7. Adriana
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Adriana
In this city, the Rosewood name gets you the best table in the house. I spent my life seated at it and invisible.
I grew up the fourth child and the only girl, behind three brothers in a family that measured its children.
Leon, our eldest, meant to lead it. Thaddeus and Conrad to serve it.
And me, raised soft and ornamental in the long shadow the three of them cast, taught from the cradle that my single useful purpose was to marry well and reflect nothing back on the family but polish.
Ours is an old house with old customs, and the first of them is this: a Rosewood does not embarrass the Rosewoods.
My father lived by it and my mother still enforces it like scripture.
I broke it in front of a roomful of people, on camera, with a slideshow and a kiss.
So it tells you exactly where I’ve landed: that of the three brothers I grew up behind, the one I called from the bar at one in the morning, was Conrad.
Conrad carries my one bag in from the car himself, waving off the building’s concierge.
“You could have packed lighter,” he says, shouldering the door open. “Or heavier. I genuinely can’t tell if this is everything you own now or a weekend trip.”
“It’s everything that matters.” I follow him in. “Renata sent the rest to storage.”
The bag is the one I packed days before the gala and left in the trunk of the car, because a woman who plans to detonate her marriage in front of a crowd should have the sense not to plan on sleeping at home after.
I’d called him that night and he came without asking a single question, which is the most Conrad thing about him.
The truth is that none of us are close, not the way siblings are supposed to be. We were raised in the same cold house and turned out civil strangers. But of my three brothers, Conrad is the one I can stand to be around.
Leon, the eldest, runs the family now, and I’ve never managed to be in a room with him without feeling measured. Thaddeus put an ocean between himself and all of us years ago and surfaces only for holidays and funerals.
And then there’s Conrad, closest to me in age, the only one who ever felt less like a Rosewood and more like a person. Brown curls he’s never once tamed, a face that gives away everything he feels.
He drops the bag in the middle of the front room, and I take the place in daylight.
Floor-to-ceiling glass down one whole wall, the city laid out gold and endless beyond it. Pale wood, clean lines, furniture that was chosen by someone with taste and a budget to match it.
It’s beautiful. It’s also far more than a woman hiding from her own family needs.
“Conrad, this is too much…” I turn to him. “You didn’t have to put me somewhere like this. I’d have been fine with somewhere simple. A room, four walls. I’m not exactly in a season of entertaining.”
He frowns at me as though I’ve said the most baffling thing he’s heard all week.
“Why on earth would we let you live in some sad little box when the family can afford this without noticing? You’re a Rosewood, Adriana.
You’re leaving your husband, you’re not joining a convent.
” He sets my bag down by the couch. “You’ll stay somewhere that reminds you what you’re worth. Non-negotiable.”
There’s a beat where a look passes behind his face that I don’t quite catch, gone before I can hold it.
I don’t have the energy to fight him, and the truth is the light coming through that glass is doing a thing to the knot in my chest that no amount of arguing would.
So I just say, “Thank you.”
“Don’t thank me. Just don’t tell Mom the address.”
A laugh scrapes out of me, hollow. It’s the closest thing to lightness I’ve felt since the gala, and it’s gone almost before it lands.
He crosses to the glass, and the humor goes out of him by degrees.
“She’s been calling,” he says to the window. “Everyone. Me, Thaddeus, half the board, wanting to know where you’ve gone to ground.”
My stomach tightens. “You didn’t…”
“I didn’t.” He gets the window up and the city noise comes in. “Told her you needed a few days and I’d pass things along. She didn’t love it. But I’ll hold her off as long as I can. Give you room to get your feet under you before she gets her hands on you.”
The breath I let out is bigger than I mean it to be.
I don’t have to imagine my mother’s reaction. I’ve watched Idriana Rosewood receive bad news for thirty years, the way her face goes smooth and terrible, the way her voice drops into a register that has never once needed to be raised.
By now, she’ll have an opinion fully formed about what I’ve done to the family name. The circle will have closed ranks and decided I was cold, that I was difficult, a disappointment.
It’s nothing new.
My phone lights up on the windowsill. A number I don’t have saved and I turn it face down.
Conrad watches me do it and doesn’t comment. Then, when he’s gathered his coat and his keys and he’s halfway to the door, he stops with his hand on the knob, turning back.
