Chapter 23 Seamus
Chapter twenty-three
Seamus
The city sprawls beneath my home office window—thousands of lights blinking and pulsing in the darkness.
I should be working. The quarterly reports are waiting on my desk, Malcolm's latest projections for the downtown development, three contracts that need my signature by morning.
Instead, I stand here with a scotch I poured an hour ago and haven’t touched, watching traffic bleed red and white far below.
Rosanna is in her studio next door. I can hear the faint scratch of pencil on paper, the occasional soft sigh when something doesn't come out right.
She's been working on illustrations for a new children's book.
Her own book this time. It's about a girl who plants a garden in the city and watches it grow despite the concrete and steel trying to crowd it out.
She told me about it over dinner, her whole face lighting up as she described the color palette she's planning.
The penthouse feels different since she moved in. There are sketchbooks on the coffee table, a bright blue cardigan draped over the back of the couch, her favorite tea taking up an entire shelf in the kitchen.
Small invasions of color and warmth that should feel intrusive but instead make the space feel like a home.
I've lived here for five years, and it took Rosanna days to make it feel lived-in.
But there's a hollowness underneath it all, following me from room to room like a shadow I can't shake.
Because every time she smiles at me, every time she reaches for my hand or laughs at something I've said, I wonder if she'd still do it if she knew the truth.
If she knew that the childhood pen pal she's been writing to—the one she trusts with her doubts and dreams—is the same man she's sharing a breakfast table with every morning.
I told myself I'd tell her after things felt more stable. But there's always a reason to wait. And they're all lies I'm telling myself to avoid the moment when she looks at me and realizes I've been deceiving her since the beginning.
My phone lights up with a notification—some society blog has posted photos of Rosanna and me.
I swipe through them without really looking until I stop on one: Rosanna's hand on my arm, both of us smiling at something someone said.
The caption reads: Reformed playboy Seamus O'Malley and his artist wife prove that some leopards really can change their spots.
Reformed. That word again. Like my past is something I've recovered from, a disease I've been cured of through the miracle of marriage and respectability.
The truth is messier.
Once upon a time, I made a decision.
If people were going to use me anyway, I'd control the terms. That meant casual relationships with clear expectations.
It worked. I knew what I was getting—temporary, surface-level, nothing real.
Honest, in its dishonesty.
The problem was that everyone assumed I loved it.
The boards, the press, even my own team—they all saw the headlines and thought Seamus O'Malley was living his best life, charming his way through an endless parade of beautiful women.
No one asked if I was happy. Probably because they assumed the answer was obvious.
No one noticed I was empty. That I’d decided this was all I deserved.
And then ERS matched me with the one woman in the city who'd publicly told me exactly what she thought of me and everything I represented.
The woman who'd looked at my company's development plans and seen destruction instead of progress.
Who'd stood up at a community meeting and called me power-hungry and soulless without a trace of fear.
I should have hated being matched with Rosanna. Instead, I felt something I hadn't felt in years: hope.
I sit down at my desk and open my laptop, pulling up the email thread. Shay and Anna. The names we chose as kids when our schools paired us for that pen pal project.
I was eight and terrible at spelling. She was seven and already attaching drawings to her letters.
We were supposed to write for one school year. We never stopped. Through middle school, high school, college.
Sometimes we wrote every week. Sometimes months passed. We always came back.
She told me about her dreams of becoming an illustrator, about the small moments that made her feel alive. I told her about the pressure of inheriting my father's company, about feeling trapped between duty and desire.
We weren't pen pals because we wanted something from each other. We were pen pals because words on a screen created a space where we could be honest without consequences.
The cursor blinks in the empty reply field.
She wrote to me yesterday—to Shay—about feeling uncertain, about wondering if she's losing herself in someone else's life.
I should tell her it's me. I should close this laptop and walk twenty feet to her studio and say the words that will either save us or destroy us.
Instead, I start typing. Hey Anna, I know what you mean about feeling lost...
I delete what I wrote and close the laptop without sending anything.
The scotch has gone warm in my hand. I set it down and press my palms against my eyes, trying to push back the headache that's been building all evening.
Somewhere in my head, I can hear my father's voice: You're overcomplicating this, son. Business is simple—you identify the problem, you execute the solution, you move forward.
But this isn't business.
This is Rosanna.
I don't know how to fix things without losing her, and I've only just found her.
The scratching sound from her studio has stopped. I hear her moving around, probably stretching out the stiffness from sitting hunched over her desk for hours.
In a minute, she'll come looking for tea, and she'll poke her head into my office and ask if I want anything. She'll smile at me, warm and real, and I'll smile back and tell her I'm fine.
I don’t know which truth will hurt her more—that I’ve been writing to her as Shay, or that I’ve been sitting in boardrooms while my company still pushes to turn her storefront into a line item.
I should lay it all out and let her decide if any of this is salvageable.
But I can't shake the fear that once I start telling truths, the whole carefully constructed reality will collapse. That she'll realize I'm exactly what she thought I was at that first community meeting.
And maybe she'd be right. Maybe the reason I can't tell her the truth is because I know that the truth will confirm her worst assumptions about me.
There's a soft knock on the office door, and Rosanna leans in, her hair escaping from the messy knot she'd twisted it into earlier. "Hey. I'm making tea. Want some?"
She's backlit by the hallway light, and for a moment she's just a silhouette—unknowable, unreachable, already slipping away. Then she steps forward, and she's solid again, real, close enough to touch.
"I'm fine," I hear myself say.
She smiles and disappears, and I'm alone again with the city lights and the hollow feeling in my chest and the certainty that I'm running out of time. Eventually, she's going to find out the truth—about Shay, about the development, about all of it.
The only question is whether I tell her myself or wait until circumstances force the revelation.