Chapter Twenty Two — Sienna #2
And I understood everything. And I pulled my hand back anyway.
The next stitch. And the next.
This is what I do when the emotion gets too big, when there's no room left for it anywhere. My hands know what to do even when the rest of me doesn't. The muslin doesn't care that I'm shaking. The thread doesn't care how long it took me to get here.
He is not my father.
He is the man who held evidence of everything Vane did to me and spent six weeks building a case instead of using it as leverage.
Who put a key in an envelope with no note and never once asked for it back.
Who looked at me across a signed contract and said welcome to Kensington Global like it was a beginning, not a transaction.
Who stood in my kitchen a month ago, soaked through, and told me the truth instead of the easier version of it.
My father taught me chess, and then he taught me, without ever meaning to, that the people who teach you the rules are sometimes the first ones to break them. I built a whole life around that lesson. I got so good at applying it that I stopped checking whether it still applied.
It doesn't. Not to him.
He stayed while I dismantled every reason to trust him. A lifetime of getting good at leaving first, and he stayed through all of it anyway.
I tie off the thread. Bite it clean.
I hold the muslin at arm's length and look at the line of the hem. The fall of the bias cut. The way the skirt moves when I turn the form slowly on its base.
I've made a hundred dresses in this studio. Wedding gowns for women I never spoke to again. Commissions I forgot the second the check cleared. None of them cost me anything to finish.
This one did.
It's the most honest thing I've ever made.
My phone rings. Izzy.
"Are you still in that studio?" she says, before I can speak.
"How did you know I was in the studio?"
"Because you always go to the studio when you need to think. You've had a lot to think about. Also, you texted me one word, studio, forty minutes ago and nothing since." A beat. "Are you okay?"
I look at the dress on the form. The finished hem. The silk that finally stopped fighting me.
"Yeah," I say. "I think I actually am."
"Good." I can hear the smile in it. "Wear the Rosso gown tonight. The red one, from the show."
"It's still at his place, Izzy."
"I know. I already asked James to bring it by before six."
I don't know whether to laugh or be annoyed that she'd planned around me before I'd even agreed to go.
"Just wear it," she says.
"Okay." I laugh. It comes out smaller than I expect, a little rough around the edges. "I'll see you tonight."
"Sienna." Izzy's voice changes, just slightly. Softer. "For what it's worth, I've known him my whole life. I have never once seen him walk toward something he wasn't sure about."
I don't have anything to say to that. I let it sit.
"Seven o'clock," she says. "Don't make me come get you."
"I'll be there."
"I know you will."
I hang up.
I stand there for another minute. The building settles around me, ordinary and loud, the same way it's been all morning. I head home to get ready.
***
Six o'clock, and my buzzer goes off. The flat, ugly sound of an intercom that's worked maybe half the times I've needed it since I moved in.
I go down anyway.
A man in a dark suit stands very straight in my building's cracked little lobby, a garment bag draped over one arm like it weighs nothing, though I happen to know it weighs about as much as I do.
I recognize him before he says a word. Adrian's driver. I've watched him hold that exact posture outside a dozen buildings I used to have no business walking into.
"Ms. Rossi." he says it like a title, not a name. "James. Izzy asked me to bring this by."
"Thank you," I say, reaching for it.
He doesn't hand it over right away. "It's no trouble." Then, like he's deciding something, "It was at the penthouse. Mr. Kensington was there when I collected it."
I go still.
"He didn't ask me to tell you that," James says. "He asked me to put the shoes in a separate bag. Said you'd know why."
I do know why. The last time I wore heels for him, I complained the whole cab ride that my feet were killing me, and he spent twenty minutes the next morning finding a pair with a lower heel and told Sterling to bill it somewhere no one would ask questions.
A month of nothing. And the first time a chance to do one small thing walked past him, he took it and told his driver not to mention it.
"Tell him thank you," I say. "Not just for tonight."
Something moves in James's face, almost a smile, gone before it fully arrives. "I'll let him know," he says, which isn't the same thing as agreeing, and somehow tells me everything anyway.
He leaves. I carry the bag upstairs like it might break.
I look at the dress on the form one more time before I go. Ivory silk, the hem finally finished, the bias fall doing exactly what she said it would. Telling the truth about whatever's underneath it. No structure to hide behind.
I don't know yet what I'm going to say to him tonight, in a room full of people who'll be watching both of us decide something. I know I'm going to be wearing something honest when I say it.
Then I put on my coat and lock the door behind me.
The gala starts at eight.
I have things to do.