrupted Roman twice, and laughed with her mouth wide open, like Saoirse had done that first night at the Madrid penthouse.

As the house fell back into stillness that night, Roman slid his hand onto Saoirse’s back.

“Loud women never last. You know that, right?” He said with his low voice.

“She seemed… alive,” Saoirse responded.

“So does fire, until it ruins the room.”

She told herself she was growing more refined, but later, alone in bed, face turned to the pillow, she dreamed of dancing on an ugly rooftop with plastic cups and music too loud to hear herself think.

When she woke up, she didn’t write that down like she usually would.

Three days later, she got a long SMS:

Hey porcelain girl,

I keep thinking about you from the other night. Not sure if you noticed, but I watch people the way most men watch sport. You were luminous but every time you spoke, your eyes checked his face first. Just an observation.

I’ve done it too. I once married a man who said I “sparkled too much in public” so I learned to dim. Just wanted to say you don’t have to answer this but if you ever want dinner with too much wine, all the wrong forks, and people who let you talk with your hands…

I’m in town for another week and I promise not to call you rare, fragile, or poetic.

– Clair from your dinner party

Saoirse read it in bed when Roman was in the shower. As the white noise of the distant water gushing immersed her in a brief, suspended moment, she read it again and again. She didn’t reply, not yet. She just… stared at it and felt the quiet flutter of something like recognition.

At the giant island of one of the Barcelona kitchens the next morning, Roman was slicing blood oranges into perfect rounds. The sun shone through the glass wall like gold paint, and Saoirse held her phone like something burning just beneath her skin.

She didn’t mean to show him. She just… didn’t want to keep a secret, not even a small one.

“Clair sent me a message,” she said softly.

He didn’t look up, “Mmm. Of course she did.” She slid the phone across the counter. He read it carefully, twice. “Red dress needs attention. Chocante.” He chewed on a slice and chuckled. He set the knife down, wiped his hands on a linen towel, and looked at her fully now. “Do you want to go to dinner with her?”

She shrugged. “I don’t know.” 

He walked to her and touched her cheek.

“Women like Clair are threatened by stillness. They only feel real when they’re being loud.” Saoirse nodded, staring into his earnest eyes. “So when they see someone who commands presence without demanding it… they panic.” She chewed on her lower lip, processing his words. His fingers slid to her chin, gently tugging to release her lip from her teeth.

“They want you to believe you’re muted. But sweetheart… You’re composed.” He smiled and turned around. “Some people don’t know how to exist without unraveling in public. It’s not your job to become chaotic so they can feel comfortable.”

She nodded again. He put some blood orange slices into two porcelain fruit bowls and handed her one with a kiss on the temple.

That night, he was asleep beside her in their bedroom, breathing soft and steady as she lay awake.

She opened her phone and typed slowly, a draft reply to Clair:

Thank you.

I didn’t realize I was checking his face but you’re right, I do. I don’t know when that started. I think he loves me. I think I love him. But I’m starting to wonder if this love only works when I’m quiet enough not to disturb it. I miss being a little wrong. I miss the version of me who didn’t worry if her laugh landed elegantly.

Thank you for noticing. That kind of noticing feels… rare. (Ironic, right?)

She stared at the message for several minutes and realized she hadn’t spoken with Nina in too long. “Let her live her life while you live yours,” Roman had once said. 

She pressed <Back>, tucking her message into the quiet. Finally, she turned out the little light on her bedside table.

+

Roman proposed exactly ten months after they met. Long enough for it to feel serious. Short enough for it to still feel like magic.

Saoirse was newly 22, barely anchored in the world. Roman was 37, impossibly composed, impossibly sure, impossibly powerful. He’d made her feel like a singular event in his long, curated life, like choosing her was inevitable.

She said yes immediately. They were in Lisbon on a surprise three-day trip. Roman had chosen the hotel for its views and quiet.

He’d packed for her. Every dress in the suite was already pressed and hanging when they arrived. That morning, a pair of vacation-grade espadrilles she hadn’t seen before lay on the floor beneath a note that said:

On the day of the proposal, they walked through Alfama, the old quarter with its labyrinthine streets and historic architecture. It was late afternoon, golden. He held her hand like it belonged to him in a contract. They reached a rooftop overlooking the orange tiles and soft haze of the sea, and there was a table set for two with linen, lemon water, and a single silver box beside the wine. 

She smiled. “What’s this?”

“A question,” he responded with all the calm in the world. He didn’t kneel. He just opened the box, slowly, like a man offering certainty. Inside was a ring she’d once admired in a museum book. It was art deco, diamond like a blade of light. She hadn’t remembered telling him. He had remembered.

“You once told me you don’t want to be saved,” he said. “Just held in a way that lets you stay soft.” He exhaled. “Let me do that.”

