Chapter 13
chapter thirteen
mia
Iwake to sunlight coming sideways through the wrought-iron balcony doors, and Seb's arm heavy across my waist, and my phone face-down on the nightstand, vibrating once, then again, then going still.
I don't reach for it yet.
Seb shifts behind me, the old bed creaking faintly, and I feel the careful caution that hasn't fully released his neck even in sleep. This is new. Every morning since I arrived in Monaco has had somewhere urgent to be. This one, for a few minutes, doesn't.
"You're awake," he says, voice rough with sleep, not opening his eyes.
"How can you tell."
"Your breathing changes when you think."
"That's an alarming amount of data to have on a person you've known since the hospital."
"I notice things," he says. "We've established this."
I turn over to look at him properly — hair a wreck, the bruise along his cheekbone faded to something barely visible now, the tape at his collar still there, still a reminder of yesterday's recklessness. My phone buzzes again on the nightstand. Neither of us looks at it.
"I should get up," I say, without moving.
"You should."
Neither of us moves yet.
We end up on the balcony in borrowed robes, the harbour spread out below us doing its bright morning thing, croissants between us that neither of us has finished.
My pen sits on the table where he set it down sometime between waking and breakfast — returned without comment, a small unspoken acknowledgment that whatever it meant to leave it in his pocket, it has now served its purpose.
I pick it up. I put it in my own pocket this time. He notices me do it. Neither of us says anything about that.
"I have to be in London by tomorrow morning," I say. "Farrow."
"I know."
"I don't know what I'm going to tell him."
He reaches across the table, not for my hand exactly, just to rest his fingers briefly against my wrist. "What's the actual question. Not what you tell Farrow. The real one."
"Whether this exists outside Monaco," I say. "Whether it's real in London, in my flat, or whether it's something that only makes sense here, in old streets nobody photographs and suite you booked before you knew my favourite colour."
"I don't know your favourite colour."
"That's my point."
"Tell me."
"Later." I look at the harbour. "This city has its own physics. Everything feels inevitable here. London is going to ask harder questions."
"Then let it ask them," he says. "I'm not afraid of London."
My phone buzzes a third time. I finally check it.
Priya. Three messages, stacked.
Farrow moved the meeting to nine tomorrow morning.
Also — small thing — a photo from the victory party is circulating. You and Seb leaving the terrace together. Nothing terrible. But it's not nothing.
Call me when you're upright.
I read it twice. Something in my chest tightens — a private world ending before I've decided what it means.
I call her.
"Report," Priya says, by way of greeting.
"I saw your texts."
"Then you know the situation has acquired texture."
"Define texture."
"The photo is mild. You're both fully dressed, walking, not touching.
It looks like exactly what it was — two people leaving a party.
But Farrow's assistant called Hartfield's press office this morning asking whether the firm had a statement.
That's new. That's not gossip-blog texture anymore. That's professional texture."
I look at Seb, who is watching me with the stillness of a man doing the math on what my face is telling him before I've said a word out loud.
"Nine tomorrow," I say. "The meeting's been moved up."
"You'll make tonight's flight if you leave for the airport within the hour," Priya says. "I checked. I am occasionally useful for things beyond moral support."
"You're occasionally insufferable about being useful."
"That's the job," she says, and for once it doesn't land as a joke so much as a simple statement of fact. "Mia. Go handle your actual life. I'll see you tonight."
She hangs up before I can argue, which has become, I notice, something of a pattern with the people in my life this week.
"Texture," Seb repeats, when I set the phone down. "That's an interesting word for it."
"Priya has a gift for euphemism."
"What does it mean for you."
"It means Farrow has gone from quietly concerned to professionally curious, which is considerably worse." I stand, and the easy warmth of the morning starts, almost visibly, to recede — replaced by the clarity that arrives when a deadline becomes real instead of theoretical. "I need to go."
He doesn't argue. He doesn't offer the car, the jet, the quiet machinery of his world that could make this easier in a dozen ways I know he's capable of arranging without my permission.
"I'm not going to arrange anything for you," he says, watching me gather my things. "Not the flight. Not Farrow. Not London. I learned that lesson in the paddock."
"I noticed you didn't offer."
"I'm learning to notice when an offer would be a management instead of a kindness." He pulls on yesterday's shirt, the tape at his collar visible for a moment before he buttons it closed. "But I'd like terms. If you'll give me some."
"Terms."
"You go to London. You handle Farrow on your own terms, however you choose to handle him.
I won't appear, arrange, or intervene in any part of your actual life unless you ask me to.
" He looks at me directly. "And when you're ready — not before — I come to London on your terms, not mine. Your flat. Your version of ordinary."
I look at him for a long moment.
"That's either the most romantic thing anyone's said to me," I say, "or the most reckless."
"Both," he says. "I prefer a timetable."
I almost laugh. I don't quite manage it, because underneath the joke is something that's actually landed — a real boundary, offered rather than imposed, the first thing in this entire impossible week that feels like a plan rather than a feeling.
"Agreed," I say. "I call first."
"You call first."
The car ride to the airport is quiet, Matteo behind the wheel, Seb's hand finding mine once on the seat between us and staying there, neither of us filling the silence with anything that needs to be said twice.
At the terminal, he doesn't come inside.
We agreed on that too, somewhere between the suite and the car, without either of us saying it aloud — that the goodbye should happen here, at the curb, not performed for departure-lounge cameras.
"Call me when you land," he says. "If you want to."
"I'll want to."
He kisses me once, unhurried, the kind of kiss that doesn't need an audience to mean what it means, and then I am walking into the terminal alone with my pen in my pocket and a boarding pass on my phone and Farrow's nine o'clock meeting waiting on the other side of a flight I haven't fully let myself think about yet.
I do not look back to see if he's still at the curb. I find, somewhat to my own surprise, that I don't need to.
The departure board updates above my head. My gate is called. Around me, a dozen other lives are beginning or ending their own versions of this exact moment, departures and arrivals stacking endlessly, none of them aware that I am currently carrying a decision I had not finished making.
I board the plane. I do not decide anything else at the gate, because I promised myself I wouldn't, and because some promises are worth keeping even when no one would notice if you broke them.
But somewhere over the Channel, watching London assemble itself out of the cloud cover below — grey, ordinary, entirely unconcerned with old Monaco streets or wrought-iron balconies or a man who learned, this morning, how to offer terms instead of arrangements — I understand, with complete and uncomfortable clarity, exactly what's waiting for me on the other side of this flight.
London is no longer distance.
It is the test.