Chapter Five #2
"How long have you had Marta and Tomas," she asked finally, because the silence had become unbearable and she'd rather fill it with something neutral than let it sit any longer.
"Eleven years. My grandfather hired them the year before he died. I kept them on because letting them go would have felt like erasing the last thing he chose for this house himself."
"You loved him."
"He was the only person in my family who ever asked me what I wanted instead of telling me what I should want.
" Damon said it without visible emotion, the same flat register he used for most things, but something underneath it caught her attention anyway, a rawness he clearly wasn't accustomed to letting show.
"I don't know that I've fully figured out how to answer that question yet, even now.
But he asked it, which is more than I can say for most people in my life. "
"My father used to ask me that too." The words came out before she'd decided to share them, a small, unguarded thing offered into the quiet between them.
"About the Belmere. What I wanted the lobby to feel like when people walked in.
He used to say a building should make you feel like someone was expecting you, even if you'd never been there before. "
Something shifted in Damon's expression, careful and complicated, and for a moment she thought he might apologize, might finally say something about what his family had done to hers, but he didn't, and she found she was almost relieved, because an apology right now would have felt like a performance neither of them had earned the right to stage yet.
"He sounds like he understood something about buildings most people in my industry have forgotten," Damon said instead, which wasn't an apology, but wasn't nothing either.
They didn't talk much more after that, but the silence for the rest of the meal felt different than it had at the start, less like two strangers avoiding each other and more like two people who'd found, without quite meaning to, one small patch of common ground neither of them had expected to share.
"Can I ask you something," she said, as Marta cleared the plates. "Off the record. Nothing to do with the contract."
"You can ask."
"Did you ever consider not doing this? Finding some other way to satisfy the clause. A shorter marriage to someone who actually wanted it. Anything that didn't involve holding my brother's freedom over my head."
He was quiet long enough that she thought he might not answer at all.
"I considered it for exactly as long as it took my legal team to explain that a marriage anyone could later prove was arranged purely for convenience, with no real leverage compelling either party to honor it, wouldn't survive a board challenge if Julian decided to contest its legitimacy.
I needed something that would hold under pressure.
I'm not proud of the math that led me to your brother's file.
I want to be clear that I've never once told myself it was anything other than what it was. "
"That's the most honest thing you've said to me since I walked into your office."
"I'd like there to be more of those, eventually. If you're willing to let there be." He held her gaze across the table, something unguarded in it that she wasn't ready to name. "I know I haven't earned the benefit of the doubt yet. I'm telling you I'd like to."
She didn't answer that directly, because she didn't trust her own voice to stay as steady as she wanted it to, and instead pushed back from the table and thanked Marta for the meal, and let the moment pass without either of them forcing it further.
After dinner, Damon walked her back toward the staircase, and paused at the bottom of it, hands in his pockets, something almost hesitant in the way he held himself that she hadn't seen from him before.
"I know none of this is what you'd have chosen," he said.
"I'm not going to pretend otherwise, or ask you to be grateful for a house or a room with good light.
But I would like this year to be survivable for you, at minimum.
I'd like it to be more than that, if it can be.
I understand I don't get to expect that.
I'm only telling you it's something I'd like. "
"Why are you telling me this now."
"Because I don't know when I'll have the nerve to say it again.
" A small, self deprecating twist of his mouth, gone almost as fast as it appeared.
"I'm better at negotiating terms than I am at saying things that don't have terms attached to them.
I wanted you to hear at least one thing tonight that wasn't part of a contract. "
She didn't know what to say to that, so she said nothing, and after a moment he nodded, as though her silence had told him everything he needed to know, and let her go up the stairs alone.
Later, alone in her room with the door closed and the city humming faintly through the old windows, Elena lay awake longer than she wanted to, replaying the day in pieces.
The courthouse. Her mother's tears. The careful, deliberate kindness of a man giving her a room with good afternoon light.
The strange, unwelcome softness in his voice when he talked about his grandfather, and the stranger softness in it at the bottom of the stairs.
She reminded herself, deliberately, methodically, of the folder that had started all of this, of Nico's shaking hands, of her father's heart giving out over a newspaper two years after this man's family took everything that made him who he was.
She reminded herself of all of it, and found, disquietingly, that none of it was quite enough to erase the small, unwanted warmth that had settled in her chest sometime during dinner, and stayed there long after she finally fell asleep.
She woke once, near three in the morning, to the quiet creak of the house settling around her, unfamiliar sounds she hadn't yet learned to sleep through, and lay still for a long moment listening to the particular silence of a house that had stood for a hundred years and outlasted every person who'd ever lived inside it.
Somewhere down the hall, faint enough that she might have imagined it, she thought she heard the low murmur of Damon's voice, on a call at this hour with someone, his father perhaps, or Priya, or one of the lawyers who never seemed to sleep either.
She didn't get up to check. She lay in the dark instead, in a bed that wasn't hers, in a house that wasn't hers, married to a man she'd known for two weeks, and tried to remember the last time she'd fallen asleep feeling anything close to safe, and found, uncomfortably, that she couldn't quite remember, and that some small, treacherous part of her chest had started, against every instinct she owned, to wonder if she might be closer to finding it here than she wanted to admit.
She thought of her father then, the way she always eventually did when her guard was lowest, and wondered what he would have made of any of this, his daughter married into the family that broke him, sleeping under a roof built by the grandfather of the man who now owned everything that had once been theirs.
She didn't know whether he'd have understood the choice or grieved it all over again from wherever grief like his eventually settled.
She only knew that somewhere in the last two weeks, without deciding to, she had stopped thinking of this house purely as enemy territory, and hadn't yet found the words to explain to herself what it had become instead.
She fell back asleep eventually, the murmur down the hall fading into silence, and didn't dream of anything she remembered when Marta knocked gently at seven to let her know breakfast was ready whenever she wanted it.