She didn’t hesitate for even a second. She said yes, then cried. He kissed her hand and said, “You’ll never have to explain yourself again.”

That night, she lay in bed in his shirt, watching him sleep. She couldn’t sleep. She turned out of bed, opened her journal, and wrote with a whimsical pen he gave her in Florence.

She stopped and stared at that last line. Where did it come from? She left it and went to sleep beside a man who remembered her preferences but had never once asked what she wanted.

+

He planned everything.

The planner was someone from Milan who was elegant, discreet, and only spoke to Saoirse via email, and even then, sparingly. Every time she tried to suggest something—songs she liked, her mother’s lace veil, a family poem to read during the ceremony—it was smoothed away.

The colors were his. Ivory, bone, silver. No red. No green. Nothing that reminded her of before. The guest list? 118 people. She only knew 12, and none of them was Sinead, her only family left.

She didn’t have bridesmaids because he said she didn’t need them, and she didn’t try to argue. The way he loved her was so total, it felt selfish to want anything more.

When she saw herself in the final dress, hand-stitched silk, simple, perfect, she cried. She didn’t recognize the woman in the mirror, but she still wanted to be her.

The wedding was at a private villa in Puglia because that’s where Allegra Suarez wanted it. It was all vineyard, marble, a chapel with no ceiling, just sky. Saoirse knew she looked unreal, hair slicked into a low twist, gown whispering at the hem. She walked like someone suspended, not grounded.

Nina was invited but not treated like a close friend. The planner sat her far from the family table, didn’t give her a speech slot or more than five minutes alone with the bride, with her. Saoirse let it be the planner’s fault when it was obvious whose fault it was and how complicit she was in that decision.

Because Roman knew Nina saw too much, and Saoirse knew Nina’s presence was a tether to her old self, the version still half-wild, unpolished, full of light and contradictions.

Nina arrived late. Her flight was delayed. The car from the airport took too long. By the time she slipped into her seat (Row 6, aisle), the ceremony had already begun. She saw Saoirse walk up the aisle and felt it like a bruise. Her best friend looked perfect but not like herself.

They only spoke once at the reception, between toasts.

“You made it,” Saoirse whispered as Nina walked up to her.

“Barely. But I wasn’t going to miss it. You look…” She took Saoirse in from head to toe, and smiled a very tight, thin-lipped smile. “You’re so thin now.”

Saoirse hesitated. “Thank you for being here.”

Pause. “Is it everything you wanted?” Nina asked. Saoirse smiled.

“It’s everything he wanted for me.”

Nina nodded once and said as gently as possible, “Okay.”

She left before dessert, a note, folded and left on the bedside table of Saoirse’s bridal suite, through a kindly Suarez staff member Nina managed to waylay:

The reception reached its still point when Roman’s parents rose to present their gifts with few words, small smiles, and no embrace. For the couple, an estate deed in Galicia, thousands of acres of vineyard and forest, handed over in a slim velvet-lined folder as casually as others might give a toaster. 

For her alone, Allegra produced a necklace, 24 cabochon sapphires set in antique platinum, the kind of piece that had lived through centuries of locked vaults. 

“For permanence,” she said softly amidst loud cheers from the guests, fastening it around Saoirse’s throat with cool, perfumed fingers.

It was their one show of warmth, a molecule of inclusion, but it was warmth that weighed. The necklace sat heavy against her collarbone. The deed was passed to Roman to tuck into his silver jacket pocket before the applause was finished. Saoirse told herself it meant she was theirs now, that was why she did not shiver when she felt the invisible chain tighten.

They honeymooned in the new Galicia property, of course. The estate was carved into the cliffside, with whitewashed stone, a private plunge pool, and bougainvillea curling against every edge.

There were no TVs, no clocks, no staff unless summoned. Roman arranged everything.

They woke up with the sun. He brought her fruit on a silver tray. He read to her from Rilke in the mornings, rubbed oil into her shoulders at night. Every moment was perfect.

And yet… Saoirse started to feel a strange kind of weightlessness.

On the third day, she tried to write. She brought her notebook to the terrace, where the view was unreal, the blue sea like something invented. She stared at the page and wrote…

Stopped. She tried again…

Stopped. She tore out the page just as Roman appeared behind her and wrapped his arms around her waist.

“That’s the trouble with want,” he murmured. “It keeps you from enjoying what you already have.”

Later that night, they had dinner by a private chef different from the one on staff, candles in glass bowls. The food was flawless. 

“I love watching you like this. No noise, no one pulling at you. Just still.”

She smiled. Have I stopped pulling at myself, too?

The next morning, she asked if they could go into town “just to wander and see things.”

“What things?”

“I don’t know. Just… to walk. Maybe find a bookstore.”

