3. She Already Knew
Three
She Already Knew
Ifound out about the Manila acquisition from my sister.
“Congratulations, by the way,” Renata said, over coffee, scrolling her phone like it was nothing. “Saw it on the business page. Sebastian’s buying that hotel group in the Philippines? That’s huge.”
“What hotel group?”
She looked up. Really looked, the way sisters do when they clock something a half-second before you’re ready for them to. “You didn’t know.”
“He mentioned they were looking at Southeast Asia,” I said, which was true, and also nothing.
“Olivia.” She turned her phone toward me. The article had a photo — Sebastian at a podium, and just behind his shoulder, in the frame, unmistakably present, Vanessa. The caption named her as “Chief Strategist Vanessa Cole, architect of the deal.”
Architect. They’d used my word. The word I used to use, back when I was the one standing in that kind of photograph.
“I’m sure he was going to tell you,” Renata said, gently now, watching my face do whatever it was doing.
“I’m sure he was too,” I said, and I even believed it, mostly.
He told me that night, in fact, exactly as I’d promised my sister he would. He came home late, tie loosened, and dropped onto the couch beside me with the specific exhaustion of a man who’d just closed something enormous.
“We got Manila,” he said. “I meant to call you from the room, it just — it moved fast at the end. Champagne fast. I’m sorry, I know you would’ve wanted the call, not the article.”
“You knew I saw it.”
“Renata texted me a fire emoji forty minutes ago. Word travels in this family.” He almost smiled, then caught something in my face and didn’t. “I should have called first. I know that.”
Here is what I didn’t say, because I didn’t yet have a clean enough sentence for it: it isn’t the call I wanted. It’s that I used to be in the room before there was a call to make.
“It’s a big deal,” I said instead. “I’m proud of you.”
“Vanessa ran point on the whole thing.” He said it easily, an offering, the way you hand someone a piece of good news you assume they’ll want. “Honestly, without her instincts on the ownership structure, we’d have walked. She saw a problem three lawyers missed.”
“She sounds indispensable,” I said, and heard, too late, exactly how it sounded.
Sebastian frowned. “You don’t like her.”
“I like her fine.” And it was true — I did like her, that was the maddening part, there was no clean villain to point at, only a woman doing brilliant work in the exact shape of the space I’d left behind. “I just found out about Manila from my sister’s phone.”
“That’s fair,” he said, and he did look sorry, genuinely, the way he used to look sorry about small things before there were this many big things competing for the apology. “I’ll do better.”
He didn’t, particularly. Not because he decided not to.
Because there was always a next deal, and Vanessa was always already inside it by the time it reached me, and somewhere in there the pattern stopped being an accident and started being simply how things were now, and neither of us said that part out loud for a long time yet.