1. Solenne
— ? —
Solenne
The rooftop is ours tonight.
Valentin found this place three weeks ago through some friend of a friend, and now we’re forty stories above the city with Los Angeles spread out beneath us in every direction.
There’s a table set for two near the edge, candles flickering in glass holders, and a bottle of wine I don’t recognize sitting open between our plates.
The air is warm for October, carrying the faint smell of jasmine from the planters someone arranged along the railing, and I can hear traffic far below like white noise, distant and irrelevant.
He’s watching me instead of the view. “You’re not even looking at the view,” I tell him, reaching for my glass. The wine is good, something red and Italian, and I take a slow sip while I wait for whatever he’s going to say.
“I’m admiring.” He leans back in his chair with that slow smile spreading across his face, the one that still makes my stomach flip even after four years of marriage and a daughter and more ordinary Tuesday nights than I can count. “You should be used to it by now.”
I set the glass down and pick up my fork, scooping a bite of risotto while I consider my response. The mushrooms are perfect, earthy and rich, and I wonder if he told the chef what I like or if he just got lucky. Knowing Valentin, he told them.
He notices things like that. What I order, what I push to the side of my plate, the face I make when something has too much salt.
“Four years,” he says, watching me eat. “I’ve been admiring you for four years and you still act surprised every time I do it.”
“Maybe I just like hearing you admit it.” I take another bite, letting the warmth of the risotto settle in my chest alongside the wine.
He picks up his own glass and takes a drink, the candlelight catching the angles of his jaw. “I’ll admit it as often as you want. You look beautiful tonight. That’s not admiration, that’s just fact.”
I’m wearing a green dress I bought three years ago for some premiere I barely remember, and my hair is down because he likes it that way, and I put on the earrings he gave me for our anniversary last month. None of this is accidental.
Summer is with Odette tonight, probably eating her weight in ice cream and watching princess movies, and I wanted this evening to feel like something. A punctuation mark. A last perfect night before everything changes.
“You’re being very charming,” I say, setting my fork down and tilting my head at him. “What do you want?”
“Nothing.” He grins, caught, and reaches for the wine bottle to top off my glass. “Everything. I want you to eat your dinner and drink your wine and let me look at you without accusing me of ulterior motives.”
I watch him pour, the dark red catching the light. “You always have ulterior motives.”
“Only the good kind.” He sets the bottle down and raises his glass toward me in a small toast, eyes warm.
I laugh, and the sound carries out over the city.
This is what I love about him. This ease, this back-and-forth that feels like breathing.
We’ve been doing it since the night we met, when he walked into that gallery opening and I watched him scan the room like he was looking for someone specific and then his eyes landed on me and stayed there.
He looked arrogant and probably insufferable, but I wanted to know what his voice sounded like. I walked over and introduced myself, and three hours later we were still talking in a corner while the party cleared out around us.
“What are you thinking about?” He leans forward, elbows on the table, studying my face.
“The night we met.” I turn my wine glass slowly on the tablecloth, remembering.
His expression softens, and he mirrors my gesture, turning his own glass. “The gallery.”
“You were wearing that terrible blue tie.” I can still picture it. Too wide, slightly shiny, completely wrong for the sharp lines of his suit.
He presses a hand to his chest in mock offense. “That tie was not terrible. That tie was distinguished.”
“That tie looked like something a substitute math teacher would wear to a school board meeting.” I take another bite of risotto, pointing my fork at him for emphasis. “I almost didn’t talk to you because of that tie.”
“Liar.” He catches my free hand across the table, threading his fingers through mine. “You couldn’t resist me.”
I squeeze his hand once before pulling back to reach for my wine. “I could have resisted you. I chose not to.”
He laughs, loud and real, and I feel it in my chest. This is the Valentin I married.
Not the one who’s been walking around for the past three weeks with grief sitting heavy on his shoulders, making phone calls at midnight and staring at paperwork he won’t explain.
This one, right here, laughing at my jokes and looking at me like I’m the only thing in the room worth seeing.
I don’t want to lose this version of him.