He tilted his head and smiled. “I brought all your favorites here. Why go looking for things when we’ve curated exactly what you love?”

She laughed. He kissed her neck, and she let it go. But that night, she woke up with her heart racing from a sudden awareness of just how still she’d become.

She went to the bathroom, turned on the tap, and stared at herself in the mirror. The robe hung perfectly, her skin glowed, she looked like the kind of woman who had everything.

On another night, they hadn’t spoken for a full hour. Dinner was soft, candlelit, barefoot on the terrace. Wine was ancient and from somewhere coastal. Dessert was mousse fed to her from his fingers. Her body was already humming before he even touched her.

He didn’t undress her quickly. He didn’t even undress her completely. He just unbuttoned the back of her dress and let it fall to her waist, brushed her shoulders with his mouth, tasted her collarbone like something he’d earned.

When he finally kissed her, he murmured against her lips, “Every time I touch you, I learn something new.”

She was on top at first, his hands on her hips, letting her move, lead. And then, he shifted so she was underneath again, his weight perfectly balanced. His mouth at her ear, breathing. 

“Let me hold the part of you that keeps disappearing.”

She didn’t know what that meant, but her body answered.

He made her come slowly and held her there, let her unravel in silence, kissed her through it. When she opened her eyes, dazed, undone, floating, he was looking at her like she was a cathedral he’d finished restoring.

They didn’t speak for a while after. His hand traced lazy circles on her thigh. Then, so quietly she almost missed it—

“No one will ever know you like this, not even yourself.”

She kissed his chest and let the words settle into her skin as she fell asleep.

+

It came in phases.

Phase 1 was Roman the Worshipper. This was the beginning, their relationship era. They had constant sex, all tenderness, devotion, permission. He made Saoirse feel like worship was a language only he could speak fluently. 

He touched her like she was rare. He asked for everything. He centered her pleasure, watching her face when she climaxed. His tenderness was her sexual awakening.

Phase 2 was when he started to edit. They moved into a Suarez family estate in outer Madrid after their two-week honeymoon. They did this even though Roman kept his penthouse near Salamanca, where he stayed between overnight trips and late board meetings at the family company HQ. 

Right after the honeymoon and into the first year of their marriage, there was a general shift in their relationship. Saoirse felt this most clearly during sex. He still worshipped her, but he guided the rhythm strictly and always corrected her.

“Slower. You rush when you want to impress.”

“Don’t speak, just feel.”

“You’re most beautiful when you give in.”

He kissed her after saying these things, so they sounded like intimacy, and she learned to respond the way he preferred.

Somewhere between phases two and three was the “withholder”, the version of Roman that came in every once in a while just to mess with Saoirse’s head.

The first time this happened was in the first year of their marriage. Roman was still warm, present, predictable. He never ever stopped making her coffee in the mornings or kissing her forehead. But one day, he just stopped making love to her. 

During this strange period, he even laid her notebook by the window for her, next to a vase of fresh lavender, yet he didn’t touch her for days.

It had started with a short story, a small piece, barely 1,500 words.

Months after they returned from their honeymoon in Galicia, she started to write it in the mornings before he woke, curled on the balcony with her knees tucked to her chest. It wasn’t about him, not directly. It was about a girl who talked to birds and didn’t know she was lonely until they stopped answering.

When she finished it, she printed it with the standing printer in his study and left it on his table like it didn’t matter.

That night, at dinner, he brought it up.

They ate sea bass and sipped the wine he picked. They talked about someone’s IPO, a summit he was hosting in October. Then, as the staff cleared the plates, he dropped it casually: “The story was interesting.”

Surprised, she perked up. “You read it?”

“Of course. You left it where I’d see it.”

“I didn’t mean to. I just… wanted to write again,” she whispered.

He tilted his head. “Writing is fine. I just didn’t know you’d started needing things again.”

She blinked. “Needing?”

“Space, time, privacy. You used to be so contained.” His eyes narrowed as if trying to understand her. “Now, there’s… spill.” He looked genuinely curious, like a man watching a plant grow in the wrong direction. “It’s not a problem. I’m just noticing the shift.”

He smiled, reached across the table, and touched her wrist.

“I fell in love with how little you demanded, that stillness, that openness. It let me pour into you.”

Something inside her went cold. He stood and walked into the hallway, back toward his study.

She didn’t plan to do it. She just clicked <Submit> on a literary mag’s website one morning while he was on a call in the other room. She had no cover letter, no fanfare. Just the story and her name, her former name. Saoirse Sweeney.

She stared at the submission confirmation email like it was a crime. Weeks passed, and she almost forgot about it. Then another email.

Accepted. With a short note: We loved the strange quiet of this piece. We’d love to include it in our winter issue.

