Chapter Sixteen
Seen Together
The publisher's winter reception filled a converted warehouse space near the river, glass and steel and expensive lighting, the kind of polished industry gathering Senna usually attended alone and left as early as professionally acceptable.
She'd nearly gone alone again this year too, standing in front of her closet an hour before the event turning the idea over, before finally, deliberately, texting Colt to ask if he'd come with her, a small, terrifying act of claiming she hadn't fully examined before she'd already sent it.
This year she brought Colt.
He looked deliberately out of place in a dark button-down that still couldn't quite disguise the ink at his wrists, standing slightly apart from the clusters of editors and agents with the same careful stillness he carried everywhere, but he stayed close to her all evening, attentive without performing, quietly proud in a way she caught more than once when she glanced over mid-conversation and found him watching her with an expression he didn't bother to hide.
"So this is the husband," said Marlen, one of the Berlin acquisitions team, sliding up beside Senna with a glass of wine and an unsubtle curiosity. "I have to say, I've heard rumors. Someone mentioned seeing a biker parked outside your studio most nights for weeks. Half the office had theories."
Senna felt the old instinct rise, the urge to deflect, to keep this part of her life carefully separate from the professional one. She looked at Colt instead, standing a few feet away in quiet conversation with Imke, and felt something in her settle rather than flinch.
"That's my husband," she said, clearly, without hedging. "We're working through some things. He's not going anywhere."
Marlen's eyebrows rose slightly, but whatever she'd expected, it apparently wasn't that particular confidence, and she let the subject drop with an easy grace that suggested the rumor mill would have new material by morning regardless.
Senna caught Colt's eye across the room a moment later, and something passed between them, quiet and warm, the first time she'd claimed him publicly since the confession, and she watched it land on his face like something he hadn't let himself hope for.
? ? ?
They went home together that night for the first time since the separation began, the loft quiet and dim around them, both of them moving with the particular care of people handling something fragile and valuable.
"You don't have to," Colt said, at the bedroom door, giving her every opportunity to step back. "I mean that. Whatever pace you need."
"I know." She reached for him instead of answering further, and what followed was slow, deliberate, neither of them rushing toward anything, every touch a kind of question asked and answered in the affirmative, tenderness where there might once have been urgency, the whole encounter carrying the particular weight of two people rebuilding trust one careful gesture at a time rather than simply falling back into old patterns.
Afterward, in the quiet dark, Colt traced idle patterns against her shoulder, and Senna felt more at peace than she had in over a month.
"Ledger's been helping me look into the paperwork," Colt said eventually, his voice low.
"For getting out officially. Formal separation from the club's operations, not just refusing promotions and hoping Rein loses interest." A pause.
"It's more complicated than I expected. There's an old debt tied to my father's last years in the club.
I've been covering payments on it quietly for a while.
It's going to need to be part of whatever exit agreement I work out. "
"What kind of debt?"
"Nothing that affects us directly. Old business, from before I was really running with the club myself.
" He said it easily, almost as an aside, already moving the conversation elsewhere, and Senna, drowsy and warm and more content than she'd been in weeks, let it pass without pressing further, filing it away as one more piece of the messy administrative reality of Colt's exit rather than anything requiring immediate attention.
They talked a while longer, quieter things: Ledger's own tentative plans to leave once Colt's exit set a precedent, Sabine's paramedic shifts and the strange, guarded warmth that had begun creeping back into her relationship with her brother now that he was finally trying to become someone worth reconnecting with.
Colt spoke about his father only briefly, careful, the way he always was around that subject, but there was less armor in it than she remembered from earlier conversations, as though naming small pieces of the man out loud was itself a kind of practice for something larger he wasn't ready to say yet.
"I keep thinking about what Sabine said," he admitted. "About our father's whole life being proof that hiding things to protect the people you love only ever destroys them slower. I don't want to be that. I don't think I fully know yet how not to be, but I want to."
"You're already doing something he never did," Senna said, drowsy, her hand finding his in the dark. "You're saying it out loud instead of carrying it alone."
He didn't answer, but his hand tightened around hers, and she felt him exhale slowly against her hair, some tension she hadn't realized he was holding finally easing.
She fell asleep beside him for the first time since the confession, believing, in the particular unguarded optimism of exhaustion, that the worst of it was already behind them.