3. Valentina #2
I did not spend my entire childhood watching her be gracious and composed and immovable and learn all those things specifically to use them in a situation like this one, only to be told to settle for bearable.
But Mamma has survived things I haven’t had to survive yet, and she is still, after all of it, the most formidable person I know.
“I’ll try,” I finally say because that’s what Mamma expects me to say.
She pats my hand and smiles. “Good girl.”
I am absolutely not a good girl. But I’ll try anyway.
I spend the rest of the afternoon constructing a strategy for civil coexistence. I approach it the way I approach everything: with a plan, clear objectives, and defined success metrics.
Objective: reduce the daily hostility to a manageable level.
Method: one evening of genuine civility to reset the dynamic.
Success metric: getting through dinner without either of us drawing blood.
It sounds simple when I lay it out like that. That should have been my first warning.
By the time I hear Cillian come in at seven, I’ve had three hours to prepare and I am ready.
The table is set.
I did that myself, which took longer than it should have because I had to locate the good placemats in a drawer I hadn’t opened yet.
There’s food from the Italian place on 64th that I’ve been going to since childhood.
The wine is from a bottle Cillian had pulled out from the wine room. I have no idea if it’s good or not and based on the oaf’s tastes, I’m going to assume it’s bad.
But I’ve poured two glasses because I am committed to this.
I look at the table and take a deep breath.
This is either going to be fine or it’s going to be catastrophic.
The keys hit the entryway table then there’s footsteps.
He appears in the doorway and stops.
He’s still in his work clothes of dark pants and a charcoal dress shirt with the sleeves rolled to his forearms.
The top two buttons are open like he already started decompressing in the elevator.
His auburn hair is slightly disheveled, like the day got its hands into it, and there’s more stubble along his jaw than there was at breakfast, shadowing that scar on his cheek.
He looks like trouble.
Scratch that, he always looks like trouble.
I have stopped being surprised by this and have not stopped being annoyed by it.
He looks at the table. He looks at me. He looks at the table again. “What’s this?”
“Dinner,” I say, with what I feel is admirable composure. “I had food brought in. I thought we could eat like two people who live together instead of strangers who happen to share a kitchen.”
He raises an eyebrow but crosses the room and pulls out his chair and sits down slowly, like he’s not entirely convinced he should.
Those blue eyes of his move around the table with the attention of a man cataloguing a potential trap.
I serve myself and pass him the containers and the whole thing is so aggressively, performatively normal that I almost want to laugh.
We eat in silence for a moment.
It’s the closest to peaceful we’ve been in two weeks and I’m aware of it in the way you’re aware of a lull in bad weather—grateful and not quite trusting it.
“How was your day?” I ask because you can’t have a pleasant dinner without conversation and I am an excellent conversationalist at mundane matters.
He looks up from his plate.
The blue eyes find me and focus with the unreadable attention he has, the one that gives you absolutely nothing back.
“Fine,” he says.
“Good.” I pick up my wine and take a sip. Dammit, it’s good. “The March opening is coming together. We finalized the installation layout today, the artist is—”
“What are you doing?” He sets his fork down with a small, deliberate click.
I pause. “Having a conversation.”
“No.” He leans back slightly in his chair and folds his arms across his chest. It’s an infuriating gesture that makes his shoulders look like they belong to someone who builds things or breaks them.
With Cillian it has always been the latter.
“You don’t do that. Not with me. So what is it? What do you want?”
I feel the first flicker of irritation, and I breathe through it because I am committed to the strategy.
“I want to eat dinner without it feeling like a tribunal,” I say evenly.
“I want one evening where we aren’t looking for ways to make each other miserable.
I know that’s apparently a radical concept.
” I lift my glass toward him in a small gesture and offer him a small olive branch.
“And this is a very good wine. Well done.”
Silence.
He looks at me for a long moment.
The scar on his cheek catches the light from the overhead fixture, and his auburn hair is catching it too.
