Do you know who? Serena looked down at her soup bowl. I have a suspicion, she said. Not enough to move on yet. Ethan was quiet for a moment.
This was not the sort of situation he had ever been adjacent to in his life. His problems ran to different categories. A workshop furnace that needed replacement, a school fundraiser he'd forgotten to buy supplies for, a delivery window that a client moved twice without notice. Corporate intrigue at this level was genuinely outside his experience. And yet there was something about the architecture of it that he recognized.
The way someone with information used it to make a capable person look incapable. The way institutions sometimes turned on the people holding them together holding them together by doing the thing that looked unfamiliar rather than the thing that looked safe. He had watched it happen to his father once. Different context, smaller stakes, same mechanism. All right, he said.
What do you need from me tonight specifically? Serena looked at him for a moment. I need Victor to believe that my personal life is stable, that the story I told was true, and that he cannot use my private circumstances as evidence of instability. She paused. I also need the board members in this room to see that I'm not the version of myself that Victor has been describing.
What version has he been describing? Isolated, she said. Reactive, emotionally compromised since the engagement ended. She said it flatly without flinching the way you stated a fact about a weather pattern rather than about yourself. And are you?
Ethan asked. Any of those things? She looked at him with something that wasn't offense, more like evaluation. I'm not isolated, she said. I'm selective.
There's a difference that most people don't bother to understand. What about the other two? I'm reactive when the situation warrants a reaction, she said. and I ended the engagement because Victor is the kind of man who sees a woman's competence as something to manage rather than something to work beside. A pause, not emotionally compromised, just done.
Ethan nodded slowly. He believed her. He wasn't sure exactly why he'd known her for less than an hour, but there was a quality to how she said things that felt like someone who had stopped feeling the need to make herself understandable to people who weren't paying attention. That was usually either arrogance or earned. Given everything he'd observed so far, he was putting his money on earned. "
Okay," he said. " So, we've been married 11 months. Where do we live?" Serena blinked. " What if someone asks?
Do you live at my place? Do I live at yours? Do we split time between properties?" " These are the questions people ask." " My apartment," she said immediately. "
16 rooms Lakeshore Drive. It makes no logistical sense for me to move." Fair enough, he said. Except that I have an 8-year-old daughter and a workshop in Pilsen and a person who actually knew you would know that living on Lakeshore Drive means Maisie changes schools. Serena paused.
So, either we're navigating that transition, Ethan said. Or we maintain both spaces and I stay at mine during the week for Maisie's school schedule and spend weekends at yours. That's actually more believable. Anyway, it's complicated. It's imperfect.
It sounds real. Serena was looking at him with an expression he couldn't immediately categorize. You've thought about this quickly, she said. I build things, he said. You have to think about the structure before you commit to the material.
She was quiet for a moment. Then weekends at mine, she said. Maisie keeps her school. There's a room on the east side of my apartment that's been sitting empty for 2 years. She could have it on weekends.
She'd hate the decor, Ethan said. What kind of decor does she prefer? She's eight. She currently wants everything either purple or featuring a horse. Serena absorbed this.
The room is gray with white trim, she said. That's correctable, Ethan said. She'd probably want to do it herself. She has opinions about everything. So do I. Serena said, "I know."
Ethan said, "I've been watching you negotiate the table bread situation with the waiter for the last 20 minutes." " She straightened slightly. The bread was cold. The bread was fine. You wanted sourdough, and they only had the rosemary rolls.
The rosemary rolls were also cold. They were slightly cool, Ethan said, in a warm room. After about 90 seconds, they were fine. Serena looked at him with a particular expression. You noticed all of that?
I noticed things, he said. It's part of the job. You learn to read a room pretty fast when your livelihood depends on knowing what someone actually wants versus what they said they wanted. She looked at him for a moment longer than the conversations strictly required. Then she glanced away and he thought he saw something shift in her face.
Not discomfort, but a kind of recalibration. The way someone adjusted their stance when they realized the surface under them was different than what they assumed. The soup bowls were cleared. The orchestra shifted into something warmer, a mid-century standard that Ethan vaguely recognized from a record his mother had owned. Several couples moved toward the edge of the room where a small dance floor had materialized near the band.
We should probably circulate, Serena said. Standing events are easier than seated ones for this sort of thing. The fake marriage sort of thing. Yes, lead the way. Ethan said he was not a natural at cocktail conversation.
He'd never pretended to be, but he had learned across years of dealing with clients of widely varying personalities that the quickest way to make someone comfortable was to ask them something specific rather than something general. What do you do as a conversation stopper for half of the people in any given room? How did you get into that was an opener? Serena moved through the room with an ease that made it look effortless, which meant it was costing her, something Ethan couldn't see. She was warm without being available, attentive without being searching.