Page 42 of Claimed By the Boss
Long enough that someone knocks on the door outside. I sayone moment. I wrap it in tissue. Put it in my bag. Wash my hands. Look at myself in the mirror above the sink.
My face looks the way it looks. I don’t know what I expected.
I go back to work.
Thursday evening, there’s a council dinner.
I didn’t plan to attend it carrying this information alone, but the invitation was sent two weeks ago, and canceling now would require an explanation I do not have.
So I put on the dress, and I get in the car, and I sit beside Zane at the table, and I smile at Alexei and answer Viktor’s questions about the amendment’s progress, and I do all of it with the same composure I’ve been building in these rooms for months.
Nobody can tell.
I’ve been doing it my whole life, but tonight the gap between what is on my face and what is happening inside my chest is wider than it has ever been.
Halfway through the main course, Zane says something low and close to my ear about a man across the table whose name I immediately forget, and I nod and laugh at the right moment, and he looks at me once, briefly, the way he looks at things he’s deciding about, and then he looks away.
On the way home, I sit in the back of the car and I look at the city moving past the window and I think about the small fact sitting in my bag and what it means for every exit I’ve been mapping and every wall I’ve been circling and every version of my life I’ve been trying to build back toward.
Friday, I almost tell him.
It happens in the kitchen, the ordinary kind of almost, the kind where your mouth opens. The words line up, and then something closes before they get out. He’s reading something at the counter, coffee in hand, and I’m behind him, reaching for a glass, and I stand there for three full seconds with his back to me, thinking this is the moment.
Then his phone rings and he answers it, and the moment folds back into the day, and I close my mouth and get my glass and go back to my room.
I sit on the edge of my bed afterward, and I think about why I closed my mouth. Not fear, not exactly. More that I’m not ready to hand it to him yet, not while I’m still holding all of it myself, not while the shape of it is still something I’m just beginning to understand.
I need one more day. Just one.
Lena calls on Friday evening.
“Priya made me walk the canal again this morning,” she says, before I’ve said hello properly. “Four degrees. She handed me a scarf that smelled like her grandmother and said the cold builds character.”
“Does it?”
“I have no idea. I’ve started looking forward to it, though, which probably says something worrying about my mental state.” She laughs, and I lie back against my pillow and let it do what it always does.
She tells me about the restaurant Priya found, a dessert she’s ordered three times now, and a nurse who brings extra blankets without being asked. She sounds like herself. Actually herself, not the careful version she uses when she doesn’t want me to worry.
Then she stops mid-sentence. “What’s wrong?” she asks.
“Nothing.”
“Celine.”
“I’m tired, Lena.”
She’s quiet for a moment. I can hear her breathing. She’s deciding whether to push. She has always known when to push and when to wait. I have never been more grateful for the waiting than I am right now.
“Okay,” she says.
We talk for another twenty minutes. She tells me about a chess match she lost badly to a man at the facility who apparently has no mercy whatsoever, and I laugh for real, the first real laugh I’ve had since earlier this week in the shower.
When we hang up, I put the phone to my chest, look at the ceiling, and think about my sister in Zurich, who looked at my face on a screen and understood immediately that something was happening, and loved me enough to let me keep it.
I think about telling her properly, soon, when I have words for it beyond the bare fact of it.
I think about telling him instead.