He looks like someone a painter would have wanted to put on a canvas. I resent the observation even as I’m making it.
“What game are you playing now?” he asks, steepling his fingers together, his eyes locked on mine.
There it is. The fracture, small and clean, right down the center of everything I built this afternoon.
“It’s not a game,” I say coolly, fighting to maintain my evenness.
“I was trying to be civil. My mother thinks we should find a way to coexist that doesn’t require both of us to be armed every waking moment, and I thought she had a point.
Apparently, I was wrong, and I’d like to note for the record that it took you approximately six minutes to prove it. ”
“Your mother,” he says, picking up his fork again and cutting into his food again, “has never spent five minutes in a room with me.”
“Lucky her, apparently.”
“So this was her idea.” He glances up at me and there’s something almost contemptuous in the curve of his mouth. “She told you to play nice, so you came home and decided to try it.”
“There are no candles,” I say, which is somehow the thing that comes out and it doesn’t make any sense but whatever. “And it wasn’t just her idea. It was also mine, because I am capable of independent thought unlike some people at this table—”
A harsh laugh escapes him. “You want to talk about independent thought?" His blue eyes go a shade colder, and I know he’s decided to stop pulling his punches. “You’ve had exactly one original thought in the two weeks we’ve lived together, and it was reorganizing your shoes.
Everything else—the gallery, the charity circuit, the carefully curated social life—that’s just the container your family built for you to stand in.
You didn’t choose any of it. You just showed up and called it a personality. ”
The words hit somewhere genuine and I feel my jaw tighten.
“That is—”
“And the worst part,” he continues, voice still conversational, “is that you know it. You know that without the Santoro name you’re just a pretty woman with mediocre opinions about contemporary art. That’s why you fight so hard. Because if you stop, you have to live with that.”
The traffic sounds drift up from thirty floors below.
I look at him across the table—at that controlled, angular face, those cool blue eyes that are watching me with the steady patience of a man who has said the thing he wanted to say and is waiting to see what it does—and I go very, very still.
This is the thing people mistake for calm.
I go still when I’m at my most dangerous.
Cillian Brennan is about to find out.
“You want to talk about what we know?” I remark, and my voice has gone somewhere quiet and I fight to keep the tremor of anger from marring my tone. “Let’s talk about what I know.”
Cillian snorts. “This I have to hear.”
“I know that you are a man in his thirties who has never made a single decision for himself.” Cillian’s eyes flare for a moment before he schools his expression.
Gotcha, asshole. “Not one. You work for Connor, you live for Connor, you married me for Connor, and every time you’ve had the chance to be something other than his weapon you have tucked yourself back in line like a good little soldier because the alternative is figuring out who you actually are without him. ”
I hold his gaze. “The brutality I can respect, but the cowardice underneath it?” I wrinkle my nose. “That’s what I find pathetic.”
A dark look crosses his face. “Watch your mouth,” he says, quietly.
“Why?” I ask, wanting to go in for the kill now that I know what I’m saying is affecting him. “Is the truth uncomfortable, Cillian? You just spent five minutes telling me things specifically designed to wound me and you didn’t stop.”
I set my glass down. “You want to talk about identity, Cillian? Your entire identity is borrowed.” I shake my head in disgust. “You are Connor Brennan’s shadow wearing a man’s body, and you’ve been it so long you’ve forgotten the difference.”
His jaw tightens and a muscle works in it.
He leans forward very slightly, and the blue eyes are very direct now and fixed on me.
He looks irate and a smarter person would stop talking.
I don’t stop talking.
“Leo built something,” I say. “He took what our father left and he made it his. What have you built? What single thing in your life can you point to and say—that’s mine, I made that, that exists because of me?”
I tilt my head. “You maintain. You enforce. You show up where Connor points you and you do what Connor needs and you call it a career. You’re a caretaker for someone else’s empire and you have the audacity to sit there and call me derivative.”