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.