The Suarez Myth: Chapter 4

Amancio passed away three months later. He was 83.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“She did?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

+

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Are we fighting? 

Or is this just what marriage looks like?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

+

The Tuscany house was unbearable by her third trimester.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Whims.

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

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

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

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

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

+

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

+

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

That was when Nina came.

Her simple text came first: 

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

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

“You sound half-asleep,” Nina teased.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“I mean, created small, perfect miracles.”

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

Nina turned. “Mariana?”

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

Nina smiled faintly. “And David?”

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

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

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

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

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

Even the air-conditioning seemed to hum with judgment.

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

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

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

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

“And you?”

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

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

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

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

Saoirse froze. “Oh.”

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

“What does that mean?”

Nina sighed. “I didn’t ask.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“I know,” Nina whispered now.

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

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

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

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

“Remind me what she does again?”

“She’s a journalist.”

He paused. “A journalist.”

Saoirse’s chest tightened. “Yes.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

No signature. None was needed.

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

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

The perfume grew heavier. The silence deepened.

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

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

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

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

white roses, thousands, master suite filled before she wakes

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

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

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

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