"It is."
"I can move to the other one." She points as though I don’t know there are more chairs available in this room. This room I designed very specifically.
"You're already settled." I walk past her to the second chair, the one no one sits in, the one that exists primarily as a surface for books I intend to shelve and haven't. I move the stack to the side table and sit down. "Stay where you are."
She watches me for a moment, clearly trying to determine if this is genuine permission or polite tolerance. Then something in my expression must satisfy her, because she tucks her feet back up and opens her book again.
I reach for the novel I left on the shelf three nights ago. Slip my thumb between the pages where I folded the corner. And I try to read.
I manage half a page.
The problem isn’t the book. The book is fine. It's a translation of something Russian and bleak that I picked up because the bleakness appealed to me at the time and now feels like the wrong register entirely for a room that suddenly contains a woman who smells like rose soap and is reading with the quiet, total focus of someone who has finally found a place where her nervous system has agreed to stand down.
The problem is that I have been thinking about her offer all day.
Not because it was a good idea. It wasn't. It was the impulse of a woman in crisis, grasping for the nearest structural thing that might hold her weight, and I was right to refuse it. I know I was right. I have been right about very few things in my personallife with any real confidence, but I am confident about that. She was sitting across from me with shadows under her eyes and borrowed clothes and the residue of the worst night of her life still clinging to her, and she offered herself up like a clause in a contract, and the correct answer was no.
I said no.
And I’ve thought about it approximately every six minutes since.
Not the offer itself of an arrangement, a contract, a clean transactional logic of two people with complementary problems. That part I dismissed this morning and it stays dismissed. What I have been thinking about, in the gaps between phone calls and briefings and the quiet minutes when my mind slips its leash, is her.
The fact that she thought of it. The way her mind works. The speed of it, the pragmatism underneath the softness, the way she looked at my situation and her situation and identified the overlap with the accuracy of someone drawing a Venn diagram on a napkin. She wasn't being desperate. That's what I keep returning to. She was being strategic. It was fear-driven, yes, and too fast, yes, but underneath the urgency, there was a mind that solves problems, that looks for the structural fix, that doesn't wallow in the crisis but reaches for the nearest tool.
I know minds like that. I work with minds like that. I’ve never been attracted to one before in quite this specific way, and it’s inconvenient.
"What are you reading?" I ask, because the silence has gone on long enough for me to have read the same paragraph three times.
She tilts the cover toward me without looking up. The House of Mirth.
"Edith Wharton," I say.
Now she looks up. A flicker of surprise. "You've read it?"
"Twice." I pause. "You know it doesn't end well."
"Nothing I've picked up this week has ended well." The ghost of something appears at the corner of her mouth. Not quite a smile. The scaffolding of one. "At least Lily Bart's problems are fictional."
"There's a strong argument that Lily Bart's problems are entirely self-created."
"There's a stronger argument that she was operating inside a system designed to destroy women who don't comply." She says this mildly, eyes back on the page, and I feel something catch behind my sternum. Not the content of what she said. The ease of it. The way she offered a literary opinion to a man she met eighteen hours ago in a bloodstained dress, casually, like we're two people who have always done this.
I look at her for a moment too long. Then I look back at my book.
The silence isn’t empty. I've spent enough time in rooms with other people to know the taxonomy of silences. The hostile ones, the performative ones, the ones that exist because no one can think of anything to say. This isn't any of those. This is the kind of silence that happens when two people are doing the same thing in the same room and neither of them needs it to be anything other than what it is.
It's comfortable, and the comfort of it is the most disorienting thing that's happened to me today, which is saying something given the day I've had.
She shifts in the chair. A small repositioning, her shoulder settling deeper into the leather, her head tilting to rest against the wing of it. I hear the soft sound of a page turning. I turn myown page and realise I've retained nothing from the last two. The bleak Russian novel is losing, comprehensively, to my peripheral awareness of the woman in the chair opposite.
Twenty minutes pass like this. Maybe thirty. The house is quiet around us, Pavlina long since retired to her rooms. The lamp beside Mia pools warm light across the lower half of her face and the open book, and the sleeve of the grey jumper where it falls over her bruised wrist.
"Can I ask you something?" she says.
I lower my book. "Yes."
"The books on that shelf." She nods toward the far wall, the third shelf from the top. "They're all in Russian."
