3. Valentina
VALENTINA
Two weeks into this marriage and I have reorganized my closet three times.
This is what I’ve been reduced to.
Valentina Santoro, who once negotiated a gallery acquisition that made three competing curators cry, who speaks four languages, and can work a room of two hundred people and make every single one of them feel like the most important person there, is now alphabetizing my shoe collection at eleven in the morning because it is the only thing in this apartment I have any control over and the alternative is going insane.
The system I’ve developed is this: I wake up before Cillian does, which means before five because the man apparently doesn’t sleep like a normal person, and I make my coffee with almond milk, and I take it to the corner of the living room that I’ve claimed with a chair and a lamp and a stack of books.
I’m gone before he materializes in the kitchen.
By nine I’m out of the apartment entirely.
Afternoons at the gallery, or at my mother’s, or with Emma, who is thirty-two weeks pregnant and mostly confined to the couch and therefore a captive audience for my venting.
I come home late enough that Cillian is usually in his study with the door closed, doing whatever he does for Connor in there.
I’ve heard him on the phone sometimes, that low controlled voice that doesn’t change inflection whether he’s discussing dinner reservations or, presumably, the disposal of a body. I go to bed.
I lie on my side and I stare at the ceiling and I listen to him breathe.
Then I reorganize the closet again.
The avoidance strategy is technically working.
We’re not fighting if we’re not in the same room.
The problem is that I was not built for avoidance.
I was built for direct confrontation, for saying exactly what I think, and the strategy of careful scheduling and disappearing before dawn is making me feel like I’m living in my own home as an intruder, which I hate.
I hate it more than I hate Cillian, which is saying something because I hate Cillian a significant amount.
When we do cross paths—and we do, because no amount of strategic scheduling can make two people sharing three thousand square feet of penthouse completely invisible to each other—it’s always the same.
He makes some cutting remark about my uselessness, my inability to function without staff, and the decorative quality of my existence.
Just last Tuesday I was looking at something on my laptop at the kitchen island and he walked past and glanced at the screen and said, without breaking stride, “Still deciding which cause to pretend to care about this season?” I’d been reviewing acquisition proposals for the gallery.
I told him this. He said, “So someone else does the actual work and you put your name on it. Got it.” Then he poured himself coffee and left.
I sat there in stunned silence before I started composing the most vicious response I could think of, none of which I said out loud because he was already gone.
That’s the other annoying thing.
He doesn’t fight like a normal person.
He makes his cut and walks away.
By the time I’ve constructed the perfect response the moment is gone. It’s infuriating.
The man has the emotional engagement of a sniper, but he’s also a fucking coward because he doesn’t stay to fight.
I retaliate when I get the chance.
I make observations about his cultural range, which appears to extend to whiskey and violence and very little else.
I comment on the particular brand of problem-solving that involves Connor’s organization, the kind where intelligence is apparently optional as long as you have enough men.
Last Wednesday he tracked mud across the kitchen floor and I told him that perhaps whatever he’d stepped in at work was at least more interesting than the work itself.
He looked at me with those ice blue eyes and said keep going in a tone that meant I dare you and oh, I certainly did keep going.
I said something about the limited intellectual requirements of being Connor’s errand boy, and ooh that pissed him off.
He crossed the kitchen slowly and leaned against the counter directly next to me, close enough that I could smell his soap, and said very quietly, “You have no idea what I’m capable of, Valentina,” and the way he said my name, not princess for once, just my name in that brogue like something being pulled taut…
I held his gaze for the full four seconds it took for him to push off the counter and leave and then I breathed.
I don’t think about that moment. I’m not thinking about it now.
There’s something about the way he wears the violence that gets under my skin in a way I can’t quite rationalize away. Leo does violence too.
My brother has done things that I know about and things I don’t, and I’ve made my peace with what he is, with what all of us are in this family.
But Leo compartmentalizes.
He comes home and he’s Leo, he’s Emma’s husband, the big giant softy who cried when they found out the baby was a girl.
The work is something he puts on and takes off.
Cillian doesn’t do that.
Cillian just is it, all the time, in every room, and he doesn’t seem to notice or care.
There’s a stillness to him that isn’t peace.
It’s the opposite of peace, actually. He always seems to be ready for something.
