Chapter 16
chapter sixteen
seb
Ifind her building by the address she sent — no driver, no team, no Pascal running interference three steps ahead of me. I am, for the first time in longer than I can accurately calculate, simply a man standing on a wet pavement with his collar turned up against the rain, looking for a buzzer.
I don't press it yet.
I had imagined, somewhere on the flight, that arriving here would feel like another kind of threshold — the motorhome, the suite in old Monaco, this.
I find instead that it feels like nothing I've crossed before, because every other threshold has had some version of ceremony attached to it, some architecture I built or controlled.
This one has none. I am standing in the rain outside an ordinary building because a woman I want very much asked me to come, and there is no version of my usual instincts that knows what to do with a request this simple.
I press the buzzer.
"Hello?" Her voice, slightly tinny through the intercom, entirely unmistakable.
"It's me."
A pause. "You're early."
"I'm aware."
"I haven't finished pretending my flat doesn't have laundry on the radiator."
"I've seen worse."
"You've genuinely never seen worse. Your idea of disorder is probably a misaligned cufflink."
"Let me up and find out."
The door buzzes. I climb two flights of stairs carefully, turning my torso rather than my neck on the tight landing, the brace gone now but the discipline of moving deliberately still very much present three days after a race I shouldn't have driven, and after a quiet private route off the plane that meant no terminal, no crowd, no cameras between the runway and the car — only the choice, once the car reached this street, to walk the last stretch myself. To Flat 4, exactly as she opens it.
She's in jeans. An actual jumper, soft and slightly too large, sleeves pushed up.
No dress, no armour, no performance for a room full of strangers.
Just Mia, in her own doorway, looking at me with an expression I haven't seen from her before — something closer to simply being seen looking the way she actually looks on an ordinary Tuesday.
"You came straight here," she says, taking in the state of me.
"I drew the line at one change of shirt."
"How responsible of you."
"I have standards." I step inside as she holds the door. "Even in crisis."
The flat is small, warm, entirely hers — books stacked on every surface that wasn't designed to hold books, a kettle that's clearly been used more times today than is strictly reasonable, a coat thrown over the back of a chair, a stack of mail she hasn't sorted through.
On the small table by the window, her laptop sits open, the screen dimmed but not closed, and I catch, before she reaches over and shuts it, the edge of a slide deck — Calloway, a header she hasn't quite let herself delete.
She closes the laptop a half-second too fast.
"You don't have to hide that," I say.
"I'm not hiding it. I'm tidying."
"You're hiding it."
She doesn't argue, which is its own kind of admission. She sits on the arm of the sofa instead, suddenly less composed than she's been since I walked in.
"I opened the deck twice today," she says.
"Once to make sure David has everything he needs.
Once because I genuinely could not stop myself, and I sat there looking at eight months of my own work with someone else's name about to go on it, and I—" She stops.
Starts again. "I'm not telling you this so you'll fix it. "
"I know."
"I'm telling you because you're the only person today I haven't had to perform composure for."
Something in my chest does something complicated. The instinct to call my lawyer, to deploy resources, to make this disappear — it rises fast and familiar, and I have to actually sit with it for a moment before I can set it down.
I set it down.
"That's the worst part of today, isn't it," I say. "Not Farrow. Not David. The performing."
"Yes." She looks at me, surprised, I think, that I've named it correctly. "How did you know."
"Because I've spent eleven years doing it professionally," I say. "I know exactly how much it costs to do it well."
We end up walking, eventually, because the flat is too small to contain the restlessness of two people who have a great deal to say and are, for once, in no hurry to say all of it at once.
The rain has eased into something finer, the streets along the Embankment slick and gold under the lamplight, the river moving dark and indifferent beside us.
"This is not glamorous," she says, gesturing at the wet pavement, the grey sky, a passing bus throwing up a sheet of gutter water that we both step back from a half-second too late.
"No."
"Monaco would never produce weather this committed to being unpleasant."
"Monaco doesn't have weather. It has a brand consultant for weather."
She laughs — real, unguarded, the sound I've been collecting evidence of since a hospital corridor.
