6. Cillian #2
This is as collaborative as Valentina will get and I’m grateful—but also wary. “What do you want?” I ask, knowing it’ll either be expensive or demeaning.
“I’ll decide later.” She waves a hand at me without looking up. “Go away, I have work.”
I mean to go but I’m rooted in place, just staring at her.
“I can feel you staring, Brennan.”
“I’m going.”
“You’ve been going for thirty seconds,” comes her dry response.
I go.
The night before the dinner we’re in the kitchen.
I’m making a salad and she’s at the island with wine.
We’ve been having the argument for about ten minutes about if she needs to know anything about the people she’s going to meet, and she has been systematically dismissing every name I’ve given her.
“Brigid,” I say. “My aunt. Connor’s older sister. She’s been—”
“In your life since your parents died,” Valentina sighs, taking a sip of her pinot noir. “I know. Emma told me.”
I stop. “Emma talked to you about my family?”
“Her family too,” Valentina reminds me, shooting me a glare.
“And yes, Emma talks to me about everything, Cillian. She’s my sister-in-law and my best friend.
” She swirls her wine. “She told me about Brigid. Sharp and difficult. She makes you think she hates you because she’ll insult the shit out of you, but you always want Brigid in your corner. ”
I stare at her. “That’s—accurate.”
“I know.” She takes a sip. “Who else?”
“Declan. He’s—”
“Teresa’s nephew. He doesn’t talk much at family things, fine once you get him on something he actually cares about.” She looks at me. “Emma told me. I already know your family, Brennan. I’ve been getting briefed on them for about a year now.”
“By Emma,” I say flatly. How could my cousin have told the Santoros all about our family? Does she not realize that knowledge is power?
“Yes, by Emma.” She sets down her wine. “So you don’t need to prepare me. I’m prepared.” This I have no doubt. She fixes me with a piercing look. “What you could do, since we’re apparently doing this, is tell me what Connor actually wants out of this dinner. Not the optics thing. The real thing.”
I sigh, rubbing my temples. “He wants the key people—the ones whose loyalty has been questioned since the alliance—to see us together and believe it.”
A dark brow quirks. “And believe it means what, exactly.”
“That you chose this. That you’re not here under duress.”
She makes a sound that isn’t quite a laugh. “I am here under duress.”
“I know that,” I tell her through gritted teeth. I am too, after all.
“And you want me to convince a room full of dangerous people otherwise.”
“Yes.”
She’s quiet for a moment, then she looks at me with an unreadable expression. “How good do you need it to be?”
I scoff and give her a disbelieving look. “As good as you can make it.”
“You make it sound like it’ll be hard,” she scoffs. “As if I’m not a fabulous actress.” She picks up her wine. “But you should know that I’m going to need something from you too.”
I look at her warily. “What?”
“Behave like you actually like me.” She meets my eyes. “Not the performance version. You do this thing when we’re in public where you’re stiff around me. I need it to look real.”
I don’t know what she’s talking about. “It’ll look real,” I insist.
“Cillian.” She gives me a look. “I’ve watched you sit in a room with people and be completely present and unreachable at the same time. That’s not what I need.” A pause. “I need you to look at me like you actually like me.”
The kitchen is very quiet for a moment and my mouth grows dry.
The physical part has never been the problem.
I want her constantly.
That’s been true since the night we first had sex and hasn’t gotten any quieter since.
If anything, it’s gotten louder.
I’m aware of her in every room and I think about her when she’s not in them.
That part is simple.
That part I understand.
It’s the other thing she’s asking for that’s harder. Looking at her like I like her. Like she’s someone I’d have chosen.
Like weeks of arguing about coffee and cabinet reorganization and whose fault it is when the schedule shifts—like all of that has made me something other than a man stuck in a marriage with an infuriating woman who is right about too many things.
The problem is I’m not sure that’s still true. And I don’t know when it stopped being true.
“That might be harder than you think,” I tell her truthfully.
Something registers in her face. It’s not hurt but she’s not exactly…pleased with my response. “That’s honest,” she says evenly.
“I’m working on it,” I say, a bit defensively, my heart still racing.
She looks at me for a moment, her face impassive. “Work faster,” she replies. She finishes her wine, puts the glass in the sink, and goes to the bedroom.
I stay where I am.
She called it like.
The physical part she already knows about.
She’d have to be an idiot not to, and she’s not an idiot.
