9. Maren
MAREN
Iwake up in his bed and I do not remember walking up the stairs.
This is the first thing I notice, and it is the wrong first thing to notice, but my brain has decided that the chronology of how I ended up here matters more, currently, than the fact that I am here at all.
There were stairs. Cassian carried me up them — that, I remember.
There was a robe. There was, at some point, water, because there's a glass on the nightstand on the side of the bed I am, evidently, claiming as mine. There was a kiss against the back of my neck before I went under, and the words sleep, sweetheart low at my ear, in a voice I’ll need to reckon with later.
It is past nine. The sun is doing the thing it does on the white-plastered walls of his bedroom, the long slants the color of pulled honey, and the linen sheet across my hips smells like him in a way the t-shirt I wore down to the kitchen did not, and I sit up too fast and my head does the slow swim of a body that has done a thing it has not done in eleven months.
Cassian is not in the bed.
There is a note on the pillow beside mine. Cream paper. His handwriting, which I have never seen before — sharp consonants, looping vowels, the kind of script you'd expect from a man who signs his name on documents with consequences.
Breakfast at ten on the terrace. Sebastian will bring you a robe if you need one. — C.
I read it twice. I read it a third time looking for something else, some thread I can pull, some word I can panic about, and there is nothing to panic about, which is somehow worse.
I panic about it anyway.
I’m sitting on the edge of his bed in his linen sheet, my face in my hands, and my thoughts go in roughly this order: Sebastian heard us; the kitchen; oh God, the kitchen; the marble, the actual marble where they make the bread; the fact that he has staff, that he has investors; the fact that I am going home on Saturday; the fact that I am going home on Saturday and what, exactly, that means.
The bedroom door opens without knocking, because of course it does.
"Get dressed," Cassian says.
He is already dressed. White linen shirt, the cuffs rolled, dark trousers, hair still damp from the shower he has, evidently, taken in a different bathroom from the one attached to this room.
He crosses to the bed. He doesn't sit. He bends and puts his hand at the back of my neck and tilts my face up to his, and his thumb sweeps across my cheekbone once, soft, and his mouth touches mine — briefly, almost professionally — and then he is gone again.
"Cassian."
"Mm."
"We need to talk."
"After breakfast."
"Cassian—"
"After. Breakfast." He pauses at the door. He looks back. "Maren. You are not in trouble."
"I didn't say I was."
"Your face did."
He goes.
By ten fifteen we are on the terrace, and my mother noticed.
I’m not sure how she’s noticed, because Cassian—to his credit or his discredit, depending on the hour—is performing a flawless impression of a man who, six hours ago, was not on his knees in front of his fiancée.
He pours my coffee. He passes me the cream.
He answers Owen’s question about the regional water table with the patience of a tenured professor. None of this is new behavior.
The new behavior is everything else.
His hand finds my knee under the table. It does not stay there in the demonstrative way it stayed at the bonfire — he is not performing for the table now.
It rests on my knee the way a hand rests on a knee that belongs to it.
Familiar. Settled. When I reach for the salt, his fingers brush mine, and he doesn't withdraw, and he doesn't comment, and his thumb traces, for half a heartbeat, the inside of my wrist before he lets me have the salt.
My mother has stopped chewing.
"Maren, sweetheart."
"Yes."
"You're glowing."
"I'm — it's the sun, Mom."
"Mm."
Sienna's eyes lift from her phone. She looks at me. She looks at Cassian's hand, which is back on my knee. She looks at Cassian's face, which is doing nothing in particular. She looks back at me. She does not, this time, say anything, and the not-saying is somehow more attention than I want.
"Cassian," my father says. "Tell me again how the expansion is going."
"On schedule. We have an investor visit Thursday, actually — Roland Vance and his team are coming out to the property. Final tour, then a dinner. Maren will host with me."
"Will she?" Owen's voice. Mild.
"She will."
"That's nice."
"Yes."
The conversation moves on. Cassian's hand slides, slowly, up my thigh, under the soft fabric of the dress I have, in a fog, put on this morning, and stops at a point that is not strictly decorous. He keeps speaking to my father about the water table.
I look at my plate. I look at the small pile of fruit I have not eaten.
I think about the words Maren will host with me and the way they sounded in his mouth — natural, casual, the way a man says a sentence he has said before — and I think, with a small cold shock under my breastbone: we have not discussed this.
We have, in fact, discussed almost nothing.
We discussed an arrangement in his office.
We discussed an end date. We discussed that I would behave at the villa as though I meant it.
We did not discuss Roland Vance. We did not discuss me hosting an investor dinner.
We did not discuss any of what has, since approximately six fifty-one this morning, become we.
"Excuse me," I say, and I stand.
"Sweetheart?"
"I just — I need a minute. The sun. I'm fine."
I walk back into the house. I walk fast. I walk past Sebastian, who pretends not to see me, and into the small powder room off the foyer, and I sit on the closed lid of the toilet with my elbows on my knees and try to breathe through my nose the way Cassian told me to in the foyer five days ago.
Voices. Muffled. Coming through the thin plaster of the wall behind me.
I lift my head.
Cassian's office is on the other side of that wall.
His office and, evidently, his open window, because the words I am hearing are not the indistinct burr of speech through plaster.
They are clear. They are coming through the open transom above the door of the powder room, which connects to the hall, which connects to the cracked door of the office.
"—Roland's already heard about it. Half of the Vance board has, apparently. His assistant called Sebastian Tuesday."
A second voice. Older. A voice from a phone speaker, probably.
"That's — well, Cassian, that's actually excellent.
That's the best news you've given me in six months.
The optics on this are significantly better than I projected.
A divorced CEO is a problem. An engaged one is — well, frankly, it's a different conversation.
Roland likes a man with skin in the game. "
"Mm."
"How serious is it?"
A pause.
"Serious enough. She's at the villa. The family's here this week."
"And Thursday?—"
"She'll host the dinner. Yes."
"Cassian. I cannot stress this enough. This is the single best thing you could have done for the Vance pitch. Whoever she is — God bless her."
"Mm."
"Don't mm me, son. Walk her down an aisle if you have to. We need this funding."
"Understood."
The line clicks. A chair scrapes. Footsteps toward the office door — and then away, deeper into the office, to a desk, to the next thing on the list.
The optics on this are significantly better than I projected.
An engaged one is a different conversation.
The little bathroom is very, very quiet.
My hand, when I look at it, has the ring on it, and the ring is catching the sun coming through the small window, and the diamond is throwing a small, fractured rainbow on the white wall above the towel rack, and I look at it and I think — clearly, without drama — of course.
Of course it benefits him. He told you it benefited him.
He told you, in his office, that it benefited him.
He never lied about that. The lying came later, in the kitchen, when he called it not an act, and how would you know the difference, Maren, how would you possibly know.
I study myself in the mirror: loose hair, a mouth touched into softness. There’s a look about me I recognize only dimly, as if the last twelve hours are still resting on my skin.
I tuck my hair behind my ears.
I open the door.
I walk back out to the terrace, and I sit down beside Cassian, and he turns to me and his hand reaches under the table for my knee, and I cross my legs away from him, smoothly, before his fingers can land.
He does not react. Not in any way another person would notice.
But his eyes flick to mine, just once, before he turns back to my father, and what I see there is a question.
I do not answer it.