She didn’t tell him, at first, because it felt too delicate. After a while, it felt too late to tell him. The piece went live on a rainy Thursday on a quiet corner of the internet. He found out within two hours.

The staff had set the table for dinner in the dining room when he entered, phone in hand. She stopped slicing her fruit and looked up at him.

“You published something,” he said as if talking about the weather.

She froze. “You saw it?”

“I see everything with your name on it.” He walked toward her. It wasn’t anger she sensed from him but something cooler and more precise. “You didn’t tell me.”

Saoirse took a deep breath. “I didn’t think I had to.”

He reached out, gently wiped a bit of juice from her wrist with his thumb.

“It’s beautiful.” She relaxed. “But it’s missing something. It’s not as clean as it used to be.” Their eyes locked. “Your writing has always been better when you let me give you notes first.”

She didn’t speak. He kissed her temple.

“Still, I’m proud. You’re returning to yourself.” He smiled. “Just don’t forget who made space for that return.”

He walked out of the room, and she looked down at the dessert bowl of fruit. There was a thin line of blood on her index finger. She hadn’t even felt the slice.

He didn’t touch her when he came to bed that night or for the rest of the week. So when she came into the study one night in a silk robe, barefoot, freshly showered, just a hint of perfume behind her ear, it was a quiet, careful invitation she’d never tried or needed to try before. She leaned against the doorframe and said, “Come to bed?”

He looked up from a flat dossier on his desk and frowned just a little. “You tired?”

She smiled and shrugged. “Not exactly.”

He studied her, then smiled too gently.

“Not tonight, mi amor.” He returned his attention to his phone. “You look beautiful, but it’s been a long week.” He grunted. “You should rest.”

Her breath caught. He made the “no” sound like a favor, and she couldn’t argue with that, so she nodded and walked away.

In bed, she lay still, hands folded, eyes open.

In the morning, he brought her black coffee with a kiss on her forehead and said, “You see? You’re glowing. I was right.”

She told herself he was, until it had been weeks of soft avoidance, gentle nos, too-tired-tonights, forehead kisses, and coffee left steaming but untouched.

Try again. Ask differently. Be soft, softer… and maybe he’d return to her the way he used to. Meanwhile, he was busier than ever with work, and she, idler than ever because she couldn’t write a word.

One night, she waited until he’d showered, towel wrapped low on his hips, hair damp, jaw clean-shaven. She lit candles in the bedroom, more for courage than for seduction. She walked to him slowly, barefoot, in a white silk nightdress she hadn’t worn in months.

“Touch me,” she whispered. She reached for his hands, placed them on her waist, and tipped her face up for a kiss.

For a moment, he did. His mouth found hers. His hand slid up the back of her neck. Their bodies pressed, heat curling between them like recognition.

Then, he pulled away and looked at her, assessing her face… or her soul.

His voice came out low and way too controlled, “I miss when you used to let me lead you.”

Saoirse froze, then said quietly, “I thought I was.”

“No. You’re asking, not waiting.” He kissed her forehead and turned away to pull on his shirt. “We need to recalibrate, mi amor. We’re too off rhythm.”

He left the room like that, and she stood there. The candles burned down. The room smelled like wax and silence. She stood there and wrapped her own arms around herself. What if he only wanted me when I didn’t know how to want myself?

When he finally made love to her, it was on the carpeted floor of their vast home library one late afternoon. He had just returned from a week-long business trip to Geneva, excited to have closed a big acquisition. She cried, wept with no sound, the tears just kept leaking out as he thrust into her, and she didn’t know why.

After, they lay on the plush carpet, hearts beating in fast tempo as he kissed her all over her face. And again and again, he repeated “I love you” between the kisses.

After that, she never wrote again, not really.

The Suarez Myth: Chapter 1

Five years ago.

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

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

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

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

But he saw her.

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Both, maybe,” she said finally.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Saoirse,

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

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

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

Warmly,

RS

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“You have no idea how perfect you are.”

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

But he kept turning the conversation back to her.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Is this okay?”

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

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

“You don’t let go easily.”

“You hold your breath when I touch you.”

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

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

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

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

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

“Do what?” Saoirse said, very confused.

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

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

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

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

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

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

She nodded.

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

+

The call was casual.

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

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

Saoirse laughed lightly. “Golden and still godly.”

“And you? How are you?”

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

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

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

Nina went quiet for a moment.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

+

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And she did! He knew her that well.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

She started editing her writing more after that.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

She’d cried on the plane.

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

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

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

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

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

She stared at it until her phone buzzed.

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

You’re welcome, mi amor.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

+

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Maybe not.”

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

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

+

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“A surprise that costs you your life?”

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

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

+

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

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

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

“Mmhmm.”

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

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

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

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

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

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