It’s the like she’s asking about.
The person-to-person version.
And the honest answer is that I don’t know yet, and I’m not sure I’m ready to find out.
Finding out has consequences I haven’t fully looked at.
I look down at the salad I was making and push it away. I’m suddenly not hungry anymore.
She comes out of the bedroom the next evening in a Valentino dress and it makes my heart stop when I see her in it.
It’s midnight blue, fitted shoulder to knee, with long sleeves and a neckline that is technically modest and somehow the opposite. I know I’m staring and I can’t stop myself.
She flashes me a smirk. “Why thank you,” she says casually, heading for the mirror to check her earrings.
“I didn’t say anything,” I respond, following her.
“You didn’t need to,” she responds breezily. “It’s written all over your face.”
My ears are turning red. “I was going to say you look—”
“I don’t need you to tell me anything. I know I look amazing.” She adjusts the back of her hair without turning around, using the mirror. “Stop looking at me like that and get your jacket.”
“Like what?” I ask, still unable to take my eyes off her.
She meets my gaze in the mirror again and she looks at me challengingly. “Like that.” She goes back to admiring herself.
The Brennan house sits on the Upper East Side, a four-story brownstone that Connor bought the year he took over from his father.
Teresa has spent nearly thirty years making the home into something that communicates, without saying it directly, exactly what the Brennan family is.
The ironwork on the front steps is original.
The door is lacquered black and heavy and has brass fittings that are polished by someone every week.
The whole thing says we have been here a long time and we will be here after you.
I spent the second part of my childhood in this house.
My parents died in February, and by March I was in a bedroom on the third floor with the window that looked out over the back garden, trying to learn the geography of a house that wasn’t mine and a family that was learning the same thing about me.
I lived here until I was eighteen, when Connor told me it was time for me to learn my own way within the family business.
I know every room, every creak in the stairs, and which radiator knocks in winter.
I have never once thought of it as home. It has always been Connor’s house. I’ve lived inside his life like a guest who stayed too long and everyone was too polite to mention.
In the car Valentina fidgets with her purse, opening and closing it. She’s working up the courage to say something.
“Is Emma’s absence going to be obvious?” she asks.
“Yes,” I say.
She nods and looks back out the window.
The house looks exactly as it always has.
That’s the thing about the Brennan house—it doesn’t change.
Inside it’s the same heavy sofas that belonged to Connor’s mother, the low lamps, the photographs on the mantelpiece going back three generations.
It smells like woodsmoke and something that is just itself, a smell I’ve known since I was a teenager.
Walking into it has always produced the same thing in my chest: the specific combination of familiar and not-mine.
What I notice first is where Emma isn’t.
There’s a gap on the side table by the window.
A silver frame used to sit there, covered imperfectly now by a vase that was never there before.
I know the photograph that was in it.
Emma at six years old, sitting on the back steps of this house in a yellow raincoat with her arms wrapped around her knees, grinning at whoever had the camera.
For whatever reason, I remember six-year-old Emma very well. I was nineteen and used to trip over her constantly when I was home from wherever Connor had sent me that week.
She’d appear at my elbow with some pressing question about dinosaurs or why the sky was blue or whether I thought her stuffed rabbit was happy, and I’d stand in the kitchen doorway trying to remember if I’d eaten and find myself thirty minutes deep in a conversation about the relative merits of different types of dinosaurs with a six year old who had very strong opinions.
I was thirty-one when she left for Sarah Lawrence. She hugged me goodbye and told me not to let Connor turn me into a robot while she was gone.
I said I’d do my best, and I watched the car pull away.
I remember thinking that the house was going to be very quiet.
It was. It has been, ever since. Now it’s a different kind of quiet.
Valentina sees the gap too.
She goes still for half a second before she smooths it. Her hand finds my elbow briefly, just a moment of pressure, then she lets go without making it anything.
Teresa comes in from the hallway.
For the first time, I notice just how small my aunt is, like she’s spent a lifetime making sure she doesn’t inconvenience anyone by existing in a room.
She’s always had kind eyes that are warm and a little worried, even when there’s nothing to worry about.
She is nothing like Emma, which has always baffled me.
Emma takes up every room she walks into and has never once in her life made herself smaller for anyone.
Emma got her looks from Teresa and her father’s explosive temper, but her personality is from somewhere I’ve never been able to identify.