Chapter Thirteen — Sienna
He catches my wrist in the kitchen Monday morning, no reason for it, and presses his mouth to the inside of it like he's checking a pulse.
"What was that for?" I ask.
"Nothing," he says, and means it, or wants to. I let myself believe him. Mergers don't sleep. A man who just asked me to design my own wedding dress doesn't need a reason beyond work for being tired.
Two days later, I'm telling him about a fitting that went sideways. A client wanted boning where there shouldn't be. She fought me on a neckline for forty-five minutes.
He laughs in the right places. He asks the right questions. Then his phone buzzes on the counter, and his whole face goes somewhere else.
"Sorry. One second." He's already walking toward the study with the phone to his ear before I finish my sentence.
I sit there holding the rest of a story nobody's listening to anymore.
When he comes back twelve minutes later, he picks the conversation up like nothing happened. "So the neckline," he says. "What did you end up doing?"
"You don't actually want to know."
"I do."
"You were just on a call for twelve minutes."
"Sterling," he says. Too fast. Too smooth. the answer arriving before I'd even finished the question, like he had it loaded.
I let it go. I tell him about the neckline.
But I notice the time on the call. I notice the way he didn't ask permission to take it, just stood up like the decision had already been made somewhere I wasn't invited.
By the end of the week, I've started keeping count without meaning to.
Three nights this week he's come to bed after me. Two mornings he's been up before the alarm, already dressed, already on the phone in low murmurs I'm not supposed to be hearing.
Thursday night I find him at the kitchen island instead of the study, laptop open. I lean over his shoulder to see what he's working on. He closes it. Not fast, not guilty-looking. Just smooth and unhurried, the lid coming down like he was getting up anyway.
"Bedtime reading?" I ask.
"Boring," he says. "Sterling's draft of the supplier indemnity language. You'd hate it."
"Try me."
"You'd actually hate it." He stands, kisses my forehead, steers me by the shoulders toward the hallway with a hand that's gentle and absolutely immovable. "Go. I'll be ten minutes."
He's an hour and forty.
I don't check the clock again after that. I don't need to. I've already counted every version of "Sterling" I've heard this week. None of it adds up to a closed laptop and a hand on my shoulders steering me out of a room like I'm a problem that needs managing.
I think about that hand a lot, lying in the dark waiting for him. The gentleness of it. The total lack of room for negotiation underneath the gentleness.
I think about the night he asked me to design my own wedding dress. Two hours later, I woke up alone. His side of the bed was cold.
I went looking for him. I found him in the study, a glass of scotch in his hand. A tablet sat face-down on the desk, like it had said something it shouldn't have.
You're using that voice, I'd told him.
What voice.
The careful one. You're not usually careful with me.
I'd let it go that night because it was one night, and because he looked at me afterward like I was still the only thing in the room he wanted to look at.
But it wasn't just the one night. Every night since has been the same.
He comes to bed at one in the morning. I hear him before I see him. The quiet sounds of a man trying not to wake someone he thinks is asleep.
I don't tell him I'm awake.
He slides in beside me. His arm finds my waist in the dark, the same way it always does, and I feel him press his mouth to the back of my neck. Warm. Unhurried. His hand slides under my shirt.
I turn my face toward him.
We don't speak. His mouth finds the side of my neck, my jaw, and his hands move over me with the certainty of someone who knows exactly where everything is.
My waist, the curve of my hip, the inside of my thigh.
He pushes inside me from behind, slow, his forehead dropping to the back of my neck, both of us exhaling.
It's good. It is. His hands know me. His body knows mine. The rhythm of it is familiar and warm and exactly what it's always been.
But somewhere in the middle of it I become aware of a gap. Not in what he's doing. He's doing everything right. Something underneath. An absence, like the difference between a song played from memory and a song played with feeling. The notes are all there. The feeling is somewhere else.
His hand presses flat against my chest, over my heart. His heartbeat is at my back. Steady. Even. The heartbeat of a man who is perfectly calm.
I come quietly, his hand still flat against my chest, his mouth at the back of my neck. He follows a moment later. Then he holds me, his arm around me, his breathing slowing, and he's asleep.
