31. Celine
CELINE
I make my own coffee now.
It’s a small thing. It shouldn’t matter as much as it does, except every morning for two months, he’s been the one filling the second cup, setting it on the counter without comment, and every morning for the last four days, I’ve made one cup and carried it straight to my room instead of waiting for him to come through.
He hasn’t said anything about it. I’ve watched him notice anyway, the way his eyes track the empty space on the counter where his own mug used to sit beside mine.
I tell myself this is necessary. Most mornings, I believe it.
The council dinner on Thursday goes exactly the way it’s supposed to.
I sit beside him, I answer Alexei’s questions about the amendment’s progress, I let Viktor’s wife tell me about her granddaughter’s recital, and I do all of it with the same composure I’ve been maintaining since the first dinner months ago.
Nobody at that table would know anything had changed between us.
That’s the point. I’m very good at performing things that aren’t true anymore.
Afterward, I take a separate car, telling Roman I need to stop by the pharmacy, which isn’t a lie exactly, just not the reason I actually need the space.
Zane doesn’t argue. He hasn’t argued with anything I’ve decided in four days, which is its own kind of statement, a man who has spent the entire length of our relationship deciding things for me suddenly deciding nothing at all.
I don’t know what to do with that either.
Lena calls Sunday evening, and I answer from my bed, the way I always do, except this time I don’t have the energy to perform brightness the way I usually manage for her sake.
“You sound tired,” she says, twenty seconds into the call.
“I am tired.”
“Tired like the pregnancy, or tired like something else?”
I look at the ceiling. My sister has never once in her life let me get away with the simple answer. “Something else.”
“Is it him?”
“It’s complicated, Lena.”
“It’s always complicated with you two. That’s not an answer.” A pause, the kind she takes when she’s deciding how hard to push. “Do you want to tell me, or do you want me to talk about something else until you’re ready?”
I think about the folder, the four pages, the lock turning in his office door.
I think about how much of this I still haven’t told her, the contract’s real origin, the danger that moved her across a country without her knowledge, all of it sitting behind a version of events I’ve kept simple for her sake because she has enough to manage with her own body without managing the architecture of mine.
“Talk about something else,” I say.
She tells me about the garden, about a man at the facility who’s been teaching her chess in the afternoons, about Priya’s plan to learn Dutch properly before they come home. I listen, and somewhere in the middle of her describing a chess match she lost badly, something in my chest loosens slightly.
“I love you,” I tell her before we hang up.
“I love you too. Get some sleep. You sound like you need it.”
I don’t sleep, not for a long time. But I lie in the dark feeling steadier than I did before the call, which is its own kind of gift, the only person in my life who has never once needed anything explained to her in careful, managed pieces.
I feel the baby move for the first time on Tuesday.
I’m at my desk, going through the offshore documents during my lunch break instead of eating, when I feel it.
Small. Unmistakable once it happens, though I spend a full minute afterward convinced I imagined it.
I sit very still, one hand pressed flat against my stomach, waiting to see if it happens again.
It does.
I don’t tell anyone. Not yet. I sit with it privately, the strange, quiet wonder of it, a fact entirely separate from contracts and councils and folders with my name typed at the top eight months before I knew any of these people existed.
This part is mine. Whatever else has been engineered, decided, compiled into a file before I had a say, this single fact belongs only to me and the small, unseen person currently making their presence known.
I think, briefly, about telling Zane.
I don’t.
I go back to the diagram that evening, the one with Dominic’s name circled twice, and I look at it with fresh eyes for the first time since the night Zane finally told me why he chose me, since I stopped needing him to be the center of every hour I’m not contractually required to spend with him.
The registered agent’s address comes up again, this time in a filing I hadn’t cross-referenced before, a routine annual report from three years ago that lists a secondary contact for correspondence.
Not Dominic this time. A law firm in Geneva, the kind that exists specifically to handle structures like the one I’ve been mapping for months.
I write the firm’s name down. I don’t know yet what it means. But it’s new, a thread I haven’t pulled before, and for the first time in days, I feel something that isn’t grief or anger or the exhaustion of pulling away from someone I haven’t stopped wanting.
I feel useful to myself.
He doesn’t come to my door that night, or any night this week. I’ve started listening for it without meaning to, the sound of his footsteps slowing as they pass my room, and every night they don’t slow, I tell myself I’m relieved.
I’m not entirely relieved.
I catch myself, twice this week, standing in the kitchen a few minutes longer than necessary, the way I used to when I knew he’d be coming through soon.
I catch myself reading the same paragraph of a contract three times because some part of my attention is tracking the sound of his office door down the corridor instead of the words in front of me.
I don’t go to him. I gave myself this distance on purpose, and I’m not ready to hand it back just because some stubborn, inconvenient part of me misses the sound of him in the next room.
But I notice the missing. I let myself notice it, at least, even if I’m not ready to do anything about it yet.
Wednesday night, I’m in bed with the lamp still on, a book open that I haven’t actually been reading, when I hear his footsteps in the corridor. They slow outside my door. I sit very still, my heart doing something complicated and entirely without my permission.
The footsteps don’t stop. After a moment, they continue, fainter, toward his own room at the end of the hall.
I lie back against the pillows and stare at the ceiling for a long time after the sound is gone, and I don’t examine too closely why some part of me is disappointed that he kept walking.