Whenever he sits and reads the news, it’s like sitting next to a fault line.
I am not attracted to this.
I want to be extremely clear about that.
It unsettles me the way any unpredictable thing unsettles me—purely as a matter of self-preservation and situational awareness.
That’s all.
My mother comes on a Thursday afternoon when I’m halfway through reorganizing the closet for the fourth time.
She appears in the bedroom doorway looking, as always, like she just stepped off the runway.
My mother never has a hair out of place.
Her dark hair is shot through with silver pulled back in a sophisticated twist.
Today, she’s wearing cream slacks and a silk blouse in deep blue.
Her trademark pearls are at her throat and the diamond studs that Papa gave her for a twentieth wedding anniversary twinkle in the sunlight.
She and I look alike.
I’ve inherited her cheekbones, and those dark eyes are intense and unmistakably familiar.
They’re my eyes, or I suppose mine are hers, which means she has always been able to see through me with them in a way I find inconvenient.
She looks at the organized devastation I’ve made of the closet then looks at me. She sighs deeply. “Valentina.”
“I’m organizing,” I tell her.
“You organized this closet last week,” Mamma responds. “I can tell because the shoes were by color before and now they’re by designer. Which means something is wrong.”
I open my mouth to tell her nothing is wrong.
“Ah, ah,” she says pleasantly, “Don’t tell me nothing is wrong.”
I close my mouth. Dammit.
She comes in and sits on my side of the bed.
How she knows it’s my side is beyond me, but then again she’s my mother and can read me like a goddamn book.
She folds her hands in her lap and looks at me with an expression that means we are having a conversation whether you want to or not.
“Sit down, amore.”
I sit. I’m still holding a pair of Louboutins, which I put down because it’s hard to have a dignified conversation while holding shoes.
“Tell me.” She looks me up and down.
I fight a squirm, keeping my back completely straight. “It’s fine. There’s nothing to say.”
Mamma raises one perfectly arched eyebrow. “Valentina Isabelle.”
Fine. When my mother uses my middle name, it means she’s not going to let me talk my way out of this.
“He’s impossible,” I start. “He is—Mamma, he is infuriating. He makes a point to be difficult. He looks at me like I’m shit under his shoes.” I rub my temples in frustration.
“He makes comments. Constant little—last week he walked past me at the island and looked at what I was working on and said”—I pitch my voice lower to mimic Cillian’s brogue—“‘Still deciding which cause to pretend to care about this season?’”
I scowl at the memory, nails biting into my skin. “I was reviewing acquisition proposals for the gallery. I told him that. He said, ‘so someone else does the actual work and you put your name on it, got it,’ and then he left.” I look up at my mother. “He just leaves before I can even—”
“And what do you say to him?” my mother interrupts.
I pause. “I said that I did the actual work, which is true.”
“Before that. What do you say to him, Valentina, when you have the opportunity.”
I really didn’t want my mother to ask this.
“I—” I think about all the comments I’ve made recently—the mud in the kitchen, errand boy, the very specific observations I have made about Connor’s organization and Cillian’s position within it and what that says about his capacity for independent thought. “I respond,” I say carefully.
My mother looks at me and one eyebrow lifts by a fraction, which on Gianna Santoro’s face is the equivalent of anyone else throwing their hands up. “I see.”
I fight another squirm. “He starts it,” I say childishly, internally wincing at how juvenile that response is.
“Amore.” Her voice is gentle, but it has that edge that means she’s about to say something I don’t want to hear. “You are both starting it. Every day. From opposite sides of the same apartment.”
She reaches over and takes my hand.
Her grip is firm but loving. “I know you didn’t choose this, and we both know it’s not what we wanted for you.
You are allowed to be angry about it, but you cannot sustain a war indefinitely.
You will exhaust yourself.” She looks at me compassionately and reaches with her other hand to cup my cheek.
I lean into her touch. “Find some common ground. Some way to share that space that doesn’t require you to be armed every moment of every day. The marriage doesn’t have to be good. It just has to be bearable.”
I want to tell her that bearable has never once been good enough for me. I am twenty-six years old and I would like more from my own life than a negotiated ceasefire with a man I despise in an apartment that doesn’t feel like mine.