I lie there in the dark and stare at the ceiling and try to name what just happened. The way you turn a piece of fabric to find where the grain went wrong. You can feel it before you can see it. The drag, the slight resistance, the tell that something has been cut off.
I can feel it, but I can't find it yet.
I don't sleep for a long time.
***
Saturday, he's gone before I wake up. There's a note — Early board call, back by ten, coffee's on — in handwriting that's too careful. Like he wrote it twice before he was satisfied with how casual it looked.
I make my own coffee and go down to the Sanctuary to work, because waiting around an empty penthouse for a man who might or might not be at a board call feels like a worse use of my morning than finishing a hem.
I'm only down there twenty minutes when I realize I left my sketchbook upstairs, in the study, on the desk where I'd been using it to mock up the gown's underskirt structure last night.
The study door is open. His briefcase is sitting in the middle of the desk, unlatched, papers fanned across the surface like he left in a hurry and didn't have time to close it properly.
I shouldn't look.
I know that the way you know not to touch a hot pan. Instantly, before your brain even catches up. And then I'm standing over the desk anyway. The way you reach for the pan anyway, because some part of you needs to know exactly how much it's going to hurt.
The top few pages are merger documents. I recognize them. Sterling's letterhead, the language I spent two nights rewriting with him at this same desk. My handwriting is still in the margins, where he'd asked what a clause actually meant in practice instead of just on paper.
Designer Credit, Retained. My name, typed, next to a line I fought for.
Something in my chest loosens. He kept it. He actually kept it.
Then I lift that page, because the one underneath it is a different font, a different kind of document, and the title catches before I can stop it.
POTENTIAL DESIGNER REPLACEMENTS — POST-MERGER STRATEGY
I read it twice before the words turn into something I can take in.
It's a list. Four names. Each one with a paragraph underneath. What they've done, where they stand, how easy it would be to slide them into the gap if she becomes one.
Antoine Reyes, Margot Larsson, and two more I don't recognize.
And then, after a line break, like an afterthought that isn't actually an afterthought at all:
S. Rossi — prior insolvency on record. Press narrative re: Rossi Designs collapse may complicate long-term brand association. Recommend monitoring.
Monitoring.
I'm a line item. A risk to be tracked. A name on a list of names, sorted by how replaceable each of us is, and I'm the only one with my own bankruptcy stapled to it like a warning label.
This is what the calls were. This is what the closed laptop was. This is what the hand on my shoulders, steering me out of the room, was actually about.
Not a board call. Not Sterling. Me.
I sit down. Not because my legs give out. Nothing that dramatic. Sitting is just easier than standing right now.
I know this feeling. I've had it before, when I was nine, and it had nothing to do with a designer or a contract or a skyline.
My dad fixed radios. Not for money, just for fun. Old transistor sets from yard sales, the kind nobody else wanted. He'd sit at the kitchen table with the back panel off, soldering iron in one hand, completely somewhere else.
I used to sit across from him and hand him things. Wires. A screwdriver. Whatever he pointed at without looking up.
The night he left, he packed one bag. I remember because he asked me to help fold a sweater, like it was a normal Tuesday.
"Hold this corner," he said. "Like that. Good girl."
Like I was just handing him another wire.
And I remember his face when he hugged me goodbye. Not angry. Not even sad, really.
Relieved. Like something heavy had finally been put down.
My mom found me on the stairs an hour later. She didn't try to soften it.
"Some men only love what doesn't ask anything of them," she said. "The second you start needing something back, they start looking for the door."
"Is that what I did? Need something?"
She didn't answer that. She just pulled me into her side and let me stay there until I stopped shaking.
I was nine. I didn't understand it yet. I understood it about ten years later, the first time a guy went quiet and distant and started checking his phone under the table. I felt that same cold drop, and I was right. Every time after that, I was right.
So I stopped waiting to be right. I started leaving first. Every time, before anyone got the chance.
I thought Adrian was different.
That's the stupid part. Not that I let him in.
I'd let people in before, a little, carefully, with an exit already mapped.
The stupid part is that somewhere in the last few weeks, I stopped mapping the exit.
I left my shears on his counter. I told him I loved him on a terrace with the whole city watching.
I let him ask me to design the dress I'd marry him in, and I said yes with my whole chest, no exit in sight.