Chapter 70

[ 1,169 words ]

Julian’s POV

I smelled the flowers before I opened the study door.

That was the first sign. My study had never smelled like flowers. It smelled like leather and old paper and the specific kind of quiet that came from nobody having been in it since I left in the morning. That was intentional. The West Wing was mine. The study was mine. It was the one room in this entire estate that functioned exactly the way I needed it to—undisturbed, undecorated, and entirely without the performative warmth that had begun creeping into every other corner of the house since the wedding.

I pushed the door open.

White peonies. A full arrangement of them on the corner of my desk, sitting in a crystal vase I had never seen before in my life. The stems were cut at the same lengths. The blooms were perfectly spaced. Someone had spent time on this, which meant someone had been in here spending time on this, which meant someone had walked past the very clear understanding we had established on day one and decided that understanding applied to everywhere except apparently my desk.

Beside the flowers, there is a framed photograph.

I picked it up. It was from the WEG Technology Summit three weeks ago—a press photograph, the kind that ended up in society pages and business publications. Delia and I were on the steps of the venue, her hand on my arm, both of us turned slightly towards the camera. We looked, in the way that photographs could make things look, like a couple. A real one. The kind that redecorated each other’s studies and placed flowers on desks.

I set it face down.

Not hard. Not with any particular feeling. I simply turned it over and placed it on the desk the way you placed any object that belonged somewhere other than where it currently was.

“I thought it would brighten the room p>

I turned. Delia was in the doorway. She was wearing something pale and expensive, and her expression was arranged with the careful neutrality of someone who had been practicing it. She was watching the photograph, face down on the desk, and not reacting to it. Which told me she had prepared for this possibility. Which told me she had known, when she put it there, that I might do exactly what I’d just done.

She was learning. That was either progress or a problem. With Delia I was increasingly unsure which was which.

“The study doesn’t need brightening,” I said.

“Everything needs brightening eventually p>

“Not this room p>

She took one step inside the doorway—just one, careful, like someone testing ice. “I had the housekeeper source the peonies. They’re from a florist on the Upper East Side. The arrangement took p>

“Delia p>

She stopped.

“The flowers can stay,” I said. Because they were flowers and removing them required a conversation I didn’t have the energy for tonight. “The photograph goes back wherever you found it. My space is off limit p>

Something moved across her face—there and gone, controlled before it could fully form. She nodded once. The careful neutrality held.

“Did you eat?” she asked.

“Already p>

“There’s food in the kitchen. The chef made p>

“I said already p>

She paused for a shorter time. She was adjusting her timing, I noticed. Learning the rhythm of which silences I would fill and which ones I wouldn’t. Two months into this arrangement and she was already reading me better than most people managed in years. I wasn’t sure what to do with that information.

“Can we talk?” she said.

“About what p>

“About—” She gestured vaguely at the room. At the flowers. At the face-down photograph. At whatever she thought the gesture communicated. “Things p>

“There’s nothing to talk about p>

“Julian p>

“The arrangement is what it is, Delia. We agreed on the terms. The terms haven’t changed. I don’t want you in my bed; I am married, and I have no interest in you p>

She looked at me for a long moment. Her eyes were very steady. That was something I had noticed about her; she held eye contact longer than most people were comfortable with. It was the one thing about her that reminded me she was a Kensington. Whatever else Martha had produced in that house, she had produced women who didn’t look away.

“Of course,” she said finally. “Goodnight p>

She turned and walked back down the hallway. Her footsteps were even and unhurried. I watched her go, and then I closed the study door and stood in the smell of peonies and leather and the silence I had been looking forward to since 7 AM.

I moved the flowers to the windowsill. Not out of the room—that would require more conversation tomorrow, and I was done with conversation for today. Just away from my desk, where they could do whatever flowers did without being in my line of sight every time I looked up.

I sat down. Opened my laptop. Pulled up the Catwoman file.

It was a habit now, the way other people checked the news or scrolled their phones at the end of the day. I opened the file and I looked at what I had, which was still less than I wanted and more than nothing. Race dates. Locations. Lap times that made professional drivers uncomfortable to look at. A heat signature from a bridge in Brooklyn. A sentence about warm air.

I stared at the screen for a long time.

Then I pulled up the WEG-IG integration report instead and worked until midnight the way I always did, which was steadily and without stopping, because stopping left too much space for thoughts I hadn’t decided what to do with yet.

In the east hallway, the photograph was back on the wall before I turned my office light off.

I saw it on the way to bed. Delia had rehung it perfectly level, precisely centered between two sconces, like it had always been there. Like taking it down had been the aberration rather than putting it up.

I looked at it for a moment. The two of us on the steps. Her hand on my arm. The careful performance of a thing neither of us was.

I walked past it.

Behind the door at the end of the west corridor, I heard the faint sound of a phone call ending. Delia’s voice, low, saying goodbye to someone. Then silence.

I went to bed.

In the hallway, Delia stood with her phone in her hand, the call disconnected, her jaw set in a line that had nothing to do with sadness and everything to do with something that had been quietly deciding itself for weeks.

She looked at the photograph on the wall. At the two of them on those steps, performing perfectly for a camera that had no idea what it was actually capturing.

Then she scrolled to her mother’s name and pressed call again.

“Mother,” she said when Martha picked up. “I need to talk to you p>

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