“The Beaufort thing.” His tone has changed. Carefully neutral, which is how this family says careful. “I’m not going to ask what it is. That’s your business. But I’d be a bad brother if I didn’t say it once.”
He looks at me intently. “Knox Beaufort is not a safe man to stand next to, Adriana. He’s charming, and he’s clever, and he ruins people for sport and forgets their names by dinner.
Men like that don’t attach. Whatever you think you’re doing with him, don’t forget what he is. Don’t be the one who gets burned.”
I hold his eyes, and I don’t tell him that I know exactly what Knox is, that knowing exactly what he is, is the entire point.
“I won’t,” I say.
He studies me a second longer, unconvinced. Then a softness gives in him, and he crosses back to press a quick kiss to the top of my head, the way he used to when we were children and I was the small one trailing after all of them.
“Call me,” he says. “Anything you need. Day or night. I mean it.”
Then he’s gone, the door clicking shut behind him, and the place is mine and quiet.
For a long moment I just stand in the middle of it.
All that glass, all that gold light, all that beautiful empty space, and no one in it but me. Some part of me waits to feel lonely. It doesn’t come. What arrives instead is closer to peace, the first in a year, the simple fact of a room where no one is waiting for me to be smaller than I am.
Tomorrow I’ll deal with all of it.
For now, I pull the blinds against the gold, lie down on a bed that asks nothing of me, and sleep the whole day into dark.
***
The thing about Knox Beaufort is that he can’t even hold a meeting the way a normal person would.
I’d texted him that morning, the day after Conrad moved me in, asking to meet somewhere private and discreet to smooth out the details of our arrangement before any of it went further.
The address he sent back leads me to a racetrack on the edge of the city, and the private box he’s directed me to looks down over a long ribbon of asphalt baking in the afternoon sun.
I stand at the glass in my sunglasses with my arms crossed, twenty minutes early because I am always ahead of agreed time, and there is no Knox Beaufort anywhere in the room.
I call him.
“Rosewood.” His voice is warm and far too pleased with itself. “You made it.”
“I’m in your box. You’re not.”
“Look down.”
I take my sunglasses off and look down.
A single car is tearing along the track below, fast and obscene about it. As I watch, it throws itself into a turn and breaks loose, the back end swinging wide in a long controlled slide, smoke coming off the tires, and rockets out the other side.
The car coasts to a stop on the straight below my window and the door opens.
Knox unfolds out of it, phone already in one hand, and uses his teeth to catch the fingertip of his glove and tug it off, his eyes finding mine through the glass the whole time he does it. Then he pulls the phone back to his ear.
“Come down,” he says, grinning. “I’ll take you for a lap. Two, if you ask nicely.”
“I’ll pass.”
“You sure? People wait years for a seat in this thing.”
He’s still grinning up at me, a grown man who picked a racetrack to take a meeting at so he’d have an excuse to play with his cars first.
“Are you done playing?” I say into the phone. “Some of us came here to work.”
His laugh crackles through the speaker. “You’re no fun, Rosewood.”
I hang up before he can offer me a third lap.
God help me, this is who I’ve gone into business with.
Knox comes up still in the racing suit, half unzipped, hair a mess, wearing the look of a man who’s had the best morning of anyone in the city while my whole life burns in everyone’s feeds.
“You could have warned me you’d be doing laps,” I say.
“And miss your face? Absolutely not.” He drops into a chair and props one ankle on the other knee. “I do my best thinking at speed. You should try it sometime.”
“Again, I’ll pass.” I take the chair across from him and set my bag down. “Can we?”
“We can.”
The play doesn’t leave his voice, but his eyes turn serious under it, and I’m reminded, once more, that the careless thing is a costume he takes on and off at will.
“The press, first. I killed the worst of it. The pieces digging into your marriage, those are gone, and they’ll stay gone.
” He says it without weight, a man reporting that he took out the trash.
“The gossip I can’t touch. The circle will say what the circle says.
But the papers won’t be handing them ammunition. ”
I hadn’t realized how braced I was for those stories until he tells me they aren’t coming. I keep it off my face. “Thank you.”
“It’s in my interest too. Don’t make it into a kindness.” He waves a hand. “Now… The particulars. You wanted to think it through sober, so think.”
So we lay it out, the shape of the thing we agreed to on a roof.
Or rather, I lay it out, because I came prepared.