The thought comes unbidden, and I push it away. We’re not losing anything. We’re just moving. People move all the time. It doesn’t have to mean anything.
“Tell me something,” I say, setting down my fork and giving him my full attention. “About the villa. About what it’s like.”
He tilts his head, considering, and takes a slow sip of wine before answering. “You’ve seen pictures.”
“Pictures aren’t the same.” I lean forward, mirroring his posture. “I want to know what it feels like. What you remember.”
For a moment he’s quiet, turning his wine glass slowly on the table. The candlelight catches the angles of his face, and I watch the way his jaw tightens and then releases as he decides what to say.
“It feels like the sea,” he says finally.
“That’s the first thing. You can hear it from every room.
Sometimes at night it sounds like the whole house is breathing.
” He takes a drink, his gaze going distant.
“There’s a terrace off the master bedroom where my father used to sit in the mornings and read the paper.
The stone is worn smooth from generations of people standing in the same spot, looking at the same water.
When I was a kid I used to think that if I stood there long enough, I’d wear my own groove into it. ”
“Did you?” I rest my chin on my hand, watching him remember.
“I was never patient enough to find out.” He smiles, but it’s smaller now, touched with something sad.
“My mother used to have these parties on the lawn. All the families from town, all the old names. I’d hide in the kitchen with the cook and steal pastries until someone found me and dragged me out to be introduced to people I’d known my whole life. ”
I try to picture it. Valentin as a boy, small and sulking, crumbs on his shirt. It doesn’t quite fit with the man sitting across from me, but I like the image anyway.
“Will your mother still have parties?” I pick up my wine and take a sip, keeping my voice casual even though the question isn’t.
“Probably. It’s what she knows.” He reaches across the table and takes my hand again, his thumb tracing slow circles against my palm. “But I want you there for them. It matters to me that you’re part of it, even while we’re all still figuring out how this works.”
I want to believe him. I do believe him, mostly. But there’s a part of me that keeps circling back to the same worry, the one I haven’t been able to shake since he told me we were leaving.
“What if I can’t do it?” I say quietly, my fingers tightening around his. “Be what they expect. Fit into a world that’s been running fine without me for generations.”
“You can do anything,” he says it simply, like it’s obvious, his thumb still moving against my skin.
“Valentin.” I shake my head, but I don’t pull my hand away.
“I mean it.” He leans closer, holding my gaze.
“I’ve watched you work. I’ve seen you disappear into a character so completely that I forget I’m married to you and not whoever you’re playing.
You prepare like no one I’ve ever met… every detail, every choice intentional.
” His grip tightens on my hand. “You’re Solenne Varga. You’ll figure this out too.”
His faith lands somewhere soft in my chest. He’s not wrong about the preparation. For my last role I spent two weeks living in the dialect before we started shooting, building the character from the ground up until she felt more real than I did.
“What about the role?” he asks, more carefully now, releasing my hand to pick up his fork. “Are you still thinking about it?”
The role. The one I’ve been trying not to think about for three weeks, ever since my agent called with the offer and I had to tell her I couldn’t take it.
A period drama, the kind of meaty prestige project that comes along once or twice in a career. A woman unraveling across three decades, losing and finding herself in cycles, the kind of part that wins awards and changes how people see you.
I read the script twice in one night and cried both times, and then I put it in a drawer and told myself it didn’t matter.
“I’m always thinking about it,” I admit, pushing a mushroom around my plate.
“I keep imagining how I’d play certain scenes.
The one in the second act where she finds out about her sister…
I’d do it quiet, I think. Everyone expects screaming and crying, but that’s not how it actually works.
Real grief is silent. You go somewhere inside yourself and the rest of the world just stops existing. ”
He’s watching me with that intent expression he gets when he’s really listening, not just waiting for his turn to talk.
“You could still do it,” he says, setting his fork down. “We could figure something out. You could fly back for the shoot, or…”
“No.” I shake my head, reaching for my wine.
“It’s a six-month location shoot minimum, probably longer with reshoots.
And you need to be there learning your father’s role, and Summer needs stability through a huge transition.
” I take a long sip and set the glass down.
“I can’t split myself that many ways right now. ”