We pass a bar with steamed windows and the warm orange light of a Tuesday evening crowd.
A young man near the entrance stops mid-sentence, stares, nudges the friend beside him, and within seconds three phones are up, not subtle about it, one of them already walking toward us with the boldness of someone who has decided the rules of distance don't apply to him tonight.
"Carras, yeah? Mate, can I get a?—"
"Not tonight," I say. Not unkind. Final.
He hesitates, weighing it, and something in my expression must settle the question, because he peels off with a shrug, already turning the moment into a story for someone else.
Mia has gone very still beside me.
"You're allowed to give him the photo," she says, once we're past. "I don't need you to refuse on my account."
"I didn't refuse on your account. I refused because I didn't want to stop walking."
"That's not actually different from refusing on my account."
"It's slightly different," I say. "I'd have refused even if you weren't here."
She considers that. "Would you, though."
I think about it honestly, because she's earned honesty several times over by now. "Some nights. Not all of them. Tonight, certainly."
"That's a better answer than the first one."
"I'm aware."
She's quiet for a moment, hands shoved into the pockets of a coat that is considerably less expensive than anything she wore in Monaco and somehow suits her more completely than any of it did.
"That's the part I don't know how to want," she says.
"Not the cameras. The choosing. Every time we're somewhere public, you're choosing — me, or the photo, or the version of the evening that gets easier if you just smile and sign something.
I keep waiting to become the thing you choose out of habit instead of the thing you choose every single time on purpose. "
"It will become habit eventually," I say. "I hope it does. But it won't stop being a choice. I don't think it's supposed to."
"I lost the Calloway pitch today," she says, a few minutes later, the words arriving like she's been carrying them and finally found somewhere flat enough to set them down. "Properly lost it. Not 'under review.' Gone. David's name on it by tomorrow morning."
"I know. You told me earlier."
"I keep needing to say it out loud. It doesn't get smaller."
"It might not, for a while."
"That's not very comforting."
"It's not meant to be comforting," I say. "It's meant to be true. You built something for eight months and someone took it from you for reasons that have nothing to do with whether you did it well. That should hurt. I'd be more concerned if it didn't."
She looks at me — really looks, the thorough attention she gives things that matter — and something in her shoulders releases, very slightly, the way a held breath finally lets go.
"I keep waiting for you to offer to fix it," she says.
"I'm not going to."
"I know," she says. "I keep waiting anyway. Old habits."
"Mine or yours."
"Both, probably." She bumps her shoulder lightly against my arm — the first deliberate touch since the doorway, small and unceremonious and somehow more devastating than anything more obvious would have been. "Thank you for not offering."
"You're welcome. It's costing me considerably more than you'd think."
By the time we turn back toward her street, the rain has stopped entirely, the pavement slick and reflective under the streetlamps, the whole city smelling of wet stone and rinsed air.
At her door, she finds her key, and pauses with it halfway to the lock.
"I don't know what tomorrow looks like," she says. "The pitch. The article. Whatever Farrow decides to do next. I don't have a version of this that comes with guarantees."
"I'm not asking for guarantees."
"What are you asking for."
I look at her — Mia Callahan, in her own doorway, in her own jumper, on her own ordinary Tuesday, having lost something today that mattered to her and chosen, anyway, to spend the evening walking beside me in the rain instead of retreating into the version of composure that would have been easier.
"Tonight," I say. "And then whatever tomorrow turns out to want from both of us."
She doesn't answer immediately. She studies me instead, the key still in her hand, something working behind her eyes that I have learned, over the last eight days, not to rush.
"This is mine," she says, finally, quietly.
"All of it. The laundry, the unsorted post, the version of me that lost an account today and cried for exactly four minutes in the office bathroom before fixing my mascara and going back to my desk.
If you come in, you don't get the curated version. You get this."
"I don't want the curated version," I say. "I told you. I want the Tuesday version."
"This is it. Right now. No edits."
"Then let me in."
She turns the key in the lock.
The door opens.
She doesn't step through it alone.