Chapter 3: The Single Bed

The room was smaller than the website had suggested.

This was almost always true of hotels, and Remy had known this when she'd booked it, but the knowing and the standing inside it with Declan Stone were different categories of experience. The king bed occupied most of the available floor space. There was a credenza, a luggage rack, a window, and approximately four feet of walking room. That was the room.

"It's fine," she said.

"I know it is."

She turned on the floor lamp and set her heels by the door and didn't look at the bed directly. The carpet was the neutral grey of hotel carpets everywhere, and there was an abstract print above the headboard, and there was one bed.

Behind her, she heard the click of his cufflinks on the credenza. She looked at the window instead.

"Bathroom's yours first," he said.

"You're sure."

"Go ahead."

She went.

She stood at the sink and ran cold water and looked at herself in the mirror—the navy dress, the cross at her throat, the faint coral lip she'd worn all day and that had survived the wedding and the dinner and Diego's very deliberate handshake and Carmen's gardenia question. She looked like herself, which was not always true after events that required sustained management of her own face.

She washed off what needed washing. She changed into the sleep shorts and shirt she'd packed with the specific knowledge that she'd be sharing a room. She'd thought about what to bring to sleep in for approximately twenty-seven minutes at eleven PM last night, which was the most she was going to admit to.

When she came out, Declan was sitting in the desk chair, jacket off, tie loosened, looking at nothing in particular. He looked up.

"Your turn," she said.

He went.

She turned off the floor lamp and turned on the bedside one, which gave the room a lower, warmer quality. She turned down her side of the bed. She thought about whether there was a correct etiquette for which side you claimed when sharing a king bed with your boss and decided there wasn't and took the left because she always took the left.

He came out while she was adjusting the lamp.

He'd changed while she was in the bathroom—she hadn't heard the door—and when she turned around he was by the window, dark shorts and his own white shirt untucked, the collar open at one button, the first time she'd seen him look like anything other than exactly assembled.

She had come out of the bathroom in the oversized T-shirt she'd packed—white cotton, faded in the way of shirts you kept too long to discard—and sleep shorts, and her hair braided loose over one shoulder because she always braided it when she planned to actually sleep.

And then, a beat later: the red bra.

Visible through the white cotton. Not dramatically, not unmistakably across a dark room—but she was aware of it, which meant the probability that he was also aware of it was high, and she was not going to change for the third time and she was not going to make it bigger than it was.

She crossed to the bed and turned on the low lamp and turned off the floor lamp. The room went warmer. He remained at the window.

She sat on the edge of the mattress and picked up her phone, which was the right move.

"You're not going to bed," she said.

"In a minute."

She set the phone down. The room was very still.

"Declan."

"Mm."

"What are you thinking?"

A pause—the considering kind, not the hesitant kind.

"I'm thinking," he said, "that I'm going to sit in the desk chair and we're going to have a conversation and it's going to be fine."

She looked at the ceiling. "What's the conversation?"

"Whichever one you want."

"That's not an answer."

"No." A pause. "It isn't."

She sat in the small silence.

"You're not going to ask," she said.

"No."

"Why not?"

He turned from the window. He crossed the room in three steps—the room was small, three steps was most of it—and sat in the desk chair angled toward the bed, close enough for a conversation and nothing else. He looked at her with the complete and specific attention she'd been the object of for eighteen months.

"Because you're sitting on the edge of that bed," he said, "and you look like what you look like, and if I asked, you'd answer, and I would come over there, and neither of us would sleep."

The room was quiet.

"And if I said yes," she said.

His expression didn't move. "Then I would come over there. Sit on the edge of the bed. Touch your face first." A pause. "Then I would kiss you until you stopped thinking about the reasons not to."

She held his eyes.

"And after that?" she said.

"That is where I stop answering."

"Why?"

"Because I'm not a saint." He held her eyes steadily. "And because you deserve the thing you chose, not the thing you agreed to at midnight because the room was too warm."

She lay back against the headboard.

"Sleep, Remy," he said.

"I'm not tired."

"You are." He settled back in the chair with the composure of a man who'd made a decision and was comfortable in it. "You've been tired since the vows."

She looked at the ceiling. Low lamp. Amber line at the curtain gap. The city outside.

"Declan."

"Yes."

"You're going to sleep in the chair."

"That would seem to be the case."

"The bed is a king."

"I'm aware."

She looked at the ceiling. He said nothing more. She did not argue.

After a while she reached over and turned off the bedside lamp.

Dark. Not full dark—the curtain gap let in a thin line of Miami amber—but close to it. The air conditioning hummed.

"Remy," he said.

"Mm."

"You did well today." A pause. "With your family."

She was quiet for a moment. "Diego interrogated you."

"He did."

"How bad was it?"

"He asked me seven substantive questions about my intentions, my financial stability, and my professional history. He asked two questions about the nature of my relationship with power generally, which I suspect was a test." A pause. "He told me, at the end, that Remy had had one serious relationship that had cost her professionally and that he would consider it a personal failure if she entered another one that did."

"He said that?"

"Precisely."

She processed this. "What did you say?"

"I said that I understood, and that I wouldn't be standing there if I intended anything that would cost you."

The dark was quiet.

"He believed you?" she asked.

"He has good instincts."

She turned onto her side, facing the ceiling. The amber line at the curtain gap. The air conditioning. The city outside, doing its late-night Miami things.

"Sebastian was civil," she said.

"He was."

"He said—" She stopped. "He said 'I always thought you'd end up with someone like him.'"

"Like him."

"Meaning older. Meaning with authority. He was implying something." She looked at the ceiling. "He always implied things sideways. It was his method."

"What did you want to say back?"

She considered. "That I didn't end up with anyone. That I chose. That those are different things." A pause. "That he spent nine months watching me choose things and understood exactly nothing about why I made any of them."

Silence.

"You should have said that," Declan said.

"I know." She didn't look at him. "I'm better at it after the fact."

"That's not a flaw," he said. "That's how most people work. The good response arrives later when it's not contaminated by the moment."

She felt something ease in her chest, just slightly.

"You knew about the work," she said. "Before I told you. You already knew."

He was quiet. She waited.

"Yes," he said.

"How long."

"Since the Harmon Bay pitch. I recognized it in the presentation." A pause. "Your voice changes when you talk about work you originated versus work you're executing. The tone—it's slightly different. More settled." Another pause. "I'd heard you settle into your own work. And then I heard you present a campaign that didn't have that quality, but the bones of it did."

She lay in the dark and felt this land.

"You didn't say anything," she said.

"You didn't come to me."

"I couldn't prove it."

"I know." His voice was steady. "I've been in that position. Exactly that position."

Something shifted. "What happened to you?"

A silence that was the considering kind, not the refusing kind.

"London," he said. "The year I was thirty. I was at a firm there—came over for what was supposed to be eight months, stayed for twelve. There was a senior creative named Riordan. Patrick Riordan. Very good with language. He had a way of being in the room when a concept landed and positioning himself as adjacent to the origin." A pause. "Three of the campaigns I developed that year launched under his name. I had the documentation—briefs, timestamps, early files—and I spent four months deciding whether to use it."

"Did you?"

"Partially." He was quiet for a moment. "The formal route moved slowly and cost me something I'd rather not have paid. But it cost him more eventually. Those things do."

She said nothing. Outside the window, a car passed on the street below.

"I'm sorry that happened to you," she said.

"It made me attentive," he said. "More than I would have been otherwise."

"That's very—" She paused. "You're doing that thing where you make the bad thing useful."

"It's a habit."

"It's a very Irish habit."

"My mother would agree with you." She could hear the dry warmth in it without seeing his face. "She has a phrase. Níl aon leigheas ar an olc ach é a iompar."

"What does that mean?"

"There's no cure for the bad but to carry it."

She lay in the dark with this.

"That's very bleak," she said finally.

"It's actually meant to be freeing." A pause. "The bad already happened. The carrying is the manageable part."

She thought about this. The ceiling was the color of nothing. The amber line. The hum.

"My father," she said.

She hadn't planned to say it. But the dark had a quality to it—the same quality of the bar at the wedding when Diego had said something true and she'd had to say something true back—of being a container for things that needed somewhere to go.

"He didn't die," she said. "He just stopped showing up. There was no event. No explanation. He just—gradually became someone who didn't exist in our lives." She touched the cross at her throat. "I used to check my phone in school. Between classes. In case he'd texted. I did that for two years before I stopped." A pause. "I still do it sometimes. Not waiting for him. Just—the habit."

Declan was quiet.

"I have a contact saved as Don't Answer," she said. "It's him. He texts maybe three times a year. Birthdays sometimes. Once he sent a picture of where he was living—Phoenix. I didn't know he'd moved to Phoenix." She let out a breath. "I archived the thread last year. After Carmen's birthday, when she made the cake and he didn't call."

"You don't owe him an answer," Declan said.

"I know that." She paused. "I know it. I just—I haven't found the right way to close the door that doesn't feel like giving up on something." She looked at the ceiling. "Which is probably the thing my therapist would tell me to unpack."

"You have a therapist."

"Had. She moved practices. I've been meaning to find a new one." A pause. "Please don't say that's the same as not going."

"It is," he said, without judgment, "but I wasn't going to say it."

She turned her head slightly toward where his voice was coming from in the dark.

"You're not what I expected," she said.

He was quiet. "What did you expect?"

"Professional distance. Very managed. You give me professional distance at work. I thought that was—the whole of it."

"It's the container," he said. "Not the content."

She let that in.

"Declan."

"Yes."

"You don't have to—" She stopped. "Never mind."

"What?"

"I was going to say you don't have to be careful with me." She looked at the ceiling. "But I think maybe I was going to say it to hear myself say it. To see if I believed it."

A long pause.

"Did you?" he asked.

She thought about it honestly. The ceiling. The amber. The way he'd reached across the table at dinner and covered her hand when Sebastian was two tables away and looking.

"I think I'm getting there," she said.

He didn't say anything. He didn't need to.

"Goodnight," she said.

"Goodnight, Remy."

She did not sleep for a long time.

Neither did he.

The desk chair held his weight with a barely audible creak when he shifted. The amber line at the curtain gap. The air conditioning. Outside, the city doing its late-night things.

Sometime before three she drifted under.

She woke once in the dark—early, still dark—and across the room the chair was still occupied, and she could hear his sleeping breathing, different from the rest of the room.

She turned onto her side toward the wall.

The hotel held them: one room, one bed unused on one side, one desk chair occupied, and the particular warmth of two people who'd decided something without saying so and were both going to sleep with it.

In the morning she would pretend this was unremarkable.

It was, she suspected, the opposite of unremarkable.

She did not take a photograph.

She would remember it anyway.